Rhett Miller On New Old 97’s Album ‘Twelfth,’ Taking A Rare Look Back And The Key To Keeping His Band Together For 27 Years

On their latest studio album, the aptly titled Twelfth, now available via ATO Records, Texas alt-country pioneers Old 97’s take a rare look back.

Legendary Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, #12, graces the cover of an album that finds singer, songwriter and guitarist Rhett Miller taking stock of his band’s humble beginnings, days defined by little income, ramen noodles and communal living in less than ideal conditions, leases broken as the four band members set forth together on a rare rock path - longevity. 27 years later, there hasn’t been a single lineup change.

Work on the new record wrapped in Nashville on March 12, 2020 just as the onset of COVID-19 was beginning to radically change the world in which musicians would operate.

In an era where it’s otherwise become difficult for artists to monetize recorded music, touring has become the single most important revenue stream for most musicians. While pandemic has taken traditional live concert performance off the table for the foreseeable future, it’s also placed an increased emphasis on art, as people turn to music, films, television and books amidst the isolation of quarantine.

“So much of this moment, for artists, is about losing the audience - losing the feedback and losing the immediacy of performing for people and seeing their faces light up and hearing them applaud and all of those things. I’m doing four shows a week [online] and half of those shows, the only physical audience that I have in the room with me is a dog who doesn’t even wake up, much less applaud,” joked Miller over the phone this week. “But I do think that people are hungry for art. Because I think that’s what helps us get through. So I hope that helps this album reach people,” he continued, nothing his group’s latest studio effort. “I hope that people hear it. And I hope that people can sense that we really cared a lot about the work that we put into making it. I gave a lot to these songs.”

In addition to 12 Old 97’s albums, Miller has also released eight solo records, touring frequently both solo and with his band throughout, working at an exhausting clip for nearly three decades.

He found sobriety in 2015, which began a period of self-discovery for the songwriter, for whom the ideas of intoxication and songwriting had grown intertwined.

Following the 2014 Old 97’s album Most Messed Up, Miller began co-writing sober with other artists in an effort to rediscover his identity as a songwriter, penning all of the tracks on Twelfth himself after a long layoff from that process.

If Most Messed Up saw him entering a bit of a spiral, Twelfth offers resolution, the new album documenting in uncharacteristically introspective and strikingly honest fashion the moments of both joy and darkness Miller experienced as he fought to make it to the other side.

I spoke with Rhett Miller about looking back, finding joy, the storytelling that defines his songwriting, the honesty at the heart of Twelfth and the key to keeping the Old 97’s together for 27 years. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length, follows below.

12 albums over almost 30 years is not a point many bands get to. Especially right now, does it force you to kind of hit pause a bit, look back at the body of work and take stock of what you’ve accomplished instead of constantly worrying about what’s next?

RHETT MILLER: Well, yes. And that’s been one of the hardest things about all of this for me. I’ve never stopped. I’ve never really believed in nostalgia. So, for me, my favorite thing is always the thing that we’re making right now. Or the next thing. 

And it was kind of weird. Because, with this record, for the first time, I kind of dabbled in nostalgia. There’s a lot of songs on this record where I kind of go back and revisit the years that we spent living in squalor, me and my bandmates. We had so little money throughout our twenties. We couldn’t afford to eat out. It was all ramen all the time.

We felt so hungry and so driven to prove ourselves. And make enough money that we didn’t feel like we were going to have bail out on another lease. I don’t know how many leases I ran out on. I don’t know how many electric or water bills that I ran out on. And the next house that we moved into, somebody else would have to put their name on the lease - because we were still in trouble with the last landlord.

At the time - that was a really scary way to live. But, looking back on it, you realize that we were really pretty safe. Even though we had kind of thrown away all of our safety nets. The word privilege right now… I know how privileged we were. We had family members and we had friends. We had places that we could turn to in worst-case scenarios. But I gave up my scholarship to college. Everybody else in my band threw away decent jobs that they had. And we just all threw ourselves fully into rock and roll. And it didn’t pay for years and years.

