Home on the Range: The Old 97's gets back to its roots on the new Blame It on Gravity

Today's music industry bears little resemblance to the one in which the Old 97's cut its teeth back in the early '90s. After spending its formative years in the Dallas music scene, the band quickly found itself being courted by several major labels looking to capitalize on the momentum of the insurgent country sub-genre. Even though the Dallas quartet made its best-known record (1997's Too Far to Care) while on Elektra Records, the band was eventually dropped after major labels failed to exploit the alt-country movement and turn it into the "next big thing." The result was a fractured scene that saw some artists (BR5-49, the Derailers) retreating further into traditionalism, while others (like Wilco) did their best to distance themselves from the country sound altogether by moving in a more experimental direction.

The members of the Old 97's did their fair share of soul-searching as well, exploring more straightforward rock and power-pop on 2001's exceptional Satellite Rides. But 2008's Blame It On Gravity is a homecoming for the band both sonically and geographically. The group came together in Dallas for three months of writing, recording and just getting to know each other again after drifting apart over the past several years. (This wasn't as easy as it sounds, though: Bassist Murry Hammond now lives Los Angeles while lead vocalist and principal songwriter Rhett Miller makes his home in New York's Hudson Valley.)

The songs on Gravity recapture the frenzied, energetic urgency of the band's best work (a feeling that was sadly missing from its last studio album, 2004's Drag It Up). Gravity's opening track, "The Fool," bursts out of the gate with plenty of signature '97's swagger and establishes the album's gritty, fervent atmosphere; it's like stopping in for a drink at an old familiar watering hole after several years away. But the album is much more diverse than the band's early output. "I Will Remain" conjures early Beatles bounce (right down to its simulated lo-fi mono production style) and Hammond's "Color of a Lonely Heart is Blue" is a bewilderingly lonesome cowboy strum.

On the occasion of its fifteen anniversary and Twangfest appearance, the RFT caught up with Miller to talk about the evolution of the band and his thoughts on its current place in the music biz.

Shae Moseley: Your bio has a quote that says you took a more perfectionist approach during the songwriting process, rather than focusing on how the songs would be received after they were recorded. How did that affect how you went about writing the songs on Blame It On Gravity?

Rhett Miller: I guess I had a little bit of an identity crisis in the last couple years. It had been a few years since the band had put out a record, and the last solo record I had was a bit of a hard slog on Universal, and I was really thinking a lot about fiction and writing some short stories. But we also changed managers at the time, and hired this guy Bill Silva — who pointed something out to me: "It seems like every time something starts to go well you switch gears and do something else." And I thought that there was really something to that — you know, I guess I've always felt like if something is going well I can move on to something else. So I really thought long and hard about whether it was the right time to switch over to writing fiction, you know, "Am I crazy?" And I realized that yes, I was.

I think Old 97's fans are glad you decided to put it off.

Yeah, I hope so. I guess to answer your question in a roundabout way, I think a lot of the songwriting on this record was informed by that temporary shift in focus to fiction. More than ever I just felt like I was really letting characters dictate where the song was going, and trying to get some in-depth character sketches and really inform the songs with some conflict.

What made you guys decide to reconvene in your hometown of Dallas to record the new album?