Supercalifragile

Background

Scott Miller was the leader and principal songwriter of the 1980s band Game Theory and the 1990s band The Loud Family. He received significant critical acclaim for albums such as Game Theory's Real Nighttime (1985) and Lolita Nation (1987), achieving cult status but little commercial success. Game Theory's catalog went out of print in the 1990s, resulting in several decades of unavailability until a series of reissues by Omnivore Recordings began in 2014.

With the exception of a collaborative album with Anton Barbeau, What If It Works? (2006), Miller took an extended hiatus from his recording career after disbanding the Loud Family in 2000. He stated later in 2006 that he had some unfinished songs for a solo album, but was doubtful that the album would ever materialize. He confirmed, in a 2011 interview, that he had continued to write music despite the absence of prospects for an album, and that "ideas continue to come.... I'll write it down and I put this piece of paper that I've written it down on in a drawer. And I will sort of remember how these things would go together into songs if I ever did have an opportunity to do an album. So it's just in that nascent state, in perpetuity, now."

His record label, 125 Records, revealed after Miller's death in April 2013 that he had made plans to reunite in the summer of 2013 with some of his old bandmates to record a new Game Theory album, Supercalifragile, the band's first since Two Steps from the Middle Ages in 1988.

Revival of Miller's project

In September 2015, Scott Miller's wife Kristine Chambers announced that she and Ken Stringfellow had teamed to produce a finished recording from the source material for Supercalifragile that Miller had left behind in various stages of completion, "including fully-formed songs and many other ideas, sketches, lyrics, even musical gestures and snippets of found sound." A preliminary decision to release the album under Scott Miller's name, using the title I Love You All, was later reconsidered in favor of Miller's original plans for a Game Theory project.

On May 5, 2016, it was announced that the project, now under Miller's planned title Supercalifragile as Game Theory's sixth full-length studio album, would be released in early 2017. A Kickstarter campaign was created to fund the pressing and other expenses involved with completing the album, and was fully funded within two weeks.

Personnel

The participants in Supercalifragile include Aimee Mann, who had written in July 2015, "I'm working on this song I wrote with Scott Miller, and hearing him sing it in my headphones is possibly the most devastatingly heartbreaking thing I've ever experienced." Mann's announcement was accompanied by a photo of sheet music bearing the title, "No Love."

In the summer of 2015, recording sessions that included Anton Barbeau, Jozef Becker, Stéphane Schück, and Stringfellow took place at Abbey Road Studios in London.

Recording sessions with Game Theory members Nan Becker, Dave Gill, Gil Ray, and Suzi Ziegler, in late May and early June 2016, were held at Sharkbite Studio in Oakland, California. Additional members of Game Theory who are expected to appear include Michael Quercio and Donnette Thayer.

Other friends and former collaborators whose involvement was announced include Jon Auer of the Posies, Peter Buck of R.E.M., Doug Gillard, Nina Gordon, Scott Kannberg, Ted Leo, and Will Sheff. Mitch Easter, Game Theory's former producer, will handle the final mixing of the album.

Songs

Songs recorded for the album include: