Consumer Guide Album

Rhett Miller: A Lifetime of Riding by Night [ATO, 2025]
The title brushes up against a big problem with love songs, especially the married kind: taking them on the road, a paradox adduced by the Old 97s headman's killer line: "Tonight I will be lonely in the arms of someone else." But this is nonetheless a remarkably warm and rich love album, complex and contradictory yet calm and thoughtful enough to convince the so inclined that however endangered the love match it analyzes and celebrates may be, it will endure. Credo: "Well now what a fool to figure that forever you'd be mine/Well I wrote a little rhyme to make it right." Quite a trick—quite a triumph, in fact. A