Old 97’s kick off their summer tour this evening in Seattle, WA. The band, who are putting the finishing touches on a brand new studio album due out this fall, will be hitting many major cities including Los Angeles on July 3rd for Hootenanny, NYC July 4th at the South Street Seaport, Taste of Dallas on July 10th and Chicago on July 16th. See Rhett’s Tour Page for full tour info!
Old 97’s Summer Tour Starts Today!
June 30th, 2010Free Rhett Miller Performance in NYC w/ RSVP!
June 2nd, 2010STATE OF THE UNION
Ryan Cronin + Alexandra Baer w/ Music by Rhett Miller!
The Bowery Hotel
335 Bowery at 3rd St.
New York, NY
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
June 24, 2010 6:00 to 11:00PM
RSVP to millerandcronin@gmail.com
Represented by Miller&Cronin
(845) 332-6905
Images available upon request
Sponsored by Tuthilltown Spirits and Izze Sparkling Juice
ONE NIGHT ONLY! On June 24, from 6:00 to 11:00PM, artists Alexandra Baer and Ryan E. Cronin will be exhibiting their paintings at the Bowery Hotel, located at 335 Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a show titled STATE OF THE UNION. Musical guest Rhett Miller will DJ throughout the evening and perform live acoustic sets at 7:00 and 9:00PM. Tuthilltown Spirits’, Hudson Whiskey will be the beverage of choice, with a featured cocktail and free pour from 6:00-7:00PM.
From the simple to the sublime, Ryan E. Cronin and Alexandra Baer’s work conspires to deliver an event of exquisite contrasts. This is a high energy evening of art and entertainment not to be missed!!
Ryan E. Cronin takes his inspiration from everyday objects, rendering the familiar in a grand scale and context that offers viewers candid new perspectives. Primary colors collide with primal iconography in his slyly cropped, naive-pop visions. Cronin likens his process to that of painting flash photos. His 4 foot square canvases are mental snapshots- bright split seconds of life captured by his brush and enigmatic sense of humor. His paintings and installations are exhibited and collected widely throughout the country.
Baer uses collage, ink, metal, gold leaf and encaustic to achieve complex and captivating surfaces. Her work is in one sense politically motivated and, whether revealing images of soldiers or a woman behind a burqa, it exposes a side of current events that puts the viewer front and center with no room to move or avoid the subject matter. The subjects are represented how they themselves are caught and exposed. The same holds true for her work with the human figure. Baer is drawn to people’s faces and to the narrative that accompanies the figure. Each composition tells a story of life, the big picture. Though Baer’s subject matter is rooted in contemporary life, her approach is deeply anchored inclassical technique and composition which allows one to view her pieces as superficially or as deeply as one desires and still come away with a sense of beauty, history and the feeling that something important is going on. Baer has exhibited her work widely in Atlanta, DC and New York.
The title, State of the Union, references the stylistic differences between these two painters, challenging the viewer to discover the deep commonalities in their work. Cronin’s bold paintings and Baer’s intricately rendered work find compliment in one another in their depiction of specific, recognizable moments in contemporary life.
Hootenanny 2010
April 23rd, 2010Rhett and the Old 97’s will be heading to Oak Canyon Ranch in Silverado, CO for the 2010 Hootenanny Festival. Check out the cool poster below and visit the Tour Page for more info!
BBC Review
November 17th, 2009When Miller sticks to what he’s good at, he is a marvel.
Andrew Mueller – http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/6wd3
One of the many reasons that The Old 97s are such a great band is that they’ve always sounded slightly like frontman and primary songwriter Rhett Miller joined the wrong group by accident. The Old 97s are, as a collective, fundamentally fairly orthodox cowpunkers, bent on filling classic country templates with angry guitars and juddering drums. Miller, on his own account, is clearly largely animated by a love for songwriterly pop. His three prior solo albums – erratic, unfocused affairs – have been infused by such distinctively un-country influences as Ray Davies, Pete Shelley and Paul Weller.
The audaciously titled Rhett Miller is the Rhett Miller album that sounds most like an Old 97s album – which makes it, by some margin, Rhett Miller’s best Rhett Miller album yet. He seems to have found a way to resist whatever pressures he felt to starkly delineate his own records from those of his band. It is telling that the only dud moment on the album – the wretchedly overwrought, Bauhaus-ish science fiction hallucination Happy Birthday Don’t Die – is also the only one in which Miller sounds like he’s trying too hard to be someone other than himself.
When Miller sticks to what he’s good at – setting witty, oblique tales of everyday bewilderment to deceptively subtle not-quite-country tunes – he is, as ever, a marvel. Caroline, If It’s Not Love and I Need to Know Where I Stand are adroit negotiations between Miller’s competing loves for country and pop, riddled with characteristically waspish couplets (the latter, in particular, can only prompt amazement that it has taken this long for someone to rhyme “analysis” with “paralysis”). The wilfully underplayed closing tracks, Lashes and Sometimes, are all the more affecting for Miller’s deliberate short-circuiting of his innate cleverness and playing it straight-faced.
Nothing, however, will gladden the bruised heart of anyone familiar with Miller’s songwriting like the triumphant opening line of tears-in-the-beer lament Another Girlfriend: “The trouble with girls like you…” It would have been a better title for a fine album.
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BBC.co.uk Album Reviews
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Rhett Miller's brand new, self-titled album is now available for purchase