“Meanwhile, John’s in the van, reading Greek, reading Latin,” Donna remembers. “He’s got attention surplus disorder,” she says affectionately.

“The conversation in the van was not the normal conversation of people who are in a band,” Scarpantoni says, recalling long talks about history, art, and politics on tour drives. “He could discuss anything.”

“On the road, you only play an hour show,” Hamilton says. “The whole day is free to just read.”

Just as Hamilton was delving deeper into what he calls his “extended reading period,” the luster of Tiny Lights was beginning to fade.

“You go back to a place where you’ve played, and the crowd isn’t as big, and maybe you’re just not so into it anymore,” Donna says. “It just starts feeling sad.”

As time went on, Tiny Lights proved unwilling to change its image or its musical repertoire to court popular success. “We put so much emphasis on authenticity and honesty,” Hamilton says with a still-extant trace of artistic indignation. “It wasn’t just a show—we weren’t just performers—and it wasn’t a role we could just put on.”

It grew especially difficult for the band to keep touring and recording after 1994, when Hamilton began his graduate studies. “We just sort of faded out,” he says. Their first son, Jasper, was born in 1996, and Donna started teaching preschool a few years later.

“It’s a new phase of our lives,” Hamilton says, as Henry, their younger son, walks through the kitchen with a set of drumsticks in hand.

‘NEVER TAKEN LESSONS’

Most of the students in Hamilton’s literature seminar did not know about their professor’s history as a rock star—yet few seem shocked by the fact that their European Romanticism professor played in a band for 13 years.

“He has all these great anecdotes, and he makes a lot of musical references,” says Amrita S. Dani ’13. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he did anything.”

While Hamilton does not often bring up his time in the band in his class, the eclecticism that characterized Tiny Lights often shines through in his teaching. He regularly brings cookies to class and sometimes relates Romantic poems to Nirvana lyrics.

“Being in the classroom is a type of performance,” Hamilton says. “There’s a large element of improvisation.”

Long before he came to Harvard, Hamilton’s bandmates recognized his capacity to combine different disciplines.

“He integrates everything into everything that he does,” Scarpantoni says. “It’s not surprising to me that he became a Harvard professor, because in my mind, this guy always was one.”