Today Old 97’s share new single “Bottle Rocket Baby,” the final preview of their new album Twelfth before its release next week. Twelfth is a look back on the band’s nearly three decade history, and “Bottle Rocket Baby” reflects the years of hard living they survived, with Rhett Miller singing, “Unemployed downtown workin’ on a buzz / All my high-class friends are hidin’ out from the fuzz / I got a resumé of what never was / The good time rolls it always does.” Check it out below…
While Miller collaborated with writers like Butch Walker and Nicole Atkins on Graveyard Whistling, he penned everything on Twelfth himself (outside of the Spaghetti Western-esque “Happy Hour” and hypnotic album closer “Why Don’t We Ever Say We’re Sorry,” which were both written and sung by Hammond). It’s a return to form he credits in part to his increasing comfort with sobriety, a comfort that finds him effortlessly running the gamut from playful romance (the dreamy “I Like You Better”) and brash bravado (the blistering “Confessional Boxing”) to supernatural fantasy (the Kinks-ian “This House Got Ghosts”) and old-school twang (the rollicking “Bottle Rocket Baby”). It’s perhaps the jaunty “Absence (What We’ve Got)” that captures this particular moment in Old 97’s history best, though, as Miller marvels at the way things change while staying the same. “The wine turns into whiskey / And the whiskey turns to tears / It’s been this way for years,” he sings, later summing the whole magic act up with a deceptively simple confession: “This is what I do.”
