It’s almost noon on this particular day in mid-May, but Rhett Miller nevertheless is still animated when he talks about his previous night’s gig: an on-ice performance in between periods of an NHL playoff game for his beloved Dallas Stars. Although it’s something that Old 97’s has done in the past (the frontman has also sung the national anthem for the team on occasion), his enthusiasm beamed when on the line with Chicago Innerview.

Even 15 years into the band, Miller still is the excitable youngster in his Dallas ensemble. At 37, the 6-year age gap between the singer and his bassist/longtime collaborator Murry Hammond isn’t as drastic as it was in the early days. But that doesn’t stop Miller from feeling like the same upstart he was when Hammond produced the then-18-year-old’s solo debut in 1989. And it’s why he’s just as giddy about last night’s performance as he was the first time that he joined his favorite professional team.

“Kurt Vonnegut had an idea in Breakfast of Champions about aging,” Miller said while discussing his band’s seventh album, Blame It on Gravity. “It’s the idea that you’re always the same person. A baby, an old man — that same person exists forever, and who you are at this moment is the same person you were at an earlier moment.”

It’s an idea that fellow Texan Richard Linklater explored in both Waking Life and Slacker. And though those films’ characters examine humankind’s evolving curiosity, the sentiment echoes clearly: our dispositions are ingrained early. Our true demeanor might be masked in youth, and other times it gets hidden with age. But at some point, it’s on the surface. And one key to happiness is deciding which is real and which is the façade — that is, if you buy into the same train of thought as the director and novelist. “I remember that Linklater thing, when he’s in the back of a cab,” Miller said, recalling the opening scene in Slacker. “It reminded me of the Vonnegut passage when I was watching it.”

It’s fitting that Miller defaults to Breakfast of Champions pages, though, instead of the likeminded films. It gives credence to the belief that the legendary writer was on to something. Maybe Miller never has put his own fiction days behind him. Maybe in middle age, he’s still the same guy who earned a creative writing scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College. Maybe that’s why he’s in the midst of reading three books, has been planning to pen his own mystery novel for years, and is as quick to recall seminal literature from his teen days as he is the records that helped shape his childhood.

But if the theory is, in fact, correct, then today’s now pop-laden Old 97’s are just the same band that sauntered to notoriety with twangy alt-country tunes about booze, sex and drunken sex. And to buy into Vonnegut’s idea, then Miller would have to acknowledge that he’s no different in 2008 — married with a pair of young children, two recent solo albums under his belt, and finally embracing his good looks — than he was a decade ago when he was a brash youngster tucked behind big wire-framed glasses. To accept that people develop their psyches early is to turn one’s back on maturation, or at the very least, to say a band can’t shed earlier genres.

“When you’re 37 and you play a song that you wrote when you were 27, it can take on new meanings — even though I know what I wrote it about back then,” Miller said. “Back then, you actually have this crazy optimism that is even beyond the invincibility of youth. It’s almost the omnipotence of youth. And it’s great to re-live it — to recall mentally, physically, spiritually, or whatever, to the time when you wrote those songs. It’s great to remember how you felt when you were that age.”

But the vocalist stops short of saying that it would be great to still feel that way. “It’s hard to stay angry for that long of a time. It’s exhausting,” he reflected. “When you get older, you can’t really be bothered to be pissed off all the time.”

Maybe people do change after all — even if they don’t realize it.

Chicago Innerview Magazine, June 2008