I always wanted to go to Jazz Fest and those good folks down there need it more than ever his year but right now it's not in my plans.photogal wrote:Hey Jah I just downloaded the new song. Never heard of them before, I love hearing new stuff. You sound like your a music freak like me! I'm going to Jazz Fest this year and have been checking out some people I've never heard of, having a good time do it too.
The Kindler, Gentler Drive-By Truckers Thread
Moderator: SMLCHNG
Patterson Hood in Playboy
Transcribed to their blog by a fellow Truckers fan:
http://alabamaasswhuppin.blogspot.com
Patterson Hood In Playboy
Bonning, balling, bonking. The first time is a memorable experience for everyone. To prove it we tracked down a range of music personalities to ask them about their first time and what they were listening to. Whether it was with a coed, in a club bathroom or with a chick in a van parked around the corner from school, even elements of this oversexed segment of the population remember their first roll in the cabbage like it was five minutes ago.
Drive-by Truckers
Patterson Hood: The Rolling Stones' Tattoo You album came out that day, and I bought it. My girlfriend at the time had been out of town on a family vacation, so I picked her up at the bus station. We went to see An American Werewolf in London and then went somewhere and humped our brains out. So it was Tattoo You, and it played over and over on the cassette deck. Not that it took that long, but if I remember correctly, we did it more than once. We were as in love as teenagers can be, which is quite a bit. I wouldn't want to change anything about it, and I hope she would say the same.
http://alabamaasswhuppin.blogspot.com
Patterson Hood In Playboy
Bonning, balling, bonking. The first time is a memorable experience for everyone. To prove it we tracked down a range of music personalities to ask them about their first time and what they were listening to. Whether it was with a coed, in a club bathroom or with a chick in a van parked around the corner from school, even elements of this oversexed segment of the population remember their first roll in the cabbage like it was five minutes ago.
Drive-by Truckers
Patterson Hood: The Rolling Stones' Tattoo You album came out that day, and I bought it. My girlfriend at the time had been out of town on a family vacation, so I picked her up at the bus station. We went to see An American Werewolf in London and then went somewhere and humped our brains out. So it was Tattoo You, and it played over and over on the cassette deck. Not that it took that long, but if I remember correctly, we did it more than once. We were as in love as teenagers can be, which is quite a bit. I wouldn't want to change anything about it, and I hope she would say the same.
That's the first single from the new record and has been available for some time at http://www.blessingandacurse.coma1aara wrote:Mojo Nixon just played a new DBT's song on Sirius Outlaw Country. The song was called "Feb 14". I liked it. Some nice rock and roll. Looking forward to the new release.
Another cut from the new album, "Easy On Yourself" is now available as an e-card via the New West Records web site here:
http://newwestrecords.com/dbt
In other news it looks like the DBTs will be gracing the cover of the next issue of Georgia Music magazine:
http://www.georgiamusicmag.com
http://www.ireland.com/theticket/articl ... CKERS.html
KEEP ON TRUCKIN'
They might be from the deep south, but Drive-By Truckers take the greatest pleasure in subverting the image of the good ol' boy, Patterson Hood tells Kevin Courtney
SOMEWHERE deep inside of us all, there's a preconceived notion about the US south, holding out Alamo-like against all reason and evidence. There's still a tiny part of us that thinks the southern states are populated by truck-drivin', line-dancin', rodeo-ridin', Bush-votin' folks who say "y'all", don't hold with those fancy northern fads and fashions, and reckon all English bands are "faggots".
Patterson Hood doesn't mind that some people may have a slightly skewed view of his home state of Alabama. In fact, he and his musical cohorts Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell positively relish the idea, because it gives them a chance to take some of those preconceptions and totally ***** with them.
