Rhett Miller cut his teeth with the alt-country Old 97’s, but years before the band released Too Far To Care, the catchiest and most compelling distillation of its cow-punk-meets-Brit-Invasion template, Miller put out his own little-heard first solo album, Mythologies. Now 2,800 miles from Dallas, where he got his start, Miller is a family man and has released his fifth studio album, The Dreamer. On all counts, the LP marks a return to basics for Miller after three studio albums that toned down the twang, ratcheted up the pop smarts and layered on the studio frills. Miller will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent feature on him.
Miller: Some bands fritter away their hours of tour bus/dressing room downtime by self-destructing incrementally. A certain amount of zombie-fication is not only inevitable, but also somewhat helpful to one’s survival in the mind-numbing daily life of a rock and roller. The Old 97’s have a trick; we play board games. Cool, right? Not nerdy at all, right? We play mostly “European style” games like Settlers Of Catan, etc. One of the very best of these is a game called Puerto Rico. You compete to grow crops, sell or ship your crops and build grand structures. I know that might sound like a dorky yawn-fest to some of y’all, but you’ll have to take my word that this game is a blast. It’s almost all strategy, which means that your brain gets bigger while you play it. Like I said, cool, right? The problem is that Puerto Rico requires at least three players willing to commit an hour of their life to play. Thankfully, technology has solved this vexing problem. Now Puerto Rico is an iPad app. It takes 15 minutes to play and, best of all, requires no ornery-bandmate-wrangling. Remember what Sartre said? “Hell is other people.”
Video after the jump.
