Old 97's : The Grand Theater Volume One

The Grand Theatre Volume One, the eighth studio album from Old 97's, returns to vinyl for the first time in over a decade — now pressed on limited-edition Whiskey Marble.

Released October 12, 2010, on New West Records, the album grew out of an unconventional writing process: the band took up a week-long residency at Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas, road-testing new songs in front of a live crowd before heading to Treefort Studios in Austin to record them while they still sounded loose and lived-in. Over two dozen songs came out of those sessions — more than could fit on one record, with the leftovers eventually released as The Grand Theatre Vol. 2 the following year.

The results struck critics as some of the band's most vital work in years. PopMatters called it "the best sounding Old 97's record in quite some time," praising it as "wild, slightly unfocused, totally committed, and furiously paced." The album's most unusual track, "Champaign, Illinois," is a full rewrite of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" with new lyrics by frontman Rhett Miller — and Dylan liked it enough not only to bless the idea, but to let the band credit him as a co-writer, something he's rarely, if ever, granted to another artist.

Elsewhere, the title track and "The Magician" rank among the most purely fun songs in the band's catalog, while "You Were Born to Be in Battle" channels a straight-ahead Johnny Cash swagger.

Out of print on vinyl for more than a decade, The Grand Theatre Volume One returns here on Whiskey Marble for the first time ever in color — a defining chapter in the Old 97's twenty-first century run.