Old 97’s Never Put Out an Album as a ‘Cash Grab.’ But Rhett Miller Says It Crossed His Mind
If you wonder what motivates a band after three decades together, ask the Old 97’s. “It feels so unlikely that we’re here, in this moment, in our career and in our lives, and we’ve built something that’s really pretty unimpeachable,” Rhett Miller tells me. We’re sitting in his office — the basement room in his Hudson Valley, New York, home where he writes, seeks inspiration, and often streams solo shows online. “I don’t want to fuck it up.”
The Old 97’s are capping off a year spent celebrating their 30th anniversary with their 13th studio album, American Primitive, out April 5. The record features 13 tracks showcasing the band’s range and manages to sound both like a fresh project and classic 97’s. The hauntingly reflective “Where the Road Goes” dropped in February as the first single.
With a lineup unchanged from the group’s founding — Miller, bassist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples — the Old 97’s worked on American Primitive with producer Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket), and opted for the first time to record without any pre-production. Instead, they relied on instinct and trust in one another, as well as on collaborations with guests like Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Scott McCaughey of the Minus 5.
“This record reminded me a lot of our Grand Theatre stuff,” Hammond says in a video call with the rest of the group, referencing their 2010-11 back-to-back albums, which began as a simulated concert residency to work up the songs. “There was not much pre-production, we really kind of winged it, and we kind of reaped the fruits of that. It’s kind of neat when you don’t prep for things. Even if that’s not a great place to live, it’s a fun place to visit.”
Like most Old 97’s records, this LP is meant to be turned up. Miller is soft-spoken, but juxtaposed against Bethea’s rock-edged lead guitar, he cannot help but raise his energy to match. In the album opener, “Falling Down,” he emphatically delivers lyrics like, “If you’re lucky enough that happiness has found you, you better get to dancing/as your way of saying thank you.”
The album’s curveball is “Incantation,” a slow, stripped-down track that centers Miller’s vocals while he laments “an invitation to rejoin the human race.” Tucker, he says, rescued the song from the demo pile.
“Now that I have kids who are entering adulthood, I get to re-experience all these firsts with them,” Miller says — his son, Max, is college-aged, and his daughter, Soleil, is a high-school senior. “One thing that it makes me do, as I look back at mistakes I was making in my younger years, is find that I’m giving myself a much more kind interpretation of things I have regretted over the years. The song ‘Incantation’ is me looking back at my young self, and saying, ‘All those things that you have been beating yourself up about for so many years, you don’t deserve the pain you’re putting yourself through.’”
Reflection — even redemption — is a theme of the album, which is natural for a band wrapping up its 30th year. The band’s roots are famously, unapologetically, in Dallas, and in the 1990s they rode the post-grunge wave to a record deal with Elektra during a time when it looked like alt-country may be the next big thing. That didn’t happen, but the Old 97’s emerged with a fan base as loyal as any of the grunge bands the label may have hoped they’d displace.
One of those fans is Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas. He says a band bus driver, “a rockabilly named Frank,” turned him and his bandmates on to the Old 97’s. By the early 2000s, the 97’s were opening for Matchbox Twenty on a tour of arenas and amphitheaters.
“There was never a time when they sold millions and millions of albums — though I always thought they should — but 30 years later their legacy endures,” Thomas tells Rolling Stone in an email. “There are so many bands that may have had bigger moments, but so many of them disappeared — while the Old 97’s have only more strongly solidified their place in music history. It’s a testament to the power of great songs played by great musicians.”
Such respect from peers has been a hallmark of the Old 97’s long before the author Stephen King broke the news on social media that they were releasing American Primitive. One of the showpiece concerts on the band’s anniversary tour was a sold-out, rain-soaked party at New York City rooftop venue Pier 17, with Drive-By Truckers and American Aquarium opening. The Truckers’ Patterson Hood joined the 97’s during their headlining set on R.E.M.’s “Driver 8.”
Drive-By Truckers have played out a similar career arc. So, it’s no surprise to learn that Hood admires both the music and longevity of the 97’s.
“Ten years is a milestone for a band that few ever reach,” he says. “Twenty, with the same personnel? Very few. The Old 97’s have now passed thirty years with the same four guys. They have been great and prolific and continued to grow and morph as they’ve all gotten older — yet somehow aren’t aging. Excellent songs and one of the most rip-roaring live shows anywhere.”
Those live shows are in full swing. After the pandemic took away their ability to tour behind Twelfth in 2020, the 97’s have plotted a coast-to-coast American Primitive tour through the fall. Peeples says the hardest part will be working the new songs into a set already full of fan favorites. “Our setlist is often not very deep cuts,” he says. “We’re out there to please people, and if we don’t have people who are being entertained, we don’t have a job.”
Hammond is quick to point out that those fan favorites were once new cuts on an album. He points to 2014’s “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” as a late-era song that the group now has to play at every gig.
