TJ Miller - Still Remains -2007

The Memory Remains

Heavy metal is about energy and anger and catharsis and celebration. From the gloomiest depths of Cathedral to the majesty of Maiden, the social commentary of the Rage Against The Machine to the personal disclosure of Nine Inch Nails, heavy metal is about raw emotions - honest and untamed.

But talk is cheap. And so many identikit bands latch onto the idea of an emotion and throw words like ‘love’, ‘loss’ and ‘desperation’ around with a flippant tongue and empty heart. Death metal and emo alike becomes a disingenuous photocopy of stereotypical metaphors and touchstone emotions.

You may think Still Remains are such a band. Forming in Grand Rapids Michigan in the early part of the new millennium, the band slotted neatly into the rising wave of metalcore bands. Their debut album, ‘Of Love And Lunacy’ saw them firm favourites in their home from home in the UK; but it was their sophomore outing, last year’s ‘The Serpent’, that saw the band enter the big league with a mature and daring sound and playing to huge crowds with labelmates, Atreyu.

Outside looking in, things might seem rosy for singer, TJ Miller. But his lyrics suggest otherwise: “It's Been Another two years now, since they've put you away… I hope you disappear again… you still can’t hold yourself together.” While this might be that transparent to people who don’t know the 25 year old, other songs from the ‘The Serpent’ make the subject matter clear. ‘Dear mother, now you know how it feels’. Put all this information together and you start to see the heartbreaking and often harrowing truth of this young singer’s life.

“It’s obvious something is wrong when your mum’s constantly getting taken away by the military police.” says TJ, as he remembers his nine year old self. “I spoke to my dad about it and I eventually told him, ‘I want to move in with you because some of the stuff that’s happening with mum scares me’. All the ‘partying’ and drinking. It’s hard as a kid watching your parents self-destruct. I knew I needed to get out of there.”

On top of a childhood punctuated with the emotional upheaval of a parental divorce and subsequent geographical relocation, TJ grew up in a household of domestic violence and alcoholism.

TJ contextualises:

“I was born in 1982 and raised in a house in the ghetto in Grand Rapids,” he says, reclining contemplatively in the sofa. “I lived there for a few years before my parents got divorced. My mother got custody [of me] and remarried. My mum and stepfather took me down to Florida and I lived in a trailer park on a military base there for four or five years. The trailer park wasn’t too bad. It had its dysfunctional families for sure. Mine being one of them. When I was nine they divorced, so my mum and I moved back to Grand Rapids, and my younger half-brother and I were separated. It wasn’t long before my dad got custody of me after we’d moved back to Michigan.”

The nine year old had started to understand that something was wrong: 

“When I’d fly back from Florida and stay with my dad for the he’d tell me things. I knew things weren’t the way they should be at home. My mum was taken away by the military police for fights with my step-dad - throwing plates at each other or whatever. I honestly don’t remember, but I’ve since been told by family what happened. I guess I’ve blocked it out.”

So TJ moved from his recently-divorced alcoholic mother’s home to his strict Christian father’s. But even with domestic stability, TJ had been enrolled at three different schools within a school year, and the flux was unsettling.

“My mum disappeared for a while after I’d moved in with my dad,” he says drawing a deep breath. “I don’t know where she went. Maybe some health programme. She’d show up at family Christmas parties drunk. Once she showed up with this huge cut by her eye and fed us some bullshit about, ‘I fell down the stairs’. Don’t get me wrong: I love my mum…”

TJ has is a wistful and philosophical kinda guy: he smiles and he jokes, but you sense that there is a more complex and contemplative side to his persona. And this stands in stark contrast to the ‘upbeat and sunny’ default setting of his bands mates.

“I don’t remember much,” he admits, as he thinks back again. “I don’t remember having friends. Although I’m sure I did. I ended making some friends down the road; they ended up taking me in: teaching me how to play football and video games. I was just learning how to be social at that point.”

“It took a while to settle into the new life,” he says. “I went from this one place where my parents liked to party - they always had MTV on with Guns N’ Roses or AC/DC or Poison - to a place where I couldn’t listen to music.”

