Rhett Miller stares across the classroom at the 14 sets of eyes staring back and lets his curiosity run free. This was early September, during Miller’s second class of the semester teaching a songwriting course at the New School in New York’s Greenwich Village. The Old 97’s frontman, with nearly four decades of performing and writing under his belt, is here to teach, and the first step is to hear the 21-year-olds in this senior-level course tell him about the songwriters who inspire them.
Miller listens as students cite Jimi Hendrix, Fiona Apple, and Radiohead, occasionally interjecting that songs can feel autobiographical regardless of whether they are true to life. “We’re taking elements and turning them up to ten,” he explains. When one student lists Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari” as a favorite for its storytelling, Miller calls it an example of “letting the song tell us where it wants us to be.”
On the surface, Miller, who makes his home in the Hudson Valley two hours north of his New School teaching gig, was merely imparting his learned wisdom. But one spin through A Lifetime of Riding by Night, Miller’s 10th solo record, out on Friday, lays bare that he is following the same muse in his own art.
This is a record of 13 tracks that tell the listener where they want them to be.
“I hear myself saying these things to the students and every now and then it occurs to me that they are true, and I’m not being just a know-it-all professor,” Miller says. “There’s no such thing as perfect. When you record a song, it’s a recording of a moment in time, and you’ve decided to capture that moment. It doesn’t mean it’s the best version of it. It just means that it’s that moment.”
It’s the 55-year-old Miller, a native of Dallas and a longtime face of the “cowpunk” genre, who cannot stop himself from rocking or shaking both his ass and his hair during most concerts, singing freewheeling, mellow folk music. And if it sounds like Miller made the record fearing it may be his last, there’s a good reason. The Old 97’s spent the bulk of 2023 and 2024 touring heavily behind American Primitive and celebrating 30 years as a band. As the shows piled up, Miller’s voice began to give out.
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“We don’t really have much of a career in Europe,” Miller tells Rolling Stone. ”Europe is still sort of the missing link in our careers and our greatest collective regret as a band. So, we went over to Europe in October of 2023, we did it with a skeleton crew. We weren’t able to play with in-ear monitors. We were playing in small venues. It was back to the old days when I was screaming over a guitar and drums. And as the tour went on, I was losing my voice. When we got back from that, I went to see a throat specialist. They said, ‘You have a cyst on your vocal cord and a polyp on the other one.’
“So, both of my vocal cords were compromised, and I had lost most of my falsetto register. I had lost a lot of my lower register. I started doing vocal rehab to see if I could get it back or if the cyst might disappear on its own, and make do with my vocal cords in a compromised state. It came down to, I could make do for the rest of my life and just give up on these chunks of my voice, or I could get the surgery.”
Miller closes Old 97s sets and solo sets alike with “Timebomb,” and has for most of his career. The song’s refrain features Miller singing the line “Oh, Celeste,” repeatedly and at the highest end of his vocal range, fully falsetto. “It’s the highlight of our set every night,” he says.
He couldn’t hit the note anymore, and when he realized that the crescendo of his live show would require him singing a full step down, he saw it as anti-climactic.
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Miller couldn’t do it. The Old 97’s have been an independent band for more than two decades, and it’s a point of pride, to the point that when the group was honored in September with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Americana Music Association Honors and Awards, Miller offered the advice, “If you’re going to sign a record deal, do it in the ‘90s,” in his acceptance speech. He has also been sober since 2015 — a move that served to re-invigorate both the 97’s and his solo songs as Miller pushed his vocals to their limit at nearly every concert.
Miller decided to have vocal cord surgery. He scheduled it for December 2024.
“I blocked out the second half of December through the end of April, and it was terrifying,” Miller says. “The 90 percent likelihood was that the surgery would be just fine. But there’s a 10 percent chance it wouldn’t — the Julie Andrews end of it all, as they say. The rehabilitation of it was scary, because that’s where the real problems are.
“If you talk to Hayes Carll about his situation, which I did, you know that his problems came from the rehab, when he didn’t do what he was supposed to do, and it took a lot longer for him to get his voice back. I talked through it with him. I called my doctor. And I committed to doing this long stretch with no talking. After that, you have to just start giving yourself a few minutes every hour, where you’re allowed to talk a little bit, for weeks. It is so weird when you can’t talk. I love to talk.”
He recorded A Lifetime of Riding by Night before the surgery.
The album features material entirely written or co-written by Miller. There are songwriting collaborations with Caitlin Rose, Nicole Atkins, and Gin Blossoms’ Jesse Valenzuela, plus three co-writes with Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker. Snippets of “A Little Song,” one of those Felker collaborations, serve as a prologue and interlude, framing the entire album.
But the partnership most important to the record, in Miller’s view, was not a songwriter at all. It was Old 97’s co-founder, bassist, and longtime friend Murry Hammond, who produced the album late last year before Miller underwent vocal surgery.