With album titles such as Southern Rock Opera, Gangstabilly, Pizza Deliverance, Alabama Ass-Whuppin'and The Dirty South, you can gather that Drive-By Truckers are taking the gothic iconography of the south and twisting it to their own melodic ends. Put on their latest album, A Blessing and A Curse, and you'll hear a recognisably southern rock sound reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Hiatt, Waylon Jennings, John Mellencamp and some of them good ol' boys of country-rock. But listen again and you realise that it's closer in spirit to such alt.country rockers as The Replacements, Pernice Brothers, Buffalo Tom and Soul Asylum, with an extra dollop of soul and an added hypersensitivity in such heartbreaking tunes as Little Bonnie and Goodbye. Dirty rock'n'roll for southern metrosexuals? Yer darn tootin'.
Even Hood's own musical pedigree confounds expectations. He grew up in Alabama not with a banjo on his knee but with sweet soul music blowing in the breeze, courtesy of his dad, a player with the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
Most bands are content with one prodigiously talented singer-songwriter in the line-up. Drive-By Truckers have three. Hood, Cooley and Isbell each contribute songs, and handle lead vocals on their own compositions. With three hard-headed southern gentlemen sharing equal billing in the band, is it hard to keep musical differences from boiling to the surface?
"It usually flows pretty easily. All of us are pretty strong willed, and it has its moments from time to time, but overall it flows pretty well," he says.
Although four out of the five Drive-By Truckers hail from 'Bammy, the band's base of operations is Athens, Georgia, home of a certain well-known band who long ago upended all preconceptions about the dirty ol' south. Hood, however, doesn't have any problem living under the shadow of those REM-boys.
"I think there was a time in Athens when there was a backlash against them," says Hood. "I'm sure the same occurred with them boys over there that y'all got. Because they have a pretty high profile too. But to be honest, the Athens scene has benefited from having a band achieve what they have achieved. And they've been good citizens of our town. They put a lot of money back into the town."
Drive-By Truckers are a relatively new name round these parts, but don't call them a new band. A Blessing and a Curse is their seventh full-length album, and it was produced by another southern alt.rock legend, Mitch Easter. Hood recalls working in a record shop when Easter's band Let's Active was active, and REM albums such as Murmur and Reckoning were rewriting the cultural history of the south. "That was all before I moved here, before I'd ever though of Athens as a cool place to go. I didn't think I'd actually end up living here. But it certainly all tied together," says Hood.
The seeds of Drive-By Truckers were sown in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Hood was writing songs and playing in various bands. He and long-time musical partner Cooley moved to Athens and borrowed musicians from the vast pool of local bands in this Georgian musical hotbed. Drummer Brad Morgan is the only non-Alabama native, hailing from South Carolina. In 2003, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell joined the convoy, and bassist Shonna Tucker came on board soon after. From the start, DBTs were determined not to play to the "sweet home Alabama" sentiment, but adopted more politically aware view from the Appalachians and hammered home a few bitter home truths about real life south of the Mason-Dixon line.
"It's definitely gone a little wrong down here from time to time, but right now the entire country has gone a little wrong. And the south is kinda the stronghold of support in a lot of ways for the kind of people who have done the most damage to this region. I think that's one of those strange American ironies. This is a region of the country that for better or for worse lives in the past. And some of the good things about this part of the country probably derive from that, but some of the bad things do too. There's a danger with living too much in the past, in that you tend to romanticise things that in reality weren't all that romantic."
Now 42, and with a 13-month-old daughter, Hood is not relishing the thought of heading off on tour and leaving her behind. He is, however, looking forward to playing for the first time in Ireland, when the band are in Whelan's on April 3rd. And he's eager to reap the rewards of a long, slow burn that's seen Drive-By Truckers go from playing half-empty hundred-seater venues to playing full-to-the-brim 2,000-seater auditoriums.
"There's been times I've complained about things moving so slow and taking so long, but the fact that it has kept growing over this long period of time has been a good thing for us. Certainly it's been healthier for us in a creative way than it would have been if on our third album we hit it huge. . . But it's been so gradual I feel we've been literally building up our fanbase one person at a time. It's like selling it door to door."
