1 The best way to cope with pain is to find the way in which it is both most intense and most instructive. Scott's vocal delivery on Attractive Nuisance may be his most evasive, and in reading through the lyrics on the band's web site I discovered elements of at least half of the songs that I had no inkling of from just listening, but several of these half-concealed insights are among the ones I'm most taken aback to find that another human being has formed (though not as taken aback as I was to hit the line in The Wishbones where Dave admits that he thinks Amy Grant is the sexiest person alive). "I fill my days with work because I am lazy", Scott muses in "720 Times Happier Than the Unjust Man", a suggestive corollary to Days for Days' "Businessmen Are Okay", and one that echoes my fear that my day job is a complicated way to kill valuable time. "One Will Be the Highway" opens with an under-populated nightclub tableau disconcertingly reminiscent of the shows in Portland and Seattle ("Ten or twelve who know the band look like they'll stay / But I'll be on my way"), but unfolds into a meditation on resignation and fate that points out the existential interchangeability of hitchhiking and just being hit by the car. "Save Your Money" is mostly a simple injunction against thinking your problems have material solutions (or at least against trusting the obvious material solutions), but my favorite touch is the oblique implication, midway through, that all stock-market windfalls can ever buy you is the power to change things nobody cares about. "But this is home, this is where we spend weekends", at the end of "Nice When I Want Something", is either the devastating punch line to a story of a relationship wrecked by cowardice, or else a defiant shard of optimism. "Blackness, Blackness" finds a trace of involuntary nobility beneath what appears to be a helpless amoral facade. "Backwards Century"'s "I used to want it to do something bad to you / As if it was going to show you decency" (a line I originally misheard without the first "it", which makes a big difference) seems to me like a cogent explanation of morbidity, and of how we court crises because it's so much easier to be our best selves in a crisis than it is to be them every ordinary day. Alison rises to Scott's lyrical challenge by folding the uncooperative "Into the void of lovesick reciprocity" into "The Apprentice", and then inverting the refrain at the end, "I taught him how to fake it" to "I should know how to fake it now", without conclusively resolving whether these mutual pretenses are the death throes of a relationship or the only way one gets through its trials. "No One's Watching My Limo Ride" is an unexpected-love song (not an unexpected love-song), in a way an alternate version of Alanis Morissette's "Uninvited", and appropriately Scott's version reads as much like a pensive internal monologue as Alanis' does like a candid answering-machine message. "The only world that I know is the / One where I don't get you", Scott confesses, and I have a feeling Alanis' narrator is going to find her way out of "I need a moment to deliberate" long before Scott's convinces himself that happiness isn't incompatible with his nature. (But Alanis, on the other hand, could hardly pull off the line "Marching in like women's liberation".) Fittingly "Motion of Ariel", the finale, is a lullaby about not having answers. But the truth I want most to have inscribed on every billboard in every city, a renegade social critique secreted among relationship songs, and quite possibly my new favorite first sentence of a song, is the opening verse of "Years of Wrong Impressions": "Design your life / To live as if you're in a movie / And after three hours / Anyone is going to think / It's gone on too long". This is, to me, our central social failure. Our culture produces role models whose lifestyle is unsustainable; it exhibits an inoperable public logic. We congratulate ourselves that we got past 1984 without acquiring an Orwellian government, but read 1984 again, ascribing all its tyrannies to private enterprise instead of government, and then tell me one detail that hasn't come precisely to pass.

