Love the Holidays
By Tom Lanham
photo by Will Byington
R
hett Miller tried incredibly hard not
to let it bother him. He really did.
But then he made the unfortunate
mistake of looking up the numbers, and
the usually calm, cool, and collected Old
97s bandleader went ballistic because the
numbers didn’t lie. “Last Christmas” by
frickin’ George Michael — God rest his
soul — is the bane of my existence,” he
declares, assertively. “Then I found out
how much his estate makes off of that song
every year, and it’s more money by four
than I’ve ever made in my life, combined.
Which really frustrated me — it’s not like
it’s a better song than anything I’ve ever
written.” A year ago, after the 97s played a
private party at the home of a Boston bene-
factor — nice work if you can get it — a
Grinch-sinister plot began to form in the
musician’s mind, as he stood with his
Grinch fingers nervously drumming: He
must find a way to keep “Last Christmas”
from coming. Or at least siphon off some of
its over-saturated airplay.
In Boston, Miller broached the subject
to his bandmates — guitarist Ken Bethea,
guitarist-co-vocalist Murry Hammond,
and drummer Philip Peeples — and they
were receptive to the idea of recording a
mostly-original Yuletide album; and sure
enough, the rollicking Love the Holidays just
hit shelves, alongside Miller’s latest intro-
spective solo set The Messenger. Which was
ironic, he laughs, “because it was a week
after New Year’s, and everybody was so
sick of Christmas music. But it was already
in my brain because I’d gone through the
whole holiday season thinking, ‘I could
write a better song than that! I could write
a better song than that!’ So I went to the
guys in the dressing room in Boston and
said, ‘Because we’re not gonna be making
a studio album in 2018, what if we make a
Christmas album? I think the fans would
like it and — god forbid! — we might actu-
ally make a little money off of it.’ But pri-
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marily for me, I just liked the challenge of
writing holiday songs, songs that will be
evergreen and perennial. And, of course,
writing a better one than “Last
Christmas.”" Post-concert, he returned to
the dressing room to start composing the
disc’s first cut, “I Believe in Santa Claus,”
and quickly fell into the ching-chinging
sleighbell groove. “And I learned what the
trick was going to be for me,” he says. “I
was going to write my own regular songs;
only they would be set during the holiday
season.”
But Miller has always aimed high, artis-
tically. And today, in a pre-Thanksgiving
call from the Hudson Valley home he
shares with his wife Erica and their two
children, Max and Soleil, he’s definitely
feeling the festive spirit. And his surround-
ings only enhance his mood. Drive five
minutes in any direction from home base,
and you’ll find one of the countless cut-
your-own-Christmas-tree farms, and out-
side his living room window sat eight
inches of freshly-fallen snow, which added
a warm wintry glow to his afternoon.
Gifts were on his mind, too — Max had
just turned 15 the day before, and dad had
spent a fortune tracking down a rare pair
of Kanye West sneakers, this week’s model.
“I just turned 48, and I noticed three gray
hairs,” he sighs. “I could be dead by now,
but I feel good. I feel young, I feel healthy,
and I feel vital, mentally and physically.
And actually, creatively, I feel more vital
than I’ve ever felt in my life.” In addition to
The Messenger, his eighth effort under his
own name, plus “Love the Holidays,” this
Renaissance man has a personal podcast
he’s fine-tuning, a novel he’s close to com-
pleting, and an Edward Gorey-grim book
of children’s poetry called No More Poems!
coming out this March. In fact, he adds,
he’d just had a meeting in Manhattan with
the publisher’s marketing team to discuss
the volume’s rollout, and he was stunned
2018
by how seriously they were taking his
goofy, lighthearted wordplay. “I spent two
hours in a conference room, and as the
team was laying out their plan, I was like,
‘Holy shit! You guys are really going for it!
This is weird…’” he says. “I even scored
the biggest illustrator in the business, this
guy who’s a Caldecott winner. I was really
lucky.”
How did Miller hit such a peak of pro-
ductivity? By quitting booze a few years
ago, for starters. Then he gradually devel-
oped a system that continues to work for
him. “So essentially, I’m waking up every
day now and going down to my office or
the hotel lobby and writing 500 to 1,000
words on the first draft of my novel,” he
explains. “And I’m 40,000 words into it
now, which is further along than any other
draft. And it’s great that none of my other
jobs — being a dad, being a rock and roller,
even starting to record a podcast — are
really prose. So for me, to write prose is a
whole other part of my brain that I don’t
get to exercise most of the time. And music
is so immediately gratifying, but the kids’
poems that I wrote are just a few degrees
removed from what I do as a songwriter —
it’s rhyme and meter and rhyming cou-
plets. But the prose is a much bigger thing,
and you have to live with these characters
and keep the timeline, plus different plots
and subplots straight in your head. It’s a lot
of work! A lot!”
In his nearly three decades with the 97s,
Miller has proven himself a champion
tunesmith, easily capable of surpassing an
even Wham!-era George Michael. The
band’s ’97 Elektra masterpiece Too Far to
Care alone feels like a master class in the
craft. And — along with its 1995 Bloodshot
precursor Wreck Your Life (which first
caught the attention of Elektra’s keen-
eared exec Tom Desavia, who signed the
Dallas outfit immediately) — defined the
galloping cowpunk-meets-Duane-Eddy-
with-a-touch-of-Tom-Lehrer aesthetic that
Miller and crew would regularly return to
for comfort on future envelope-pushing
experiments. And in this colloidal system,
every sonic ingredient was equally impor-
tant — Bethea’s booming guitar lines,
Peeples’ chugging rhythms, Hammond’s
deep, heavy bass notes and conversely
high singing voice, and Miller’s rich,
mahogany warble, snarky, sardonic lyrics,
and brash punk-schooled way with a mar-
lin-sized hook. One track, in fact — the
loping, knowing-wink-subtle “Big Brown
Eyes” — was so picture-perfect, it was
included on both mid-‘90s records, as is.
And the man was right - this clever men-
tality can transfer with relative ease to tra-
ditional Christmas carols, a la Love the
Holidays.
The disc kicks off with the initially
incongruous title cut, but its chuck wagon
coziness and mariachi horns make sense
after a few bars. More Keane-painting-
eyed innocence ensues, in a waltzing “I
Believe in Santa Claus” — which is every
bit as family-friendly as it sounds — the
jingle-jangly “Gotta Love Being a Kid
(Merry Christmas),” the southwestern-
smoky ballad “Snow Angels,” and
“Christmas is Coming,” which is basically
sleighbell-adorned cowpunk, Old 97s’ wel-
come stock in trade. Miller’s original song
list was supposed to end with only one tra-
ditional, “Auld Lang Syne.” But label execs
kept adding old holiday B-sides, like “Blue
Christmas” and “God Rest Ye Merry
Gentlemen,” until “Holidays” was much
longer and less originals-centered than its
composer had anticipated. But you don’t
have to dig very deep to unearth his wise
life philosophies, as in “Gotta Love”’s
Christmas morning reflection, “Wrapping
paper, big old bows/ I hope I don’t get no
clothes/ I’ll wake up at 6 a.m./ Just so I
can open them.” They say you can never
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