He's also looking forward to "bringing it all back home" to Ireland, a country he believes has strong historical and cultural ties with his own region. "I can't speak from knowledge, but I've been told there's a lot of parallels between Ireland and the American south. Appalachian music definitely derived a lot of its ideas from Ireland. A lot of the practitioners of Appalachian music were descendants of people who had travelled over from Ireland, my family included." And, like a true tourist, Hood can't help holding onto one particular myth about Ireland. "Aw, come on, Guinness don't give you a hangover, does it?"
Drive-By Truckers play Whelans, Dublin on April 3rd. A Blessing and A Curse is out today on New West Records
KEEP ON TRUCKIN'
They might be from the deep south, but Drive-By Truckers take the greatest pleasure in subverting the image of the good ol' boy, Patterson Hood tells Kevin Courtney
SOMEWHERE deep inside of us all, there's a preconceived notion about the US south, holding out Alamo-like against all reason and evidence. There's still a tiny part of us that thinks the southern states are populated by truck-drivin', line-dancin', rodeo-ridin', Bush-votin' folks who say "y'all", don't hold with those fancy northern fads and fashions, and reckon all English bands are "faggots".
Patterson Hood doesn't mind that some people may have a slightly skewed view of his home state of Alabama. In fact, he and his musical cohorts Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell positively relish the idea, because it gives them a chance to take some of those preconceptions and totally ***** with them.
With album titles such as Southern Rock Opera, Gangstabilly, Pizza Deliverance, Alabama Ass-Whuppin'and The Dirty South, you can gather that Drive-By Truckers are taking the gothic iconography of the south and twisting it to their own melodic ends. Put on their latest album, A Blessing and A Curse, and you'll hear a recognisably southern rock sound reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Hiatt, Waylon Jennings, John Mellencamp and some of them good ol' boys of country-rock. But listen again and you realise that it's closer in spirit to such alt.country rockers as The Replacements, Pernice Brothers, Buffalo Tom and Soul Asylum, with an extra dollop of soul and an added hypersensitivity in such heartbreaking tunes as Little Bonnie and Goodbye. Dirty rock'n'roll for southern metrosexuals? Yer darn tootin'.
Even Hood's own musical pedigree confounds expectations. He grew up in Alabama not with a banjo on his knee but with sweet soul music blowing in the breeze, courtesy of his dad, a player with the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
Most bands are content with one prodigiously talented singer-songwriter in the line-up. Drive-By Truckers have three. Hood, Cooley and Isbell each contribute songs, and handle lead vocals on their own compositions. With three hard-headed southern gentlemen sharing equal billing in the band, is it hard to keep musical differences from boiling to the surface?
"It usually flows pretty easily. All of us are pretty strong willed, and it has its moments from time to time, but overall it flows pretty well," he says.
Although four out of the five Drive-By Truckers hail from 'Bammy, the band's base of operations is Athens, Georgia, home of a certain well-known band who long ago upended all preconceptions about the dirty ol' south. Hood, however, doesn't have any problem living under the shadow of those REM-boys.
"I think there was a time in Athens when there was a backlash against them," says Hood. "I'm sure the same occurred with them boys over there that y'all got. Because they have a pretty high profile too. But to be honest, the Athens scene has benefited from having a band achieve what they have achieved. And they've been good citizens of our town. They put a lot of money back into the town."
Drive-By Truckers are a relatively new name round these parts, but don't call them a new band. A Blessing and a Curse is their seventh full-length album, and it was produced by another southern alt.rock legend, Mitch Easter. Hood recalls working in a record shop when Easter's band Let's Active was active, and REM albums such as Murmur and Reckoning were rewriting the cultural history of the south. "That was all before I moved here, before I'd ever though of Athens as a cool place to go. I didn't think I'd actually end up living here. But it certainly all tied together," says Hood.
