Rhet Miller returns to Delmarva for solo album concert
Few artists are as committed to repetition as Rhett Miller, who will return to Delmarva for one of his semiannual appearances, this time at the Dogfish Head brewpub in downtown Rehoboth Beach on Friday, Aug. 5.
The alt-country singer and songwriter returns again and again to one subject in his song, turning it over and over again with obsession matched perhaps by Paul Auster or Joey Ramone. Most all of his songs, and there are a lot of them — spanning 10 studio records as a member of The Old 97’s and six solo full-lengths — look at love.
It’s been a bleak, if melodic, run. His love’s all wrong. He’s a train wreck. There are landmines in his bloodlines, whiskey in his system. If a car shows up in an Old 97’s song, someone’s going to drive it drunk. If a heart, attack. He’s said before: He believes in love but it doesn’t believe in him.
By 19, he had seen a lot of love gone sour. And judging by the dozen songs on 2015’s “The Traveler,” a brilliant record that includes collaborations with much of the Decemberists and two-thirds of R.E.M., Miller hasn’t learned a whole lot. Now, north of 40, he’s pitching infidelity with a woman who may be as unfaithful as he (“Wicked Things”), thinking about hooking up wasted (“My Little Disaster”), and embracing the ambivalence. Even when he seems to find someone perfect — independent, articulate, world-weary — he hedges: “Part of me will always be so in love with you.”
“I realize that over the years I’ve written a lot of songs that sounded like I didn’t believe that love could exist,” he told a crowd in an introduction to “Question,” one of his most popular songs. “Or that it was doomed. Or that there was no such thing. Or that you were an idiot if you believed in it. And … I still kind of think like that. But there’s a part of me that’s moving back the other way.
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Miller gets away with this hemming and hawing because he is so attuned to the minutiae of love. As he has put it, “you tell me you like the songs that tell the story of real love the kind that’s flawed,” and his fans — of which I count myself one — agree. And he happens to be clever, both with a turn of phrase (“Walker says you’re a cancer / I just think you’re the flu”) and with influences—alluding to Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, and winking at Elliott Smith, the Velvet Underground, the Kinks.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Miller told me a few years back. “I love working in The Old 97’s. But with the band, it is very much a democracy. I get told ‘no’ a lot, I get vetoed all the time, and the guys are strong-willed and opinionated, and that’s good — it’s what makes a band a band.
“But a solo record is great as well, because though I don’t boss people around, I get to put people together and shepherd a bit, and I get to put forth an individual vision that is different from the collective work of a band.”
While Miller’s solo albums are always named after personas — the instigator, the believer, the dreamer, the traveler — at heart he’s a storyteller. And a great one at that.
IF YOU GO
WHEN: Friday, Aug. 5, following a 10 p.m. opening set by Cliff Hillis
WHERE: Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats, 320 Rehoboth Ave., Rehoboth Beach
COST: Free
CALL: 302-226-BREW
WEB: www.dogfish.com