One Day Rhett Miller's Gonna Take Off

Songs about big regret for the terminally hip is Rhett Miller at his worst. But at his best he’s like that person in your creative-writing class back in college who always had better plot lines than anyone else — and the writerly chops to pull them off. Miller’s finest material explores themes of the strange and the overextended: a man is trapped in his apartment by agoraphobia and falls in love with a woman in a dance class he can see through a window. Kafka, the writer, has a fling with his best friend’s wife. A guy charts a relationship that hasn’t even happened yet. Or Miller imagines the life of a child (in this case, his own) as a senior citizen: “She’s the sum of the tchotchkes she keeps.”

Other writers have better explored the human condition: consider Hank Williams Sr. or even J. Geils. But Miller is still a work-in-progress, a huge romantic in which the moon and ships figure into his ever-twisting unresolved narratives. Love is a jail, one of his characters explains, especially when you have two girlfriends and are considering a third.

Miller is best known as the front man for the Old 97’s, a Dallas-based alt-country band with its origins in the middle 1990s. They arrived with contemporaries such as the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo but never got their share of credit — or, more importantly, sales. The Old 97’s were dropped from the Elektra Records tree like over-ripened fruit. Wreck Your Life, a critics’ favorite among their nine band releases, finds Miller’s voice in perfect counter to the Old 97’s deep-throated twang, but it fails to catch fire. Miller has recorded five albums of originals and a CD of covers. His latest, The Dreamer — a collection of all-new, rootsy pop rockers — is slated for release in June. Worth a listen? Yep. One day, Miller’s gonna take off.

RHETT MILLER: Casbah, Friday, June 15, 8:30 p.m. 619-232-4355. $16 advance; $18 day of show.