The seeds of Drive-By Truckers were sown in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Hood was writing songs and playing in various bands. He and long-time musical partner Cooley moved to Athens and borrowed musicians from the vast pool of local bands in this Georgian musical hotbed. Drummer Brad Morgan is the only non-Alabama native, hailing from South Carolina. In 2003, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell joined the convoy, and bassist Shonna Tucker came on board soon after. From the start, DBTs were determined not to play to the "sweet home Alabama" sentiment, but adopted more politically aware view from the Appalachians and hammered home a few bitter home truths about real life south of the Mason-Dixon line.
"It's definitely gone a little wrong down here from time to time, but right now the entire country has gone a little wrong. And the south is kinda the stronghold of support in a lot of ways for the kind of people who have done the most damage to this region. I think that's one of those strange American ironies. This is a region of the country that for better or for worse lives in the past. And some of the good things about this part of the country probably derive from that, but some of the bad things do too. There's a danger with living too much in the past, in that you tend to romanticise things that in reality weren't all that romantic."
Now 42, and with a 13-month-old daughter, Hood is not relishing the thought of heading off on tour and leaving her behind. He is, however, looking forward to playing for the first time in Ireland, when the band are in Whelan's on April 3rd. And he's eager to reap the rewards of a long, slow burn that's seen Drive-By Truckers go from playing half-empty hundred-seater venues to playing full-to-the-brim 2,000-seater auditoriums.
"There's been times I've complained about things moving so slow and taking so long, but the fact that it has kept growing over this long period of time has been a good thing for us. Certainly it's been healthier for us in a creative way than it would have been if on our third album we hit it huge. . . But it's been so gradual I feel we've been literally building up our fanbase one person at a time. It's like selling it door to door."
He's also looking forward to "bringing it all back home" to Ireland, a country he believes has strong historical and cultural ties with his own region. "I can't speak from knowledge, but I've been told there's a lot of parallels between Ireland and the American south. Appalachian music definitely derived a lot of its ideas from Ireland. A lot of the practitioners of Appalachian music were descendants of people who had travelled over from Ireland, my family included." And, like a true tourist, Hood can't help holding onto one particular myth about Ireland. "Aw, come on, Guinness don't give you a hangover, does it?"
Drive-By Truckers play Whelans, Dublin on April 3rd. A Blessing and A Curse is out today on New West Records
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/art ... 1002235096
Drive-By Truckers Ready To Rock On Tour
Ray Waddell, Nashville
The Drive-By Truckers will begin a North American tour April 20 at the Charlottesville (Va.) Pavilion with Robert Randolph. Included in the rock act's run are a string of West Coast co-headlining dates with Son Volt, beginning April 30 at the El Rey Theatre in Albuquerque, N.M.
The band's new album, A Blessing and a Curse, is due April 18 via New West, and the Truckers are planning a lot or road work behind the project.
"We're gonna tour a whole lot," DBT frontman Patterson Hood tells Billboard.com. "There's some talk of us maybe going out as an opener this summer for a bigger act and maybe playing some sheds and arenas."
The band, currently touring in Europe, will spend a lot of time overseas this year, Hood says. "We'll be going to Europe three [or] possibly four times to tour behind this record," he says. "We're definitely making it a priority to really break Europe because I think there's such a wide open market for what we do over there."
