DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Unable to tour early 2020’s The Unraveling album, instead they wrote some new songs and dug into the ‘unused’ drawer and made another cracker.
Drive-By Truckers have been especially vocal this past year. The American rockers released two essential albums – The Unraveling and The New OK – at either end of 2020, both of which examined the effects of ordinary lives against a socio-political backdrop of turmoil and rage. Now a resident of Portland, having relocated from his native South four years ago, band leader Patterson Hood also found himself at the centre of events during the summer.
How has 2020 been for you? It’s been shitty as fuck, the worst year. And I say that from a position of being pretty lucky. None of my family has gotten sick, we’re all healthy. Financially the pandemic happened at a pretty vulnerable time for the band and for us as a family, but so far we’re eking it out. I have to thank our management for finding creative ways to bring money in, and our fan base for really supporting us.
Drive-By Truckers bookended 2020 with two albums, The Unraveling and The New OK. In their own way, each of them took the temperature of the times. Even with this tiny bit of distance, I look back on our last three albums [starting with 2016’s American Band] as an unintended trilogy. Politics and history have been two things we’ve dealt with over and over as a band, from our first album onwards. The big difference with American Band is we set that record so firmly in the present, politically. You never know how any music is going to age, but I think we’ve documented this moment in time more than most bands have.
Is it true that The New OK wasn’t planned? Yes. It wasn’t my idea initially, so my first reaction was: “Oh great, now we can have two brand-new records that we can’t tour behind!” But I’d just written The New OK [song] and Watching The Orange Clouds, then I started digging through what we had. The Distance was written a good while ago, but it didn’t really fit anywhere. And it became a big part of this record. We also had [the Ramones’] The KKK Took My Baby Away, which we’ve been playing live for years. So we ended up with an album. Which is an endearing way to go about it.
Did Watching The Orange Clouds come from seeing the Portland demonstrations first-hand? Absolutely. I wrote it the weekend after George Floyd was murdered, when all hell broke loose. The first weekend of the protests was particularly ugly, then it escalated and they sent in the goddamn feds. Our mayor got tear-gassed, for Chrissake. I also wrote The New OK after spending an evening down there in the middle of the protest. As much as Portland is known as this liberal, progressive city, we’re also surrounded by rural Oregon, which can be superconservative. And there’s a huge white supremacist movement in our state. So we’ve had a lot of people coming in from out of town. The mood among the protestors was angry, but it was uplifting and also very powerful. And it was very positive.
Conversely, against all the turmoil the Truckers seem to be in a stable place right now. This line-up has been together for the last eight years, which is longer than the lifetime of a lot of bands. The Truckers will turn twenty-five next June, and to have that kind of stability is just amazing to me. We were on such a high note when it suddenly ended this last winter. We had a huge European tour booked. I want to play, I want to get back out there! So we’re ready to go as soon as it’s safe.