“When I started getting into music…” he trails off. “I would see my mum every now and then and she would give me music. When she gave me my first Nirvana CD my dad flipped when he found it.”

“I just wanted to get through his head that I wasn’t a bad kid: I wasn’t doing bad at school, I didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs; I just wanted to listen to music and hang out with my friends. He just didn’t understand that; he thought I was on the wrong path.”

And as TJ admits, this almost Draconian strictness was doubtless due to a fear that he would ‘turn out’ like his estranged mother. But despite the constraints, he never rebelled against his father’s religious beliefs. 

“I knew where my heart was. I felt like God knew where my heart was. I just didn’t see that listening to music was wrong. And he just didn’t understand that then.” 

Like most parents, TJ’s father has mellowed in his old age, and is now supportive and proud of his son’s life decisions. Sadly the story with his mother has only worsened. From repeated failed attempts to get clean in various rehabilitation to her arriving out of nowhere to borrow and steal money from both TJ and his grandmother, the emotional storms continue.

“A few years ago I heard that she went into a health programme in a rehabilitation prison thing,” he explains. “This was her forth offence drunk driving. I’m thinking, ‘at last’ because she was like, ‘I’ve gotta sort this out’. But she’s been in and out of every programme in Michigan. So I hear.”

TJ goes on to describe how he decided to use Still Remains as catharsis far more than on their debut; pumping the music full of genuine anger, anxiety, frustration and heartbreak. 

“I needed to get that shit out,” he says firing a glassy-eyed look our way. “I figured out which help programme she was in and called her. I said, ‘I wrote some things to do with you because I needed to get it out, because I’m angry’. I said ‘I don’t hate you, I just want you to be ok’. I have no idea if she’s actually heard it. It’s stuff I don’t really talk about much.”

“I haven’t seen her in nearly three years now,” he continues. “I don’t want to talk to her because I don’t trust her. Eventually if she can prove that she’s over the crazy lifestyle then I’ll let her back in. I’m just sick of her hurting everyone, and doing it all over again.” 

And just when the yoke seemed heavier than is bearable, his stepfather died. In the absence of his father, his mother’s new husband had become more than a step-parent – he was a friend, a confident, a guardian angel.

“We got on great,” says TJ again looking into the middle distance. “Yes he had his demons. He was also an alcoholic. But he didn’t act like she did.”

“He was discharged from the military because he was diagnosed as diabetic in his 40s,” he continues. “I think that was brought on by drinking and smoking a lot. I remember we had a dinner with him and my grandparents. It was awesome, but when he said goodbye, he had tears in his eyes, and it was his way of saying, ‘I love you and I miss you…’ A few days later he was found dead in his apartment. I think he knew he was going to die soon.”

“There were cigarettes everywhere and four gallon jugs of vodka. They found vomit on the stairs. He’d tried to clean it up but fell and hit his head. I don’t know if he was trying to kill himself, if he was drinking and smoking to try and ease the pain. I want to think that. I want to.”

How did that affect your mum?

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

No one can go through trials and tribulations of this magnitude and not bare the scars.

“I think I’d be different if I’d had a normal upbringing,” admits TJ interweaving his fingers in his lap. “I guess I am a bit more philosophical than other people. I think about things a lot. I absorb things. I want to learn. I want to be a good father and husband when the time comes. I think that both sets of parents’ lifestyles taught me a lot. They taught me how not to be.”

Were you ever afraid that you’d be like your mum?

“Honestly, no,” he says flatly. “Not at all. I definitely have my weaknesses and an addictive personality, but it doesn’t come to it with alcohol. When you grow up seeing all that stuff it goes into your head as, ‘I do not want to end up like that’.”

At 25 TJ has already endured what few people have to go through in their life times. But it has only made the singer more determined to be a positive force in the lives of his friends, family and the growing number of Still Remains fans. With this band you don’t get some faux-martyr spouting identikit emo-metaphors about tears, wounds and bleeding hearts - this is real life: real insight, real disclosure, real catharsis. Whether or not you’ve had a life like TJ Miller’s, Still Remains has a message for us all.

“It must be hard to see your kids’ intentions when they’re so young. I never wanted to be a bad kid – regardless of what colour my hair was.”