Here are the Drive-By Truckers' tour dates:
April 20: Charlottesville, Va. (Pavilion; w/ Robert Randolph)
April 28: Dallas (Gypsy Ballroom)
April 29: Austin, Texas (Stubb's)
April 30: Albuquerque, N.M. (El Rey Theatre; w/ Son Volt)
May 2: San Diego (Cane's Ballroom; w/ Son Volt)
May 3-4: Los Angeles (House of Blues; w/ Son Volt)
May 5-6: San Francisco (Fillmore; w/ Son Volt)
May 8: Portland, Ore. (Roseland; w/ Son Volt)
May 9: Seattle (Showbox; w/ Son Volt
May 10: Vancouver (Commodore Ballroom)
May 17: Minneapolis (First Avenue)
May 18: Milwaukee (Pabst Theatre)
May 19: Chicago (Vic Theatre)
Drive-By Truckers Ready To Rock On Tour
Ray Waddell, Nashville
The Drive-By Truckers will begin a North American tour April 20 at the Charlottesville (Va.) Pavilion with Robert Randolph. Included in the rock act's run are a string of West Coast co-headlining dates with Son Volt, beginning April 30 at the El Rey Theatre in Albuquerque, N.M.
The band's new album, A Blessing and a Curse, is due April 18 via New West, and the Truckers are planning a lot or road work behind the project.
"We're gonna tour a whole lot," DBT frontman Patterson Hood tells Billboard.com. "There's some talk of us maybe going out as an opener this summer for a bigger act and maybe playing some sheds and arenas."
The band, currently touring in Europe, will spend a lot of time overseas this year, Hood says. "We'll be going to Europe three [or] possibly four times to tour behind this record," he says. "We're definitely making it a priority to really break Europe because I think there's such a wide open market for what we do over there."
Here are the Drive-By Truckers' tour dates:
April 20: Charlottesville, Va. (Pavilion; w/ Robert Randolph)
April 28: Dallas (Gypsy Ballroom)
April 29: Austin, Texas (Stubb's)
April 30: Albuquerque, N.M. (El Rey Theatre; w/ Son Volt)
May 2: San Diego (Cane's Ballroom; w/ Son Volt)
May 3-4: Los Angeles (House of Blues; w/ Son Volt)
May 5-6: San Francisco (Fillmore; w/ Son Volt)
May 8: Portland, Ore. (Roseland; w/ Son Volt)
May 9: Seattle (Showbox; w/ Son Volt
May 10: Vancouver (Commodore Ballroom)
May 17: Minneapolis (First Avenue)
May 18: Milwaukee (Pabst Theatre)
May 19: Chicago (Vic Theatre)
I've merely posted to this thread. Despite what is widely perceived to be me pushing them on people, I have never done that. Check them out because you want to. And whatever you do, please don't do as some BN'ers have done and come back to blame me because you didn't like them. If you're the least bit concerned that you won't like them by all means please make use of the internet to check out their songs before attending one of their shows.CaptainP wrote:After all your talk, I may bite the bullet and try them out....Jahfin wrote: May 18: Milwaukee (Pabst Theatre)
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 19,00.html
The Sunday Times March 26, 2006
Pop: Get those motors running
After years on the road, Drive-By Truckers are finally about to hit top speed, says Paul Sexton
In any contemplation of the Southern rock idiom, it’s hard to dispel images of head-down, half-hour guitar solos and drunk bikers yelling “Freebird”. It’s high time the genre had a makeover, and Drive-By Truckers are putting a whole new face on their sweet home Alabama.
Actually, not that new, as I’m reminded when the band’s front man, Patterson Hood, tells me they played their 1,000th gig — many of them marathons — 18 months ago. During some formative years of repeated line-up changes and broken-down borrowed cars, struggling to and from endless no-mark gigs, the Truckers were often looking up for the next thing to bring them down.
But a decade of resilience has brought still-growing stature as perhaps the most articulate guitar-slingers ever to represent the southern states. Having seen them at this month’s South by Southwest festival in Texas, it is not hard to predict that the Truckers’ imminent British tour will consummate the promise of their excellent new album, A Blessing and a Curse.
The band have already constructed a healthy British following with albums such as 2003’s Decoration Day and its ambitious two-disc predecessor, A Southern Rock Opera. It’s an almost unknown phenomenon these days, but Drive-By Truckers are marking their 10th anniversary on an upward trajectory — at a perfect crossroads of the drawl of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the pomp of the Stones and the punk of Hood’s years in junior high.
