event

Rhett Miller

with Elaina Kay

Tue, Oct 22

Doors: 7:00 pm

Show: 8:00 pm
All Ages
$25.00
Additional Info
RHETT MILLER - founding member of the venerable Old 97’s and acclaimed singer–songwriter, with special guest Elaina Kay - live at Elevation 27!
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22nd at 8:00 PM, 7:00 PM Doors, *6:30 PM Reserved Dining Doors
TICKETS:  $20.00 - $30.00


ENJOY DINNER DURING THE SHOW - We have daily specials and great BBQ!
LUNCH SPECIAL:  Monday-Friday from 11-2.

Bring your ticket stub back and get a FREE SANDWICH with the purchase of one sandwich and two drinks!  Offer Valid through 2019.

General Admission tickets are standing room only.

Reserved Seating Tickets at Dining Tables and Booths include admission to the show.  If your party does not occupy all the seats at a Table or Booth, you may be seated with other guests.  You must arrive at or before the time assigned to your table or booth, or your seat may be given away.  Waitress service will be available approximately 30 minutes after you are seated.  Please allow an additional 30 minutes for your food to arrive. *All Reserved Seating Tickets are subject to a requested food minimum of $9.00 per guest.

Please note:  If our parking lot is full, please park in the Walmart parking lot closest to Advance Auto.

Artists
Rhett Miller
“This has been a hell of a year,” Rhett Miller says. “I turned 48 in September and I’m still surprising myself.”
 
After more than two decades as founding member of the venerable Old 97’s and acclaimed singer–songwriter in his own right, Rhett Miller has crafted a trio of new projects that see him pushing his creative energies in hitherto untraveled directions. Among them are two utterly unique new albums – one solo, the other as part of Old 97’s – as well as his first ever book, a collection of subversive kids’ poems.
 
THE MESSENGER, Miller’s eighth solo album, is perhaps his most unflinchingly personal collection of songs to date. Recorded over five spring days at The Isokon in Woodstock, NY with producer/musician Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby, Benjamin Booker), THE MESSENGER sees Miller playing it faster and looser than perhaps any other time in his quarter century career, instilling songs like the first single, “Total Disaster,” with a groovy limberness that belies the reflective darkness within. Backed by a white hot backing combo comprised of Cohen (Electric & Acoustic Guitars, Pedal Steel Guitar, Keys), Brian Betancourt (Bass), and Ray Rizzo (Drums), Miller worked quickly and with purpose, fast-tracking four or five “keepers” each day.
 
“I wanted this record to be less safe,” he says. “I wanted to put myself in the hands of a producer who was going to do things that I didn’t expect; I wanted to perform with people I didn’t know and be surprised by what they came up with. And all of that really came to pass. 
 
“That’s what you’re getting with this record. You’re getting a locked-in rhythm section with a crazy, psychedelic guitar maestro playing along with me as I dig deep into these songs about depression and insecurity and modern life and somehow wanting to live despite all of it,” Miller chuckles. 
 
While that might sound somewhat flip, Miller is in some ways more serious than ever before. THE MESSENGER sees the veteran songsmith diving deep into his own youthful encounters with suicide and depression, placing “a long distance phone call to myself as a 14-year-old” on surprisingly buoyant new songs like “Permanent Damage” and “I Used To Write In Notebooks.”
 
“For a lot of years I tried to keep self-reference out of my work,” he says, “and I believe there’s a lot to be said for that. There’s enough about what I do that’s masturbatory without me reading from my diary. But at a certain point, when you want to dig into personal issues and maybe explore things from your own past, you have to let yourself go there.”
 
Miller hadn’t publicly addressed his adolescent suicide attempt until a 2008 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. “She asked me about my suicide attempt and I found myself telling her the story. I was surprised at how people responded. I ended up doing a little work on behalf of the National Suicide Prevention Network and that kind of blossomed to where I’ve made a point of recognizing my own history and doing whatever I can to try and bring it out of the shadows and make it something people are okay talking about. But even then, I’d never really recognized it in my own work.”
 
And while THE MESSENGER addresses this darkness head-on many times, the album also visits the brighter corners. Songs like “You Were A Stranger” and “Wheels” speak to the joy that comes with having survived. Towards the end of “Wheels,” when Miller sings “I’m broken, we’re all broken, we just keep on trying,” it’s clearly a rallying cry rather than a lament.
 
After delving inward to create THE MESSENGER, Miller rejoined his mates in the Old 97’s – Murry Hammond (Bass, Vocals), Ken Bethea (Electric Guitar), and Philip Peeples (Drums & Percussion) – to make a red-and-green gift for the world. Produced, mixed & engineered by John Pedigo in the band’s home state of Texas, LOVE THE HOLIDAYS presents a stocking stuffed with rockin’ new Yuletide favorites, capped off inevitably by the Old 97’s take on the New Year’s Eve staple, “Auld Lang Syne.” Among the album’s many highlights are the title track, co-written with Kevin Russell (The Gourds, Shinyribs), “Gotta Love Being A Kid (Merry Christmas)” and “Snow Angels,” both co-written with acclaimed prose writer Ben Greenman, and the continuing saga of everyone’s favorite reindeer, “Rudolph Is Blue,” co-written by Miller and Dan Bern.
 