“I asked him, ‘Do you want to do this after you’ve had surgery and recovered and your voice is a hundred percent?’ And he explained to me that surgeries like this, they don’t always have a happy ending,” recalls Hammond, who also serves as the unofficial archivist of the Old 97’s and has a collection of Miller’s music that dates back to the band’s inception in 1992.
“It occurred to me that not only is Murry a great producer, but he’s also the kind of producer who I felt like was making the sounds that suited the songs I had put together,” Miller says. “It was really the perfect storm. And then I started thinking about how beautiful it was that, here is this man who was my mentor and my best friend and my bandmate of 30-plus years, and it just worked on so many levels.”
Hammond is as much of a Miller fan as he is a peer, and his own recent solo record, Trail Songs of the Deep, helped Miller land on the sound and feel for this project.
“He had heard the solo records that I had done,” Hammond says, “and he basically said, ‘Would you do that for me?’ Just the vibe of it, and the approach. And I thought it sounded like a really interesting idea. If he wanted me to do just a rock & roll record, I don’t think I’d be very good at it. But when he asked me to do it like we did — he’s never done a record like that, and I thought he had at least one in him, if not a dozen.”
Before surgery, Miller left the entire production — including paring the 40-plus songs they brought into the studio — in Hammond’s hands.
“When I first listened to it, I was sitting next to a swimming pool in the Pacific Northwest, and it was such a beautiful, moving experience,” Miller says. “It felt like a love letter between two brothers. He had really given me a gift while I was going through this terrifying thing.”
One of Miller’s final solo shows before the surgery took place in October 2024 at Le Poisson Rouge, one of New York’s prominent live-music lounges, less than a mile from his teaching gig. His vocal struggles were on full display then. When Miller returned to the same venue in May, he may as well have returned as a new artist. That 90 percent likelihood won out.
“As it went, it was just such a revelation,” Miller says. “Just, oh my God, this thing fucking worked. I can hit all the notes again. It really felt like I was the bionic man, stronger and better than ever.”
The record itself is less of a journey through Miller’s angst over surgery and more of a snapshot of the life he had carved out for himself. With two children college-aged or older, Miller and his wife, Erica, spend considerable free time in the Hudson Valley. He cites the area’s picturesque Mohonk Mountain House as one of his present-day creative outlets.
This is why Miller holds the collaborations with Felker close to his heart.
When Felker searched his soul during the Troubadours’ 2019-22 hiatus and navigated his own sobriety, Miller was a sounding board and one of the first artists to coax Felker back in front of a microphone for his 2021 “Breathe Easy” streaming benefit for cystic fibrosis. Now, with Turnpike firmly entrenched as one of the biggest and most important bands in independent country music, Miller and the Old 97’s have enjoyed several prime slots as openers for the Troubadours.
Two of their tunes on the record — “A Little Song” and “Come As You Are” — predate the pandemic. The former made it onto Turnpike’s 2015 self-titled album, and the latter was recorded by the band for a 2019 compilation record called The Next Waltz. (Felker’s vocals feature on the A Lifetime of Riding by Night version as well). The third, “Time Again,” is one that both men started nearly a decade ago but finished after Felker’s own rehab journey.
“It was sort of buttoning up a time in our lives when he was going through a lot, and I was also going through it,” Miller says. “It was sweet, and I think Turnpike fans and Evan fans might appreciate this sort of lost gem.”
Miller will spend the bulk of this year touring in support of the record. He’ll be back at Le Poisson Rouge in New York in late October, and hit such venues as Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles and a year-end three-night residency at SPACE in Evanston, Illinois. Hammond will join him for several dates. Miller will also once again host Breathe Easy — this time as a concert on Nov. 9 at Dallas’s Granada Theater, joined by the O’s, Ben Kweller and Cody Canada. “When you live a rock & roll life, you don’t get an opportunity to do things that feel rewarding, in the way that this does,” Miller says of the benefit.
He is also fully embracing his decision to sober up in 2015. Miller runs a Substack now, and he commemorated a decade without booze in July with a poignant post reflecting on his final hangover. Miller doesn’t force his sobriety on the audiences who recall his years of hard partying, but he opts to let the clarity that being sober brought him dictate his public-facing persona.
In that respect, Rhett Miller has never been more at peace.
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“When I was in the throes of drinking too much — and smoking too much weed, but the booze was the defining substance — it was two extremes working on me, both of them in a negative way,” Miller says. “One was my drunk self-believing that I was God’s gift and that everything I did was perfect. The other was the hungover, next-morning voice telling me that I was the worst human being who ever walked the face of the earth. When you’re living in those extremes, they’re both so bad for you, and they’re both so wrong. Since I’ve been living a sober life, it’s really a beautiful thing that I get to live somewhere in the middle.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.