So you look back on those years and you realize that even though they were kind of terrifying - and, like I said, we were living in squalor - those were some of the greatest years of my life. And I think my bandmates would agree. Those were such fun times. When you look back on them now, the abject poverty in which we lived was part of the fun.

It was kind of great to have nothing. Because later on, you have kids and a mortgage and the stakes are higher. You have to make your nut every month. There’s other people who depend on you! And they don’t want to live in squalor, you know?

There’s a lot of time travel on this record. It’s not nostalgia for some bygone era. But I’m appreciating it, in retrospect, in a way that I wasn’t able to at the time.

Whether it’s been solo or with the band, great storytelling has always been at the heart of your music. As opposed to doing it over the course of 300 pages, what’s the key to telling a compelling story in a three minute song - introducing a compelling character, establishing a plot, resolving it and doing all of that quickly and efficiently?

RM: Boy, it’s funny… I would give anything now to know how to translate that to the other direction. Because my lifelong dream is to write long-form fiction. And I still throw myself into the study of it and the practice of it. And I’m trying. 

And I know that somebody could say, “Stay in your lane!” But the lane that I’ve always stayed in - which is the three minute song form - to me, it just feels so easy. Because I can sit down and, in the space of 30 minutes or three hours or something, I can come up with a tiny moment.

And I feel like the thing that I really love - that I think I’ve gotten pretty good at- is finding a way to take a tiny moment, between two people typically, and tell a story [in a song] that could be told over the course of a Raymond Carver short story or a Kurt Vonnegut novel. But these tiny moments are microcosms. And, in them, you can see the greater arcs that might be told in a longer piece of prose or something.

But I really love that. Because I love the distillation of it. I love how one little look or one little detail can carry an entire subplot. It’s a beautiful art form and I really love it.

I don’t think I’ll ever perfect it - but I really love trying to perfect it.

“Honesty” is a word frequently attributed to your songwriting - this album in particular. “Confessional Boxing” is probably a good example. How important is honesty to you when it comes to your songwriting and does it manifest itself maybe more than usual on Twelfth?

RM: I used to be really averse to the idea of writing something that was autobiographical - or felt autobiographical. Because I guess I got, as an audience member, burned too many times by artists who thought that everybody was paying 20 bucks to come listen to them read pages out of their diary. And [the audience] had to shut up and listen because [the artist] is so important. That approach to creativity really grosses me out. So I tried to stay away, for a long time, from being the kind of artist where I let myself go there in terms of autobiography in the things that I would write.

But, as I’ve gotten older, it’s kind of struck me that the things that feel the most honest and the most... I used to think that universality equated to broad strokes. But I do think that, in a way, the things that end up feeling the most universal, are the things that start out the most personal. 

So, I’ve let myself go there in terms of writing things that were specifically autobiographical and hoped that nobody would begrudge me my navel-gazing. 

You did some co-writing on the last few albums - on Graveyard Whistling for instance. But on Twelfth, you did not...

RM: Really, around the time that I got sober, I was trying to figure out how I would go back to the drawing board and find my voice as a writer again. And I discovered that by co-writing with people with whom I was friends or admired - Ben Kweller, Butch Walker, Nicole Atkins, Brandi Carlile - I could sort of take the onus off of me and spread it out between two of us. If there was something that made me feel uncomfortable, I could blame it on somebody else. And it was just sort of a nice reintroduction. 

But, eventually, I found that I really like writing myself. I like writing from my own voice. I like having to carry the entire mantle of inspiration and then all the weight, after the fact, of owning whatever it was that I said.

I like that. I think it makes for better art. 

Reintroduction. That’s kind of where I was going with that. That process of co-writing after you found sobriety, in an effort to find your voice again as a songwriter, that’s a process that went on for a few years. Was that kind of a scary time for you as a songwriter?

