Old 97's set new CD for October

The band's eighth studio record comes out Oct. 12 on New West Records. The band recorded more than two dozen new songs during studio sessions and will be releasing a second volume in 2011. "The Grand Theatre Volume One" was predominantly written during Rhett Miller's 2009 solo tour abroad. The lyrics are filled with character studies while the sound - expertly rounded out by band members Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea and Philip Peeples - is garage-rock-meets-60s-British Invasion without abandoning the classic 97's sound.

Miller said the CD "centers around a suite of songs I wrote during a month-long tour of England, Ireland and Scandinavia. Opening for the great Steve Earle meant watching a master Texas songwriter at work, and I soaked up these strange surroundings and turned them into songs. I was writing at a furious clip in the midst of the most intense kinds of planes, trains and automobiles. I can see an epistolary strain running through the songs. All my years of Anglophilia make these feel like a collection of love letters, or a collection of letters home. I wrote the title track in the dressing room of Leeds' Grand Theatre."

The Old 97's last album was "Blame It On Gravity" from 2008.