Old 97’s

“Rock and roll’s been very, very good to me,” Rhett Miller sings on “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive,” an epic six-minute stream-of-consciousness meditation on his life in music and the opening track to the Old 97’s 2014 release, Most Messed Up. To say that rock and roll has been good to the Old 97’s (guitarist/vocalist Rhett Miller, bassist/vocalist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples) would be an understatement. The band emerged from Dallas over 20 years ago at the forefront of a musical movement blending rootsy, country-influenced songwriting with punk rock 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 Clash than the Carter Family.” They’ve released a slew of records since then, garnering praise from NPR and Billboard to SPIN and Rolling Stone. The band performed on television from Letterman to Austin City Limits and had their music appear in countless film and TV soundtracks. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter that he put the band on a continuous loop on his iPod while writing the show’s final scene.

Now, with over 20 years and 10 albums to their name, the Texas alt-country stalwarts are back with their eleventh LP, Graveyard Whistling via ATO Records. The album was recorded in the same Tornillo, Texas studio as their 1996 debut, Too Far to Care. The band also still contains its original four members – Miller, guitarist Ken Bethea, bassist Murry Hammond, and drummer Philip Peeples. “We weren’t trying to remake Too Far to Care, but to make something where fans would say, ‘This band hasn’t lost a step in twenty-some years,’” explains Miller. The result is the 11 songs of Graveyard Whistling, from a group that has earned the respect and veneration as one of the pioneers of the alt-country movement, while still retaining the raucous energy, deceptive cleverness, and knockabout spirit that first distinguished them from the pack.

While there are new collaborators on Graveyard Whistling, including Nicole Atkins and Butch Walker, there aren’t more than a handful of bands in history who can claim to have an intact, unchanged line-up as they approach 25 years together. There is, of course, no real blueprint or rulebook for sustaining the kind of chemistry that Miller, Bethea, Hammond, and Peeples enjoy.

“I think our longevity can be attributed primarily to our friendship and ability to overcome those moments when egos want to overtake and obliterate everything in their path,” says Miller. “We experienced the hype of the old business model, with all of its excess and idiocy, and also the deconstruction of that model and the advent of the new world, and been able to maintain a fundamental love for each other.”