Video: Old 97’s – “Where The Road Goes”
From American Primitive, out April 5 on ATO.
It used to be easy to hate the Old 97s because Rhett Miller was so beautiful, but now that he’s aged into being just extremely handsome I guess we’ll have to reconsider.
Just kidding, they’ve always been good.
And they’ve been around for thirty years now, which seems hard to believe but time is a motherfucker. The first time I heard them was on a mixtape of “insurgent country” from my man Vitas that turned me on to all kinds of great new stuff like Jack Logan and Wilco and Son Volt. Thirty years. Wow.
Miller says, “I started building this song as a statement of gratitude for having survived this long. It revisits some of the darkest moments of my life, including a suicide attempt at age 14 that by all rights I shouldn’t have lived through and yet somehow did. In a way it’s like a spiritual travelogue that rolls back through all the places that shaped me for better or worse, and ends up in this beautiful place that I felt so thankful to experience.”