Longtime Ball of Wax listeners should be familiar with the work of Mr. Kelly Minnis, formerly of Seattle but now well established in College Station, Texas. Kelly first showed up way back on Volume 1 with his long-running solo electronic project Great Unwashed Luminaries, and has shared music from a variety of projects with us over the years (most recently his punk/shoegaze band Ex-Optimists, whose “Let’s Go to Sleep and Dream” appeared on last year’s Love Songs edition).
For “The Meaning of Life,” Kelly comes to us under the Invasion Boys moniker, which usually includes his brother, but here is just Kelly. Anyway, this is another entry in the “dad song” category for this volume, and it’s a very sweet bit of guitar-driven college rock addressed to his sons. Having recently experienced the conversion of dadhood myself, it’s nice to see that the wonder of being with a person for whom you’re completely responsible, yet who is his own self with his own perceptions and feelings, never really wears off. It occurs to me in listening to this song that the idea of finding “the meaning of life” is actually pretty childlike, but seeing the world and imagining meanings through the eyes of a child can be a pretty rewarding experience.