Rhett Miller was at home in New York with two kids bouncing around on a snow day when we talked, the rare moment he wasn’t on the road. “My favorite is always when I get home and I’m actually here for a snow day,” he said, sounding half-dad, half-wandering troubadour grateful for a pause.
But then we got to Graveyard Whistling, the Old 97’s album that, depending on how you spin it, is either a collection of religious parables or one long hangover. Miller laughed at the suggestion. “The religious thing is one angle. When I looked at this pile of songs, I realized it wasn’t so much a continuation of Most Messed Up—that was the wheels-off, out-on-the-town record. This was the morning after. The atonement record. The one where you wake up and start getting texts about what you said and did.”
Atonement crops up everywhere: Good with God, Jesus Loves You, All Who Wander. Miller doesn’t shy away from invoking judgment, but he insists it’s not literal fire-and-brimstone. “God and the concept of judgment are tools. They’re what the narrator uses to punish himself, to hold himself accountable.”
That narrator—the one Miller’s been writing about since the mid-’90s—is finally facing consequences. “Sometimes he gets away with it, sometimes he doesn’t,” Miller said. “On Graveyard Whistling, he’s being held accountable for a lot of the stuff he’s done.”
Even the title feels like a tell. “Graveyard whistling comes from a song on the record—‘Irish Whiskey, Pretty Girls.’ The narrator’s trying to pretend everything’s cool, whistling past the graveyard. We agonize over titles, man. You write 1,200 words for a record, and it’s easy. Coming up with three that sum it all up? Way harder.”
The album’s first single, “Good with God,” turned into one of their best. It started in a Salt Lake City hotel room with Miller feeling anxious and homesick. “I had this idea for a character bragging he could get away with anything. Pre-Trump. Just a guy. By the chorus, he lets it slip that God is a woman, and suddenly it opened up this whole world. What does that mean? Is she more forgiving? More judgmental?”
That twist gave Miller pause. “I didn’t feel comfortable writing God’s part myself. There’s enough male writers putting words in women’s mouths. I wanted a real female voice to play God.”
Enter Brandi Carlile. Miller remembered seeing her at a Johnny Cash tribute in Austin. “She did Folsom Prison and just owned it. I was standing next to Kris Kristofferson, and halfway through we looked at each other like, what is even happening? Brandi Carlile is God. That was it.”
Carlile wrote her own parts, making sure God didn’t come off like a pushover. “She wanted the narrator to feel terror,” Miller said. “I don’t know that I would have gone there. Her voice is so big and cool—it exceeded everything I’d hoped.”
The song, released just as the Women’s March was flooding streets across the country, landed at the right moment. “Sometimes timing screws you—like when we put out ‘Murder (or a Heart Attack)’ a week before Columbine,” Miller said. “But this time, the timing worked. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it became this funny little moment of empowerment. Women need everything they can get right now.”
Miller admits he used to think progress was linear. “I always told my wife, yeah, it’s been bad, but every year it’s getting better. This last year was the first time I felt like it wasn’t. But I still believe it is. Women have agency. They will themselves forward—with the help of men like you, I hope, who believe in them too.”
Which is the paradox of Rhett Miller—eternal optimist writing about eternal screw-ups. Hangover songs that double as hymns. A narrator punished but never silenced. Or, as Miller put it: “It’s the next morning. You’ve got to atone. But you can still whistle past the graveyard.”
Hear the interview above and hear their single "Good With God" below.
