When listening to songs like “I’ve Just Seen A Face” or “Rocky Raccoon,” I get the sense that Paul McCartney fantasized about being a real country singer. With the hopelessly romantic, harmoniously addictive music of Old 97’s coming to town, Buffalo gets to hear something close to McCartney’s dream come true.
“People are laughing and they’re having such fun,” sings lead singer/songwriter Rhett Miller on Drag It Up, Old 97’s sixth album. The sentiment seems atypical for a songwriter usually drawn to topics of loneliness and unrequited love, until you hear the following line: “I wish it was happening to me.” These lyrics appear in the song “Moonlight,” a sliver of bittersweet country sunshine that depicts a man shuffling aimlessly through the night, pining for his lost love. It’s a classic country theme, with just enough saccharine to please McCartney’s inner cowboy.
Old 97’s has been writing anthems for the quiet and forgotten since 1993, but when the Dallas quartet hits the stage this Tuesday at the Tralf, the group’s unbelievable melodies are sure to wash over the crowd, making tales of rocky relationships smoother than sandstone. It’s a profound ability that separates the band from fellow country rockers like Wilco and the now-defunct bands Son Volt and Whiskeytown. When those groups are upset, the music leaves no doubt, but when Old 97’s sings about the pitfalls of love, they do it without anger, humor or irony, and their saddest tales are often the most exuberantly catchy.
“Moonlight” is one of Drag It Up’s 13 explorations of nostalgia and loss, and a microcosm of how Old 97’s can permanently set up shop in your musical headspace. A slow, beautiful, Hank Williams shuffle, the track is centered on Miller’s forlorn character, accented with the graceful ooohs and aaahs of bassist Murray Hammond, whose delicate background vocal has always been the band’s secret weapon. While McCartney has no peer when it comes to sweet love songs, Old 97’s reflects his childlike joy for the subject and fuses it with a mixture of country rock and power pop, churning out one rambunctious sing-a-long after another.
Miller’s narrators are the kind of guys that women pray actually exist – sensitive, scorned, faithful to a memory and desperately in love until the sun winks out for good. Drag It Up adds a few more of these chivalrous gems to the band’s repertoire, including “Valium Waltz,” a track written in 1995 that is finally seeing the light. It’s a slow, psychedelic ride, with Miller’s reserved vocal cutting through guitarist Ken Bethea’s sleepy atmospherics: “You’re scoring her shipwrecks with fiddles and dobros/Laugh at the plainclothes police the crowd/Carry her under like water or ether/Spirit her off when the music’s too loud.”
“Valium Waltz” is a great example of what Old 97’s does best; it’s an ode to nervous, good-hearted men that watch an endless procession of misogynists and meatheads treat their secret loves like dirt. It’s the epicenter of a record that has more gravity than anything the band has ever done. Bethea calls Drag It Up “better served by thinking and driving on Sunday afternoons in the middle of nowhere.” It is the most serious Old 97’s record, noticeably absent of the old-fashioned, starry-eyed love songs that made previous albums like Fight Songs and Satellite Rides so wonderful. Nevertheless, the melodies are just as indelible, deepening the band’s dichotomy even further.
Even after hearing the heavy-handed intonations of its newest work, the spirit of Old 97’s is still infused with sweet, innocent romanticism – music that sounds like a love letter and reads like a lonely diary. These songs are about timid people in darkened corners, and they have the kind of harmonies that inspire their subjects to cheer up and chime in. Old 97’s has spent 11 years making music that sticks in your head like grits to a pan. You don’t want to miss a second.
Appeared in the September 9, 2004, issue of Artvoice.