1997 Are You Out There Industrial Arts Theatre in Denver
Thu Jun nine, 2022 - 8:00 PM
"Stone and ringlet'southward been very very good to me," Rhett Miller sings on "Longer Than You've Been Live," an ballsy half dozen-minute stream-of-consciousness meditation on his life in music. It'southward a rare moment of pulling back the mantle, on both the excesses and tedium of the world of a touring musician, and it's the perfect style to open the Old 97's new album, 'Most Messed Upwardly.'
"I wrote that vocal very apace and didn't rewrite one word of it," Miller explains. "It's sort of a thesis statement not only for this record, but for my life's work."
To say that rock and roll has been expert to the Quondam 97's (guitarist/vocaliser Miller, bassist/vocalist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples) would be an understatement. The band emerged from Dallas twenty years ago at the forefront of a musical movement blending rootsy, country-influenced songwriting with punk stone energy and delivery. The New York Times has described their major label debut, 'Too Far To Care,' as "a cornerstone of the 'alternative country' movement…[that] leaned more toward the Disharmonism than the Carter Family." They've released a slew of records since then, garnering praise from NPR and Billboard to SPIN and Rolling Stone, who hailed the band as "iv Texans raised on the Beatles and Johnny Cash in equal measures, whose shiny melodies, and fatalistic character studies, do their forefathers proud." The band performed on television from Letterman to Austin City Limits and had their music announced in countless flick and Television receiver soundtracks (they appeared every bit themselves in the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston movie 'The Break Upwardly'). Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter that he put the band on a continuous loop on his iPod while writing the testify's final scene.
'Most Messed Up' finds the Old 97's at their raucous, boozy best, all swagger and heart. Titles like "Wasted," "Intervention," "Wheels Off," "Let'south Get Drunk And Get Information technology On," and "Most Messed Upwardly" hint at the kind of narrators Miller likes to inhabit, men who possess an ambition for indulgence and won't permit a few bad decisions make it the style of a good story.
"A few people in my life said, 'Yous can't sing 'Let'south get drunk and become it on,'" Miller remembers. "I said, 'What do y'all mean? I've been singing that sentiment for 20 years! I was just never so straightforward about it.'"
It was a trip to Music City that inspired Miller to throw abroad his inhibitions equally songwriter and cutting correct to the center of things.
"For me, this record really started in Nashville on a co-write session with John McElroy," he says. "I really admired his wheels off approach to songwriting, And I liked the thought he had for how he thought I should interact with my audience. He said, 'I think your fans want yous to walk upwardly to the mic and say fuck.' It was liberating." It reminded me that I don't have to be too serious or besides sincere or heartfelt. I only take to have fun and exist honest. I felt like I kind of had costless reign to go alee and write these songs that were bawdier and more adult-themed."
The magic in Miller's songwriting lies in the depth that he lends his characters. Upon closer inspection, the difficult partying and endless pursuit of a proficient time often reveals itself to be a band-aid covering upward deeper wounds and emotional scars.
"There's a lot of darkness hidden in this record," he explains. "I of the large Sometime 97's tricks is when we write about something kind of dark and depressing, it works best when information technology's a fun sounding song. So it's non until the third or fourth listen that you realize the narrator of this song is a consummate disaster."
If that description calls to mind The Replacements, information technology's no coincidence. Miller is a fan of the Minneapolis cult heroes, and now counts Tommy Stinson among his own friends and fans. All-time known as bassist for the Mats and more recently Guns 'north' Roses, Stinson joined the Old 97'south in the studio in Austin, Texas, to lay down electric guitar on ## tracks, elevating the sense of reckless musical carelessness to new heights and lending the album an air of the Rolling Stones' double-guitar set on. It'south a collaboration Miller never would have even imagined in 1994 when the band released their debut.
"We didn't think nosotros'd terminal until the yr 1997," Miller laughs. "We idea the name would get a little weird when it became 1997, merely nosotros decided none of our bands had ever lasted that long, and so let'due south not fifty-fifty worry about it. But as information technology all started to unfold, nosotros realized we could mayhap brand a living doing this, and we were all really conscious of wanting to be a career band. It was way more important to us to maintain a really loftier level of quality, at the expense, perhaps, of having hit singles or fitting in with the trends of the time, and I'1000 glad nosotros did that."
Twenty years on, it'due south safe to say rock and roll has indeed been very, very good to the Old 97'south.
Source: https://www.axs.com/artists/104572/old-97-s-tickets
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