Once in California, Miller hooked up with Brion to make his solo record.
“It was very anarchic,” he says of the sessions with Brion. “The 97’s records have always been the typical record-making schedule. You cut the basic tracks, bass and drums, and you build with guitars and vocals on top until you have completed songs. You check things off as you finish them. With Old 97’s, it is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and then go into the studio and lay them down.
“Jon, with him it is so much more about inspiration. We didn’t do any demos. I wrote like a crazy person, but it was all in my notebook. I would come in and he would say, ‘What song should we do today?’ I would play a couple, and he would say ‘Oooh, I like that one.’ And we would just make it up as we went.”
Ultimately, the biggest challenge for Miller was abandoning himself to Brion’s method of record-making.
“I don’t put a lot of stock in astrology, but I am a Virgo,” he says. “Apparently we are perfectionists and controlling. I guess that does ring true, in my case. I have a hard time letting things be natural or organic or chaotic. It was very hard to just let go. But I think it was very good for me. I trusted Jon and I knew it was going to get down and it was going to be great, and I didn’t have to micromanage on what’s done and what is left to do. By the end of it, I was writing songs in the studio. We would cut them hours or minutes after I had written them.”
Many of Brion’s other production jobs have leaned heavily on keyboards, but for Miller’s record, the sound sticks to familiar guitar-based arrangements. “Jon promised me, he said, ‘I know where your heart is musically, and I am going to give you a record you can be proud of.’ I went in knowing it could be a record with strings and horns and weird keyboards. And some of the songs that didn’t make the record started like that. But it wound up feeling like a rock record. We wanted to keep it simple. It didn’t make sense to have a string section or horn section or a whole lot of B3s going on.”
The simple, classic style of the record was even reflected in its final assembly. Although they recorded twenty songs, the final version of The Instigator features twelve tracks and clocks in at around a modest, vinyl-era running time of 40 minutes. “We were talking about the records we loved, which we consider the great albums,” he recalls, “and the records we came up with were ten songs, twelve at most. We have been shooting high, shooting for — I am not going to say important, because that is a bunch of bullshit — but something that was perfect in its way.”
During a break from making The Instigator, Miller was sharing a drink with Robyn Hitchcock when the eccentric songwriter uttered this observation: “Some day there is going to be a graveyard full of us banging out songs on our six strings.” Hitchcock’s remark resonated with Miller, who concedes he has been touched by mixed feelings about his future as a musician, whether as a solo artist or with Old 97’s.
“There are a million guys who sit around writing songs, and it has been done and we do it over and over again,” he says. “I feel there is only so long you can be one of those guys Robyn Hitchcock described — the graveyard full of six-string, songwriting corpses. I just don’t want to do that my whole life. I don’t want to desperately try to appear young as I grow old, and try to appear current as I grow old.”
With that in mind, Miller has begun exploring other kinds of writing. He was recently approached by the hip publishing outfit McSweeney’s and asked to submit stories for a collection of fiction that will have an odd distinction; all the works must be composed in 20 minutes. “It’s like an experiment in automatic writing,” Miller explains. And it is clear that, as daunting as writing prose or fiction may be, his literary ambitions won’t end with the offer from McSweeney’s.
“I have always sort of envied the people who I do interviews with. You traffic in words. You lead the life of the mind. You sit at home at night. You don’t have to go from shitty nightclub to shitty nightclub giving people an excuse to get wasted,” he says, before acknowledging that one of the few shared experiences between musicians and music critics is exactly that: They both spend their nights going from shitty nightclub to shitty nightclub.
So if the grind of the touring musician is losing its allure just as other creative endeavors are gaining luster, what will that mean for the Old 97’s? That very issue was chewed over in what Miller calls “a year-long summit meeting” with his bandmates — bassist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea and drummer Philip Peeples.
“It is sort of up in the air. It is all weird, all very weird. Everything depends upon this record, how long I have to work it,” he says. At least part of the weirdness can be attributed to this simple fact: Even as Elektra is energized about Miller’s solo album, the Old 97’s have parted company with the label. False rumors of the band’s imminent demise likely haven’t been helped by Elektra’s website for Miller, which talks about the Old 97’s in the past tense (“For nearly ten years, Rhett Miller was the charismatic frontman and main songwriter for acclaimed Dallas quartet Old 97’s “). And that might help explain why Hammond says he’s happy to be out of the Elektra fold.
“We’ve done the major-label thing, and I think they’ve figured out that a ‘radio hit’ of us is pretty much going to be a crapshoot, but that we will always do well on that next notch down, the mid-level labels and whatnot,” Hammond says in an interview conducted via email. “It’s in the smaller labels that you have the real meaty fun anyway, because that’s where you get to record in the home studios, your relationship with your label is more like family, and you stay a tiny bit ‘hungry,’ which does nothing but good things for a songwriter. I think the 97’s could use a good dose of the hungries.”