His incisive observations on wild times and messed-up, drug- and drink-infested relationships have the grit from those 1,000 gigs. On Aftermath USA, after a guitar setup by Jason Isbell that’s right out of Ronnie Wood’s Faces, Hood staggers out of bed to observe the wreckage of the night before: broken glass on the floor, crystal meth in the bathtub and a car sprawled sideways, full of “the smell of musk and deception”.
On the brilliant, heart-stopping finale, World of Hurt, plaintive pedal steel accompanies his spoken observations about pulling back from self-destruction. “I was 27 when I figured out that blowing my brains out wasn’t the answer,” he says calmly. “So I decided maybe I should find a way to make this world work out for me.”
“I’m extra-proud of that one,” Hood tells me. “That’s the way I heard it in my head. As a band, we never tell each other what to play. It’s part of the process we have. When I write a song, I’ll play it for everybody, then what they play is their business. But I’ve been with these guys a long time.”
The most recent personnel switch came after Decoration Day. At odds with the ingrained masculinity of the musical dialect, the bassist Shonna Tucker was voted into the group. “Shonna joining was one of the easiest things that’s ever happened,” says Hood. “She’s a phenomenal musician and a really cool person. As far as having a girl in the band goes, I think we’ve always had girls in the band.” His eyes glint. “We just finally got one who’s female.”
When the Truckers got together in 1996, Hood had already been in bands with fellow founder Mike Cooley for ever. “Cooley and I have played together for 20 years last August, and we spent the first 10 at each other’s throats. By the time we formed Drive-By Truckers, he and I kind of got along.”
Hood now lives in Athens, Georgia, but he grew up in Alabama towns such as Auburn and the celebrated Muscle Shoals, where his father, David, was a member of the revered rhythm section at Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in the 1960s. “What I do couldn’t be any more different than what my dad did, other than they’re both music-related,” he says. “I could never have done what he did. The idea of playing with someone different every week could be really attractive when it’s Aretha Franklin, and the next week it’s Wilson Pickett, and the week after Willie Nelson. But some weeks it’s somebody where the label just has money to hire the musicians, and the songs s***.
“That would involve a degree of being able to separate yourself from your passion about it. That I’ve never been able to fathom, which makes me respect him all that much more. He probably wanted a better life for his son, and I took that the wrong way. I love it when he comes to see us now. It’s all come full circle.”
Hood’s website diaries of the shambolic struggles of their early years could make a vivid volume. “At the time, we had desperation on our side,” he says. “It was either figure out a way to make this work or go back to working in a restaurant for the rest of my life. If I was good at working in a restaurant, it’d be one thing, but I was, like, the world’s worst line cook. I was like a Jerry Lewis movie in the kitchen, and a Steve Martin movie when I was waiting tables.
“But I do know how to write a song, and I think I know how to deliver a song I write, and during the course of doing this, we’ve kind of figured out how to do the other parts that go with it.”
A Blessing and a Curse is out now; Drive-By Truckers’ UK tour starts on Saturday at the Academy 2, Manchester
The Sunday Times March 26, 2006
Pop: Get those motors running
After years on the road, Drive-By Truckers are finally about to hit top speed, says Paul Sexton
In any contemplation of the Southern rock idiom, it’s hard to dispel images of head-down, half-hour guitar solos and drunk bikers yelling “Freebird”. It’s high time the genre had a makeover, and Drive-By Truckers are putting a whole new face on their sweet home Alabama.
Actually, not that new, as I’m reminded when the band’s front man, Patterson Hood, tells me they played their 1,000th gig — many of them marathons — 18 months ago. During some formative years of repeated line-up changes and broken-down borrowed cars, struggling to and from endless no-mark gigs, the Truckers were often looking up for the next thing to bring them down.