The touring dynamic has evolved along with the setlists. After a lifetime of hard partying, Miller found sobriety in 2015. The vibe, backstage and on the bus, chilled.
“Until about seven or eight years ago, our days would have been filled with drinking and partying,” Bethea says of the band’s past routine. “We’ve kind of moved past that, which is a good thing overall. At night, we do our set, and it’s just fun. I have fun nearly every time, as long as I’m not having a crackling wire, or something physical that I can’t manage.”
Peeples quips about another habit that has become integral to the band’s touring life: “You usually wake up to Rhett wanting to go play disc golf somewhere,” he says.
For his part, Miller seems locked into a perpetual state of creativity. If he’s not touring with the 97’s or keeping a steady slate of solo gigs, he’s writing, or talking about writing. When the band makes a record, Miller brings more music than can fit. He recently started a Substack, titled Time and Temperature, often writing multiple newsletters a week. He hosts a podcast, Wheels Off with Rhett Miller, showcasing candid discussions with artists, authors, and writers about the creative process. He records it in this same office he’s holed up in, talking about the band while his miniature poodle, Ziggy, dozes off on the couch.
The familiarity of home, and the rolling hills of the Hudson Valley, keep the drive to create from consuming Miller, but just barely — especially when it comes to the Old 97’s.
“I feel like I’ve always been hungry. I can’t imagine ever not being hungry to make the next record, or prove something,” he says.
“But there’s also this responsibility now to the idea of the Old 97’s — to the longevity and the catalog,” Miller continues. “We used to make speeches to all the record labels when we were going through the dog-and-pony show in the mid-90s. We would say, ‘It’s so important to us that we have a catalog that we can be proud of, that we never put out an album that’s an outlier that feels like a cash grab, that we never do something we’re embarrassed of.’ At the time, I wasn’t 100 percent sure that was true. But, now, putting out this 13th record, I feel like there were definitely moments where we could have tried to calculate something that would open doors. We never did it.”
As a writer, Miller has come a long way since he derided songs that get self-referential on “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive,” and his self-realizations permeate American Primitive. He reckons with one of the darkest moments of his life — a suicide attempt when he was 14 — on “Where the Road Goes.”
“I did not address that for years,” Miller says. “But I thought I should let that be a part of my story, because it’s true, and because it’s something we need to de-stigmatize generally, for kids. It’s embarrassing to admit any kind of weakness, but especially that kind of weakness. It seemed so dramatic. And then, if you talk about it, you feel like you’re just dining out on it. I always thought there was some trope of a suicide attempt that was not so much a cry for help, but a look-at-me gesture.”
He adds that self-doubt and the idea of being “less than” is inherent in the human condition. He calls it “the art killer” and says we need to embrace it to take away its destructive power.
“We acknowledge it, and we say, ‘I know you’re always going to be a part of me. I love you, because you came from a moment in my youth,’” he says. “’But I don’t have to listen to it.’”
Miller’s personal evolution reflects that of the band. Decades removed from industry pressures, they are more comfortable as an outfit than ever, and it shows on American Primitive. The songwriting and music are fresh — Hammond even plays a harmonium. But the sound is vintage: loud and unpolished, neither country nor punk. Not even “Americana.”
Miller is aware of this. He points out that many of his musician friends have long-since been embraced by the Americana genre while his band never was. “That world, they’re always getting invited to these big parties, and the Old 97’s never get invited, because we’re not country enough, or we’re too loud, or we jump around too much,” he says. “People playing the Americana Awards tell me that we’re their favorite band, but for whatever reason, we never get invited.”
Turning that tide, though, would mean turning the tide of the Old 97’s — like those calculated moments they steered clear of early in their career. Miller feels the temptation, but never enough to take seriously. The day before he flew to Portland to record American Primitive, he was in Boston, watching the Pixies play. Joey Santiago’s heavy lead guitar stuck in his head and reminded him of what made audiences revere the Pixies in the first place — and of his own band’s lead guitarist.
“Joey’s guitar was so big, and so iconic. When Ken does his version of that, those big single-note melody lines, that’s us. I kind of refer to that sort of guitar playing as ‘dumb,’ but it’s really the opposite,” Miller says. “To me, anybody can pretend that they’re sitting in a Guitar Center, masturbating on their guitar. But to have the kind of restraint, and to come up with the perfect little melody like Joey Santiago or Ken Bethea can do, I feel like that’s such an art.
“Watching that, I went back thinking how the Pixies are still loved because they’re doing this thing that they have always done. They’re being who they were always meant to be,” he continues. “So, let’s let the Old 97’s be who we were always meant to be.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author of the 2020 book Red Dirt: Roots Music Born in Oklahoma, Raised in Texas, at Home Anywhere and the 2023 book The Motel Cowboy Show: On the Trail of Mountain Music from Idaho to Texas, and the Side Roads in Between.