On a recent trip to New York, Rhett Miller took a break from touring with The Old 97’s to drop by Chelsea Studios and join us for an all-new season of A.V. Undercover. The erstwhile Messenger and his band previously appeared on season eight to cover T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy,” but this time Miller was on his own, and he chose to reinterpret Nick Lowe’s “Cruel To Be Kind.”
When he first caught the video for the song, which initially appeared as one of Lowe’s B-sides in 1978, Miller admits to having an ambivalent reaction. At the time, the video was “a very strange outlier” on MTV, sandwiched between offerings from some of the biggest pop and rock acts of the ’80s. “This isn’t glossy and shiny,” Miller thought; there was something “weirdly terrifying” about it. But the song, which was later rerecorded for Labour Of Lust, eventually revealed itself to be “the dark underbelly of the music” Miller already liked. “These are my people,” Miller soon realized.
The Old 97’s are getting ready for a three-day stint at Evanston’s SPACE at the end of this month, and you can find more shows here. We’ll be back with a new Undercover video on January 8, 2026.
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