’The Joker’

A Reason To Smile

Credit: Getty Images

To celebrate Steve Miller’s birthday today we have chosen one of the Steve Miller Band’s biggest hits, “The Joker,” as our reason to smile.

I sat down with Miller a few years ago to talk about his career and his eponymous band.

Miller grew up surrounded by music. He was partial to jazz and blues as his mother was a singer, with a voice like Ella Fitzgerald, Miller told me. His godfather was Les Paul, of guitar fame.

As a child growing up in Dallas, he had the opportunity to see a roster of jazz and blues greats perform live: Ray Charles, T-Bone Walker, James Moody, and Charles Mingus, to name a few.

Though he started his professional career as a blues musician, in the mid-1960s he moved to San Francisco and pioneered a new genre of rock ‘n’ roll with catchy, playful lyrics you can’t help but sing along to.

“The Joker” is no exception. It is arguably the band’s most successful and enduring song. It was their first No. 1 hit in 1974, and it topped the U.K. charts 16 years later after being featured in a Levi’s jeans commercial.

I had to ask him about the song’s most famous lyric, “the pompatus of love.” Miller admitted to coining the word “pompatus” as he was writing the song because it just seemed to fit — and that it means “whatever you want it to mean.”

“The truth of the matter is, things that feel spontaneous have a much longer life than things that have got a lot of burnt brain tissue to make them perfect,” he told me.

If you want to enjoy all the songs chosen for A Reason To Smile, you can listen to this Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly.

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Stay Steady,

Dan