“This place doesn’t look very Austrian!” Ryan Miller, the leader of the band Guster, said, as he approached the front desk of the Trapp Family Lodge, in Stowe, Vermont, on the third day of 2015.
“I just imagined, like, exposed wood, a roaring fire, Chesterfields, and . . . taxidermy!” He peered around at the eighties corporate-campus-style architecture. The desk clerks’ pseudo-Tyrolean neckwear was the only visible Old World touch.
The clerks eyed Miller warily. The lodge, still run by the family that inspired “The Sound of Music” (the original building burned down in 1980), attracts its share of oddballs, and this bearded, wild-eyed forty-two-year-old might be one.
“There’s a sheep’s head on the second floor,” one clerk suggested.
Miller is a relatively recent Vermont transplant. Since arriving from Brooklyn, in 2010, he has been aggressively pursuing “community” with what he calls like-minded “high-functioning weirdos” such as he left behind in the city. His quest has led to, among other things, a series on Vermont public television called “Makin’ Friends with Ryan Miller,” in which he travels around the state, trying to do just that. But even off camera he pursues a to-do list of real Vermont experiences, and he was hungry for one at the Trapp Family Lodge.
Miller didn’t want to leave New York, where he had lived happily since 1999, when the band relocated from Boston. “I’m an extrovert. In the sense that people give me energy,” he said, taking a seat in the bland lobby. “In New York, you walk out your door and anything can happen to you. I was meeting interesting people, I was eating food, I was staying out late. I was thriving. But my wife was the opposite. New York never clicked for her. The bug in the air was ‘We’re going to move to Vermont and raise our kids.’ And I would say, ‘No, that is not an option!’ ”
They moved when their second child was born.
“People told me it would take five years to develop a community,” Miller went on. “And I was, like, ‘Why does it have to take five years? In New York or L.A. it would take twenty minutes.’ In L.A., it’s, like, ‘Hey, what are you doing here? I’m directing a movie and we’re going to this crazy party—come along.’ And that becomes your community.”
But Miller started to find that when he visited his friends in the city they would say, “ ‘Wait. You can be here and have this conversation with me, but you get to go back to Vermont?’ And I was, like, ‘Wait. You’re right. That is kind of cool.’ ”
Now, entering his fifth year in the town of Williston, he says, “I get it, there is a community here—it’s just that people want their space and they want to be left alone to do their shit.”
Guster, the regionally beloved alt-rock band that Miller founded with two fellow Tufts University students during their freshman-orientation week, in 1991, took a break when Miller moved north. “I got down on the band after the last album cycle,” he said. “We were in a box. We weren’t going to get a great review on Pitchfork. We weren’t going to get the cool blogs to put us on their list.” Also, Miller had discovered composing for movies. “And I thought, This is it! I’m going to score films! I could do this when I’m seventy!” He recently completed his fifth film score, for “Tig,” a documentary about the comedian Tig Notaro.
But he and his bandmates kept writing songs. “And in New York I would meet cool people who would say, ‘I like Guster,’ and I would think, Maybe I’ve just been a total dick about this, not appreciating that there is this legacy. I realized it was all fear-based.” Fear of what? “That we would be this purely nostalgic band if we came back. And then I thought, Put your head down and do your work.” “Evermotion,” Guster’s new album, came out last week.
Miller went back to the desk clerks, who had another idea: a snowshoe trek up to the old chapel that one of the von Trapp children built in 1950 in the woods above the lodge. That sounded good to Miller, for whom snowshoeing was another new experience. “I’m getting some of these!” he declared, stepping across a patch of ice. “You don’t slip!”
There was no taxidermy at the chapel, either, although there was exposed wood. But the cross behind the altar threw Miller.
“Wait. The family wasn’t Jewish?” he asked. “Then why were they running from the Nazis?”
Add “Watch ‘The Sound of Music’ ” to the to-do list. ♦
