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: Have you ever heard of this TV show called 30 Rock? It’s on the National Broadcasting Corporation network and stuff? Listen … I know that you know all about this, but 30 Rock is an institution worthy of the type of acclaim and admiration that transcends the cynicism most of us feel toward anything that succeeds on a large scale. The writers have found a way to take a format that’s been beaten to death, the 30-minute network comedy, and turn it into something much more akin to an Ionesco play than some How I Met Your Mother bullshit. (Confession: I’ve never watched How I Met Your Mother; I’m just assuming.) In the fourth episode of 30 Rock‘s second season, entitled “Rosemary’s Baby,” Alec Baldwin’s character Jack Donaghy role-plays various members of Tracy Morgan’s character’s family to hilarious results. For that episode, Baldwin won an Emmy award. Jack Burditt, who wrote the episode, should win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTj47rcuM-4
