Drive-by Truckers are more than ready to rock and roll
Patterson Hood and the Drive-by Truckers are embarking on a new multimonth tour.
It’s got to be better than the last one. “I’m in Indianapolis, the scene of the crime,” Hood, 57, said, speaking by phone recently.
“This is where we sound-checked on the 12th of March, 2020. We were two songs into sound-check, and we were all set up, and they pulled the plug, and we all went home for what turned out to be 17 or 18 months.”
With the new tour kicking into high gear, the Drive-by Truckers are eager to play in Columbus on Oct. 14 at the Newport Music Hall.
“We essentially have two brand-new records that we didn’t tour behind,” Hood said.
The band’s newest releases
“The Unraveling” was released in January, 2020, and was set to be the basis of an 18-month tour. “The New OK” was released in October, 2020, including some older songs, some songs from a recording session that didn’t fit into “The Unraveling” as well as a couple of songs Hood wrote in the summer of 2020.
“I wrote the two songs last summer that dealt specifically with the federal occupation of my adopted hometown (Portland), and all the misinformation that was being told about the town where I live,” Hood said.
(Hood, who grew up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, now lives in Portland, Oregon.)
Those two songs, the title song of the album and “Watching the Orange Clouds,” made up most of his musical output until after the election.
“When I realized we couldn’t tour, I was like, well, I’m going to write another record, I’m going to work on that book I’m always talking about writing, but I didn’t do (anything). I cooked. I cooked so much. Then in December, after the election had been called, and the vaccine was on its way, and I felt hope for the first time in almost a year, then the floodgates opened, and I wrote most of my part of the next record.”
The songwriting process
Hood and the other core member of Drive-by Truckers, Mike Cooley, both write songs for all their records, but they don’t write them together.
“We both write totally separately,” Hood said. “I would probably be open to try to collaborate on a more direct level, but he has no interest whatever in doing
that. He’s like, songwriting, that’s one of the things I get to do alone, without having to talk to anyone. The miraculous thing is that every single time without exception, he comes in with songs that link perfectly with my songs.”
Their songwriting processes also differ wildly.
“His songs are carved in stone. He edits before he writes. If I did that I would never write another song. To get to the good ones, I have to write as many bad ones as have to be written, and then take them out back and shoot them. He takes his out back and shoots them before they’re written,” Hood said.
The Drive-by Truckers have been a band since 1996, but Hood and Cooley have been working together longer than that, for 37 years now.
“We had three bands before Drive-by Truckers that were, at least as popularity goes, dismal failures. I don’t think of them as failures. Particularly Adam’s
House Cat, I’m really proud of what that band did. But we had zero popularity. Adam’s House Cat never sold out a show, not even a little bitty room,” Hood said.
The audience for the show at the Newport shouldn’t expect a typical album tour.
“Calling this the “Unraveling’ tour would be like pretending 2020 didn’t happen. That would be lovely, if 2020 didn’t happen, and a good bit of 2021 could go to hell, too,” he said.
“At this point, we’re just looking at it like, hey, we’re all together, we’re on stage, we’ve survived, let’s just rock and roll and have a good time and play whatever we feel like playing. We don’t ever use a setlist. The audiences have been needing what we give, and we’ve been needing what they give. It’s been about as beautiful as 2021 can be.”
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