RM: It was a really scary time. 

It’s funny… I’ve been lately doing The Artist’s Way. Which is a book that I kind of always thought was like a self-help book. But I interviewed a writer named Brian Koppelman for my podcast “Wheel’s Off.” And he recommended this book and said that he still does his morning pages - which is one of the things that they recommend in this book: you wake up and write three pages, just stream of consciousness. So he said he still writes his morning pages. 

Well, I had this book sitting on my shelf forever. So I revisited it and found that I kind of liked the approach. And so I’ve been doing that. And in my morning pages this morning, I was actually just kind of wondering aloud in these pages about that exact thing.

I’m going to be revisiting [my 2015 solo album] The Traveler in one of my StageIt streaming shows. And The Traveler was really the last record I made before I got sober. So I was thinking about the difference and what happened. I was thinking about self-identity.

What I was afraid of was in terms of my abuse and my songwriting - I thought that it was so intertwined that I couldn’t write songs without being that person. And, now that I’m on the other side of it, I can kind of see that there was no interdependence. I wasn’t the whiskey. I wasn’t the weed. I was just a person who did that. And eventually, it no longer worked for me.

This album takes the listener a on a bit of a ride - it really lays out a story from start to finish. Side two gets a little dark. I know that you’re primarily responsible for sequencing Old 97’s albums. What was the goal for you with this record in terms of telling that story?

RM: With every album, the sequencing is a different kind of challenge. And I really love it. It’s one of my favorite parts of the album. And it’s kind of nice that it comes last. Because you kind of feel like everything is done - and then you get this sweet little puzzle to put together.

But, with this one, I went for the classic bait and switch. I wanted to draw everyone in with the fun songs and the lighthearted songs - and then I wanted them to stick around for the weirdness. And, even when it got a little bit dark, I wanted them to be willing to go there with me because we’d earned maybe the goodwill for them to stick around for side two.

Earlier today, I was thinking about two Old 97’s albums in particular. When I look at Most Messed Up and the new album, it almost kind of feels like they’re bookends in a certain way. Some of that darker songwriting seems to have begun on Most Messed Up and you seem to achieve a little bit of resolution on Twelfth. Is there any truth to that?

RM: I had not thought of it that way. But I think you’re exactly right in a lot of ways. Most Messed Up was like entering a long, dark tunnel. And this is coming out of that tunnel.

Yeah. Well observed.

I’ve seen you use the word “joy” to describe parts of this album. And certainly those moments are there. They’re generally there in your music. How important is to have that balance and strike that chord?

RM: To me, music has always been something that, first and foremost, was useful.

I was a kid who battled depression. I had a suicide attempt really early on - when I was 14 years old. And the thing that, more than anything else, gave me hope and some sort of a reason to go on was music.

And even to this day when I write music, it goes to dark places. But I think that, more than anything, at its core, it’s this weird alchemy where you turn sadness into joy.

And sometimes you’re not running away from the sadness, you’re diving straight into the sadness and going through the very heart of it to find the joy on the other side of it.

Well, one of the themes that emerges from this record is simply surviving and staying intact for 27 years. What’s been the key to keeping it together now for almost three decades?

RM: Well, it still boggles my mind that we’ve been able to keep it going as long as we have. It’ so unlikely, you know? But the thing I guess I would point to is just be willing to grow and be willing to lose some battles. You have to set your ego aside some.

It’s like a marriage. You have to always remind yourself that you love these people. I love my bandmates. And they drive me crazy. And sometimes I don’t like them. But I love them. And I’m so lucky. And we’re so lucky that we get to do this. So I think that it’s important to just always remember that and be grateful for what we’ve got. It’s hard. It’s hard to make it work - like any long relationship. 

But, yeah, I love my bandmates. And I miss them. There have been times where I guess I’ve lost sight of that. And there’s been times where we came really close to letting the band become a casualty of ego or time or entropy or any number of things.

But I’m so glad that we never threw it away.