2 The music matters. I watched Gil more closely, in Boston, than I had in Portland or Seattle, and finally noticed that when he sings along he's not singing the words of the song, he's singing his own drum part. As I am wont to forget, when I focus on Scott's lyrics, in a sense the music's story is rhythmic and wordless. The crashing accents and clattering fills on "720 Times Happier Than the Unjust Man", the resonant patter on "One Will Be the Highway", the subdued shuffle of "Save Your Money", the manic accelerando in the middle of "Nice When I Want Something", the taps and splashes of the elegiac "Blackness, Blackness", the evasive gait of "Soul D.C.", the impish skip of "The Apprentice", the edgy encouragements in "No One's Watching My Limo Ride", the bleary prom themes of "Controlled Burn (Part 1)" and the uncluttered heart-pulse of "Motion of Ariel" are all integral. Kenny is a reliably discreet bass player, but "No One's Watching My Limo Ride", especially live, is a rare showcase, and his harmony parts, both with Scott and especially with Alison on "Years of Wrong Impressions", have become an element of the band's sound that they never exactly had before. Alison has grown into her role, too, I think, almost certainly the best of Scott's many keyboardists at knowing when the most supportive thing to do is to stay out of the way. As is more apparent on stage, where you can see who's doing what, the Loud Family could have been Trans Am or Don Caballero if they'd wanted to be. Scott's production, here on the third album made without Mitch Easter's help, is rather less indulgent, on a macro scale, than on Interbabe Concern or Days for Days, the track structure normal for the first time since The Tape of Only Linda, but inside this framework the songs still bristle with obsessive detail. "720 Times Happier Than the Unjust Man" has a distressed background vocal part that sounds like one of your stereo components is picking up CB crosstalk. "One Will Be the Highway" counters sparkling acoustic guitar with warm, sweeping synth-string pads. Tim Walters' special effects punctuate the bouncy "Save Your Money" with oddly propulsive twitches of clipped static. The squalling guitar on the verses of "Nice When I Went Something" turns into roaring power-chords on the choruses. "Years of Wrong Impressions" is played almost completely straight, but Alison's breezy, cheerfully out-of-character bridge still floors me today. "Blackness, Blackness" is a ballad at heart, but the way Alison's detuned introductory keyboard notes snap back into key just as the other instruments start might be my favorite thing on the whole record, and Scott's gyrating slide-guitar hooks seem to have wandered in from an entirely different genre. "Backward Century" subsists on syncopation, and "Soul D.C." sounds momentarily like it's going to be Guided by Voices, but Alison's piano guides "The Apprentice", and "No One's Watching My Limo Ride" merely stops and starts. "Controlled Burn" is the only pure experiment, part one a reeling, soundtracky home-studio instrumental by Gil, part two an extended duet between Scott and his punch-in pedal. The aching "Motion of Ariel", conversely, is the only song without any experiment, a chiming throwback that might have come from any era at all.

3 There is the list of things for which you vow you would sacrifice, and then there is the list, far shorter, of the sacrifices you do make, not just endorse in theory. I wore earplugs for the Portland show. The Seattle show was a little quieter, or the room acoustics a little kinder, and I didn't need them. In Boston, though, the volume was a few decibels too high, and I had the plugs in my pocket. I took them out of their case and held them in my hands, considering. I didn't put them in. My ears would ring for a few days afterwards, I knew, but if hearing is a finite resource to be spent, this was the right thing to spend some on. After I finally hear my last new sound, I'll have only the old ones to listen to in my head; I suspect the last time I heard the Loud Family play will be one of the most cherished.

4 The distinction between nostalgia and continuity is subtle, perhaps even illusory. I loved hearing the new songs in concert, but the most helpless raptures came from older ones. The two oldest in the regular set list were a breathtaking "Idiot Son", from 1993's Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, and a wall-shaking "The Waist and the Knees", from 1987's Game Theory album Lolita Nation, but over the course of several encores I also got to hear a plaintive "Slit My Wrists" and a heartfelt "Inverness", from PABARAT, a whirring "Rosy Overdrive" and a titanic "Dripping With Looks", from Lolita Nation, and "Erica's Word", from 1986's The Big Shot Chronicles. Game Theory songs are always highlights, to me, since I never got to see Game Theory play live, but the early Loud Family songs have come to occupy the same dear place in my heart, even after five tours. The part of me processing the experience as the end of an era wanted desperately to have the connections explicitly confirmed. I only realized how successful the integration had been when I got home and it dawned on me that "Rosy Overdrive" is actually on PABARAT, not Lolita Nation, a conflation which firmly reassures me that replacing the latter with the former on my DID list, recently, was an acknowledgement, not a decision.

