Y
ou'll have to forgive Rhett Miller – the Old 97s bandleader is a father now. So while he
wanted to dive right in on a discussion of Most Messed Up, his group's galloping return
to its classic Wreck Your Life/Too Far to Care cowpunk roots, he had more pressing familial concerns. After a week together in his native Texas, the singer had just put his wife
Erica and his son Max and daughter Soleil on a plane bound for home in New York.
by Tom Lanham
"And my son went straight from the airport to a baseball game, because he's 10 years old and he's eaten up
with baseball,” he sighs, wistfully. "And he called me
after the game – I'm normally right there helping coach
– and said 'I only had a couple of hits. I had one double and one walk and a bunch of foul balls that were
one foot away from being home runs'. Dad was caught
up, emotionally invested in junior's failures.
And I said 'Sooo….did you guys win?' And he goes
'Oh, yeah! We won 18 to 3!'” guffaws Miller, 43, still a
tad dumbfounded. "I mean, he was burying the lede!
Now he's taking winning for granted!" The sport has
been consuming him, too, he adds. "Because I'm also
part of this rock and roll baseball E-mail chain, with
Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn and Joe Pernice and
Will Johnson and Craig Finn from The Hold Steady -all these baseball supernerds. These guys are con-
22 illinoisentertainer.com june 2014
stantly E-mailing about baseball.
And I'm not as big of a super
baseball fan as them, but I do love
it. And I really watch baseball
now a little differently – between
that and having a son who's obsessed with it, there's been a lot of
baseball in my life lately."
Surely now it's time to discuss the new 97s magnum opus,
an autobiographical accounting –
or reckoning, perhaps – of the band's turbulent, sometimes alcohol-powered two decades together, which
kicks off with one of the greatest opening lines ever:
"We've been doing this longer than you've been
alive/Propelled by some mysterious drive." Not exactly. Talking about plane trips reminds the vagabond
that he also just flew into Indianapolis for several days,
to co-write with Margo and the Nuclear So and Sos'
Richard Edwards. "It's for a project that we're doing together that's gonna be sort of a modern-day Louvin
Brothers thing," he elaborates. "Just a lot of harmonica,
a lot of acoustic guitars, a lot of hellfire and brimstone.
And no covers," he stresses."We're writing original
songs, and the one murder ballad so far is this really
sweet song called "Oh, Lord, Please Help Me"."
While in Naptown Miller also booked a spur-of-the-
moment solo gig at Radio Radio, the ultra-hip venue
owned by David 'Tufty' Clough, of Zero Boys/Toxic
Reasons renown. The artist even humbly apologized
to the club owner afterwards for exuberantly leaping
atop the monitors during his performance. "And I got
all the great stories from Tufty – he's just awesome,"
Miller added of the conversations he had w