Book of Poems

The Old 97s are a unique musical product: a country rock fusion band with a literary sensibility. Any band that lifts a song title from a Raymond Carver story ("What we Talk About," the fifth track on "Fight Songs") is OK with us.

Rhett Miller, who writes most of the 97s' songs, has that essential quality so often lacking in rock musicians: he's a great poet. His songs tell stories and he can play nifty tricks with words. Here are some lyrics to "Oppenheimer," another track from "Fight Songs":

Me and this girl we've been falling in love
Beneath a quarter moon beneath a quarter moon
Me and this girl I've been living above
On a road called Oppenheimer

Tar on the roof there were stars in her hair
Beneath a quarter moon beneath a quarter moon
Me and this girl we were going somewhere
On a road called Oppenheimer

I love that song. The tar on the roof and the stars in her hair are the perfect mix of low and high, earthly and celestial, just like the moment they are describing, and "quarter moon" sounds exactly the right amount like "paper moon." Is it just that time of night, or is the beauty in the singer's life as plentiful as loose change? "Oppenheimer" is a short story condensed down into a 4-4 rock song. Rhett Miller can write.

Naturally, the Old 97s front man has ventured into short story writing. In a recent interview on Mixed Bag Radio, on venerable XM Radio channel 45 (which only recently sold out to Starbuck's), Miller said that a few years back he started writing short stories in the hope he can one day leave the hectic rock world and become a writer. Miller had a story in Issue No. 12 of McSweeney's, and his story "Tender Till the Day I Die," originally selected for a killed MTV anthology, recently appeared on Five Chapters.

Five Chapters, by the way, is a great short story website, and it features the work of a number of Hobart friends: Ryan Boudinot ("Profession" in Issue Two and editor of Issue Four), Aimee Bender ("The Most Intuitive Book I've Ever Read" in Issue Two), Lauren Groff ("The Ballad of Sad Ophine" in Issue Six), Jennifer Egan (no Hobart stories, but I met her once at a reading at Housing Works), and Alix Ohlin (no known connection to Hobart). It's worth hunting around the Five Chapters archives; there's a lot of great stuff there.

Now I've gotten a little off track. How can we tie Rhett Miller and Hobart together? We can't, really. There is no collaborative Hobart/Old 97s concept album in the works. I know you were expecting that to be the grand conclusion of this post. Yes, there had been rumors. In the first sentence of this paragraph, in fact. Sorry about that.

So, while there is no such album in the works, and Alix Ohlin has never sent a story in to Hobart, the Old 97s do have a new album coming out soon, you can also find Miller's 20-minute story "I Got You" on the Five Chapters site, and you can watch a little video of him performing "Our Love" on the Mixed Bag Radio site.

Rock on.

-- Sean Carman

(Rhett Miller set list stolen from San Diego Dialed In)

Comments

[Isabel]

I'm anxious to read more from Rhett. His sing writing is impressive, so of course his fiction is just as impressive.

[Dan Wickett]

Well, the EWN has written about both Hobart and Alix Ohlin in the past, if you really want to stretch out a liiiiink to her. And you both put out some fine writing.

[steve]

Another good Carver song is Paul Kelly's "Everything's Turning to White," inspired by "So Much Water, So Close to Home," which is also the title of the album it's on (though a better version is on Kelly's "Live, May 1992").

[Ryan]

They also have a pretty good remake of Marty Robbins "El Paso"