5 Other people matter. The few Game Theory/Loud Family songs not written and/or sung by Scott tend to be sources of contention on the list, but "Years of Wrong Impressions", words by Scott but sung by Alison, was my first favorite song on the album, nothing like "Mammoth Gardens" in structure but similarly distinctive and arresting. Alison's swooping "The Apprentice", the one song Scott didn't co-write, seemed out of place to me the first few times through, but after a couple weeks I noticed that I'd gone from trying to overlook it to not knowing how else the album could have been assembled. Scott demanded it as the first song of the encore, in Portland, and it didn't go that well. Alison, normally animated, seemed to be paralyzed by the task of singing and playing at once, and the rest of the band's stage composure looked destabilized by the shift in aesthetic geometry, so they didn't try it again in Seattle or Boston, but that only makes me desperately glad I got to see it before they gave up. There's another band there, Alison in charge and the others supporting her. It's not the Loud Family, and this one song could be all we ever hear from it, but that's enough for me to imagine a mirror universe, and the profound shock was seeing, in Scott's eyes as he played the guitar part to her song, transfixed as if by the indescribable beauty of his own funeral, that he can imagine it too. If you understand how the world would cope with your absence, you are half the way to knowing what you should do until you're gone.

6 I need more people in my life. I stood right in front of the stage, at all three shows, but turning around, late in the Seattle show, and seeing what was left of the crowd, which should have been depressing, may have been the most overwhelming revelation of my whole tour. Although there weren't that many people, I knew them. I was in a club I'd never heard of, under a highway overpass in a city in an opposite corner of the nation from my own, and yet the sense of collective effort was as strong as I've ever experienced in a public space. I've spent the last eight years designing collaborative software for a living, and I've only seen a virtual community transcend its virtuality in virtual space once, in the last hour before the result of my first four years of work was anaesthetized. Some of these people were list-members I'd met the previous night in Portland, some I'd met earlier in the evening in Seattle, a handful I've known for months or years, and some were still strangers. Most of them, including the band, are still more accurately acquaintances than friends, but when we say "It takes a village", we don't mean a village of bridesmaids, we mean a village of people who take your existence and/or well-being into account even though they don't know you all that well. In Seattle I sent the set list to myself, amused by my toy. Checking my email during the Denver stop-over on my return trip, it hit me that that was wrong. I didn't need to archive the information, I needed to share it. I wanted to feel, whether the rest of the list, scattered around the globe, felt the same need or not, that the people physically absent were emotionally present, and that I was absorbing these sounds not only for myself, but also, however partially, as proxy for the community. It wasn't a utile gesture (I could have saved myself some laborious phone-keypad typing by writing "Same as Portland" instead of literally transcribing Scott's notation), it was an offered hand. I need more things to offer hands to. Writing about Days for Days, two summers ago, trying to decide what it indicated for my future, I begged for some route to a sense of community other than religion or politics. But I often deny things as the first step towards accepting them, and sure enough, two years later, my two tentative plans for my next life-direction after I find out how the story of my current internet software company ends are running for Cambridge City Council and starting a secular community church. I don't resent all these hours alone in front of my computer, but I need to balance them better. I don't want to drive around the country in a van, but I need a stage. No, that's wrong, I need a room. I need more rooms, with people in them, whose doubts and struggles are intertwined with mine. It's possible that the flaw with the council and church plans is that they are more stage than room, but I think not if they're done right. And buried in this idea may be the secret to how the end of the Loud Family, if that's what this turns out to have been, can be a graduation, not a tragedy. The tours notwithstanding, Game Theory and the Loud Family represent a dozen albums, and more years, of an insular mission. Touching somebody with a pop song is a triumph over physics and context, and Scott has learned to do it. We can hardly blame him, now, if he decides that it isn't the only way he wants to have ever tried.