15 JULY 2-8, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | FIND MORE MUSIC COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MUSIC Sage Advice RHETT MILLER OF OLD 97’S SHARES WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A TRUE WRITER AND ARTIST. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN Most rock stars are content to be just plain old rock stars. They tour, they jam, they write, they plan and they work late hours in the studio. Rhett Miller of Old 97’s — which includes frontman Miller, Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea and Philip Peeples — is not most rock stars. “I think we were lucky that we didn’t have the massive success that some of our friends and peers did,” Miller says. “The pull to be constantly on the road is so strong in that case, since there’s such a cottage industry connected to the band. We’ve had enough success that we’ve been able to stay together, keep playing and have a pretty comfortable middle-class existence.” Miller credits that success not only to the choices the band has made since the begin- ning (“with our own longevity in mind,” he says), but also the members wives, who “worked hard and held down the fort while we were on the road,” he says. It’s allowed them all to have families, other in- terests and real lives outside the image-driven world of a popular music tour. And that tour is coming to Denver, with the Old 97’s playing the Gothic Theatre on Thursday, July 23. It’s shows like the upcom- ing Mile High stop that have allowed Miller to do more than just front a longtime-favorite band, if one that sometimes fl ies just under the mega-stardom radar. He’s also been active in solo work, releasing his tenth album, “A Lifetime of Riding by Night,” in 2025. He’s writ- ten children’s books, including 2019’s “No More Poems” and 2022’s “The Baby Changing Station.” He hosts a weekly podcast called “Wheels Off,” in which he talks with other musicians, writers, artists, actors, comedians and more about the “messy reality of the creative life.” On top of that, he has a Sub- stack called Time & Temperature — it’s his own writing, not something farmed out to a publicist — that features smallish essays on life, the universe and everything else...except, he admits, the actual time or temperature. As if that weren’t enough, Miller has also taken on a professorial gig teaching song- writing at the New School. In his Substack, he admits that’s something that both excites and terrifi es him. “So I get to deal with young people who are creative,” Miller says, “and the question is always: ‘How? How do you do this?’ There’s this prevailing wisdom that you have to give up everything to do this thing, whatever creative pursuit it is. There’s something to that, but that’s really what you do in your twenties. If you want to keep the thing going, you have to be realistic about how you make it fi t in your life. “I do think that if you decide at 21 years old that, ‘Okay, I’m just going to do this thing on Saturdays and occasional Sundays,’ then that is what it is. It’s a hobby, and there’s still value and virtue in that. But to make a career out of it, you do have to start out sacrifi cing for it,” Miller says, and smiles. “You have to live in squalor. When you’re still young, that’s when you just have to eat it, and throw everything else away in order to try to make this thing work.” Miller’s own experience with squalor was his precipitous fall from the ivory tower, when he dropped out of his scholarship to Sarah Lawrence after one semester of a cre- ative writing major. “No one can...,” he starts, then pauses and laughs. “I was just about to say that no one can teach you to write.” That’s not something a student might want to hear from the professor who’s there to teach them writing. “What I mean is that writing teaches you how to write,” he ex- plains. “For me, back then, I realized I had to get back out there and keep doing the thing. I’d already been performing and recording for fi ve years, and I knew that was where I needed to put my focus. So I threw away the scholarship and lived with all the dropouts back in Dallas. Multiple roommates, roach- infested houses, living week-to-week and month-to-month. I don’t think I cracked $20K in a year until I was 27. But that was fi ne. What did I need? A little food, a little beer and guitar strings.” Despite being such a pro- lific content creator, Miller says that artists never used to get into their craft in order to publicize it, but that’s one of the things he sees happen- ing with younger artists. “I just did two interviews this morning for ‘Wheels Off,’” he says, “one with an artist in his twenties and another who’s almost forty, and both of them were talking about the level of social media emphasis in their careers being through the roof. I feel bad for them in that. Social media is poison to artistic output. To my own creative self, anyway. Artists are sensitive people, and the online environment preys on sensitive people. I feel lucky that I was able to start out in a world that didn’t have that additional pressure.” Miller isn’t done with writing. He’s just sold a book on songwriting to a publisher, so that’s forthcoming. “And I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” he admits. “Something along the lines of Elmore Leonard. Crime fi ction. Nothing too fancy — I’m not trying to write ‘Infi nite Jest.’” Modesty aside, the Elmore Leonard tone — gritty, honest, cynical and hopeful despite itself — is a pretty close match to much of what Miller does in his music. And that, in turn, tends to be exactly what satisfi es Miller musically. “I write the thing that I want to hear,” he says. “If you try to follow trends... calculation is the art killer. If I’m doing something that feels authentic to me, that’s my best shot at creating something that feels real to the listener.” That sense of reality is all over those Old 97’s songs that are familiar to fans: “Barrier Reef,” with its twangy wordplay; the mourn- ful country-rock of “Big Brown Eyes” (from which Miller’s substack borrows its name); “Champaign, Illinois” and its indictment of safe choices, with a tune borrowed from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”; and the tribute to short-story minimalist Ray Carver in the drunken melancholy of “What We Talk About.” And so on. The list is long, the sor- rows plenty, the hooks anchoring the joy- ously profl igate phrase-turning. “It’s funny,” Miller says. “In music, the trope is the difficult, mercurial, eccen- tric, problematic, probably drug-addled rock-star thing. I’m glad that’s gone by the wayside to some degree. We don’t have to be unhappy; we don’t have to be famously self-destructive. Too many artists buy into that mythos and really suffer from it. Some- times they don’t survive it. It’s heartbreak- ing because the myth is bullshit. I may be looking back at some unhappy moments in my songs, but it’s hard to work from a dark and depressed place. I do better work when I’m happy.” Old 97’s, will play Thursday, July 23, Gothic Theatre, 3263 S. Broadway, on Thursday, July 23. See the Gothic website for tickets and more information. His name is Stewart Ransom Miller; he’s a serial lady killer. And a lot more. The Old 97’s will play the Gothic on July 23. MUSIC JASON QUIGLEY ALYSE GAFKJEN