“I’ve thought about making a Christmas record for years and years,” Miller says. “My goal was to make a record that could stand up alongside the classics, a record that would offer some new songs to this frustratingly finite list of holiday tunes that we all have to listen to on a loop between Halloween and New Year’s Day.  We all get sick of the old ones, so why not try and come up with some new options for people to listen to when they’re wrapping their gifts and snuggling in front of the fire?”
 
Speaking of gifts, Miller has teamed with Caldecott Medalist and bestselling artist Dan Santat for NO MORE POEMS!, a hilarious collection of irreverent poems for modern families, to be published March 5th, 2019 by Little/Brown Books For Young Readers. Written in the tradition of Shel Silverstein and Edward Gorey, Miller’s poems bring a fresh new twist to the classic dilemmas of childhood as well as a perceptive eye to the foibles of modern family life. Full of clever wordplay and bright visual gags – with toilet humor to spare – these clever verses will have the whole family cackling.
 
“I was missing my kids so bad while out on tour,” Miller says. “So I had to come up with a trick to get them to spend time on the phone with me. The trick was, ‘Hey, I wrote a poem, and I need you kids to critique it for me.’ I gave them carte blanche to criticize me, to tell me that what I did was stupid. They let me have it, which was so great. It kept them on the phone way longer than if it was just me moping about how lonely I was in Peoria, Illinois or whatever.”
 
Miller – who left Sarah Lawrence with a full scholarship for creative writing to pursue a career in music – has long worked a side game as a writer, publishing a number of essays, short stories, and criticism over the past 20 years. Though NO MORE POEMS! is his first proper book to be published, he firmly avows it will not be his last.
 
“When I dropped out I thought, I’ll do rock ‘n’ roll when I’m young and then when I’m middle aged, I can segue into writing with decades of experience under my belt,” he says. “So now, that plan is coming to fruition. If I have my druthers, I’m going to keep writing books of different stripes for years and years to come. “
 
From THE MESSENGER to LOVE THE HOLIDAYS to NO MORE POEMS!, Miller’s current crop of original output is testament to those aforementioned decades of experience, each distinct project marked by his ever-increasing skill set and multi-faceted approach to art and artistry. Having long ago committed himself to the artist’s life, he has kept his nose to the grindstone, determined each and every day to create something of quality, meaning, and purpose.
 
“I’ve always believed that making art gives meaning to life,” says Rhett Miller. “So far it’s worked out pretty well.”
 
Elaina Kay
“In the last few years, I’ve grown so much,” Elaina Kay says. She’s home in Texas, reflecting on the relentless writing, playing, and touring that has culminated in her anticipated new album. “I’m not that small town ranch girl anymore,” she says, then with a smirk, she adds, “I run with the boys.”

Elaina talks like she writes: defiant but vulnerable, hopeful but wry. Her new album wraps all those occasionally opposing forces in Elaina’s signature ranch rock-and-roll to create a modern portrait of steely femininity that’s sad, funny, and ultimately, inspiring. “I don’t want to be a victim,” she says.

Elaina comes by her self-reliance naturally. She grew up on her family’s ranch in Wichita Falls, Texas, 15 miles south of the Oklahoma border. Up at 4 a.m. every day, she helped farm and raise cows and cutting horses. “There was always something to do––lazy wasn’t an option,” she says. “Then, it was a pain in my ass, but now, I miss it. Especially when it’s sunny outside.”

In between ranch chores at dawn and dusk, Elaina discovered music. Her grandmother, Meemaw, noticed, and took her to perform at county fairs, beauty pageants, nursing homes, and everything in between. Elaina remembers vividly when she began composing her own songs. They were living in a single-wide trailer while her dad built the family a new house. “He was stubborn and building it by himself,” she says. “He said, ‘We’ll be in this trailer for six months.’ Well, we ended up being there for about three years. I hated it. But now, I see I had more fun and more great memories living in that trailer. That is where I really started writing.” Country kids are the last to be dropped off, so on long bus rides home from school, she also took pen to paper.

For college, Elaina loaded up two horses and her dog and headed to Tarleton State University, where she joined the rodeo team. “Rodeoing trained me to be on the road like I am now,” she says. “I was traveling then, too, just with horses instead of with long-haired dudes in a band.”

Elaina loved to rodeo, but she realized she loved music more. So she took her horses home and hit the road, this time with her guitar, singing songs in bars throughout the South. Nashville beckoned, and without a safety net or fully formed plan, Elaina packed up and moved to Tennessee. She rented a room in what she became to know as the “rock hostel,” a three-story house full of boys in bands. Elaina didn’t know a soul, but she jumped in, wrote more songs, and made more friends.

Produced by Paul Cauthen and engineered by Jeff Saenz, the new album was recorded at Modern Electric in Dallas. Backed by The Texas Gentlemen, Elaina’s moody soprano slides from breathy storytelling to golden-era country songbirding and back again, nuanced and captivating. She wrote or co-wrote every track, and the result is a layered collection that is both starkly personal and intensely relatable.

Asked what she hopes listeners experience when they hear the new songs, Elaina is resolute. “When I write a song about something, I’m over it––I can close that book and move on with my life,” she says. “That’s what I want for people who listen to my songs. If one of my songs could get someone to that other side, like it has for me, that’d be the coolest thing.”