But a decade of resilience has brought still-growing stature as perhaps the most articulate guitar-slingers ever to represent the southern states. Having seen them at this month’s South by Southwest festival in Texas, it is not hard to predict that the Truckers’ imminent British tour will consummate the promise of their excellent new album, A Blessing and a Curse.
The band have already constructed a healthy British following with albums such as 2003’s Decoration Day and its ambitious two-disc predecessor, A Southern Rock Opera. It’s an almost unknown phenomenon these days, but Drive-By Truckers are marking their 10th anniversary on an upward trajectory — at a perfect crossroads of the drawl of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the pomp of the Stones and the punk of Hood’s years in junior high.
His incisive observations on wild times and messed-up, drug- and drink-infested relationships have the grit from those 1,000 gigs. On Aftermath USA, after a guitar setup by Jason Isbell that’s right out of Ronnie Wood’s Faces, Hood staggers out of bed to observe the wreckage of the night before: broken glass on the floor, crystal meth in the bathtub and a car sprawled sideways, full of “the smell of musk and deception”.
On the brilliant, heart-stopping finale, World of Hurt, plaintive pedal steel accompanies his spoken observations about pulling back from self-destruction. “I was 27 when I figured out that blowing my brains out wasn’t the answer,” he says calmly. “So I decided maybe I should find a way to make this world work out for me.”
“I’m extra-proud of that one,” Hood tells me. “That’s the way I heard it in my head. As a band, we never tell each other what to play. It’s part of the process we have. When I write a song, I’ll play it for everybody, then what they play is their business. But I’ve been with these guys a long time.”
The most recent personnel switch came after Decoration Day. At odds with the ingrained masculinity of the musical dialect, the bassist Shonna Tucker was voted into the group. “Shonna joining was one of the easiest things that’s ever happened,” says Hood. “She’s a phenomenal musician and a really cool person. As far as having a girl in the band goes, I think we’ve always had girls in the band.” His eyes glint. “We just finally got one who’s female.”
When the Truckers got together in 1996, Hood had already been in bands with fellow founder Mike Cooley for ever. “Cooley and I have played together for 20 years last August, and we spent the first 10 at each other’s throats. By the time we formed Drive-By Truckers, he and I kind of got along.”
Hood now lives in Athens, Georgia, but he grew up in Alabama towns such as Auburn and the celebrated Muscle Shoals, where his father, David, was a member of the revered rhythm section at Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in the 1960s. “What I do couldn’t be any more different than what my dad did, other than they’re both music-related,” he says. “I could never have done what he did. The idea of playing with someone different every week could be really attractive when it’s Aretha Franklin, and the next week it’s Wilson Pickett, and the week after Willie Nelson. But some weeks it’s somebody where the label just has money to hire the musicians, and the songs s***.
“That would involve a degree of being able to separate yourself from your passion about it. That I’ve never been able to fathom, which makes me respect him all that much more. He probably wanted a better life for his son, and I took that the wrong way. I love it when he comes to see us now. It’s all come full circle.”
Hood’s website diaries of the shambolic struggles of their early years could make a vivid volume. “At the time, we had desperation on our side,” he says. “It was either figure out a way to make this work or go back to working in a restaurant for the rest of my life. If I was good at working in a restaurant, it’d be one thing, but I was, like, the world’s worst line cook. I was like a Jerry Lewis movie in the kitchen, and a Steve Martin movie when I was waiting tables.
“But I do know how to write a song, and I think I know how to deliver a song I write, and during the course of doing this, we’ve kind of figured out how to do the other parts that go with it.”
A Blessing and a Curse is out now; Drive-By Truckers’ UK tour starts on Saturday at the Academy 2, Manchester
-
photogal
- I Love the Now!
- Posts: 1685
- Joined: January 22, 2004 10:27 am
- Number of Concerts: 0
- Favorite Boat Drink: Tonga Juice
- Location: massachusetts
- Contact:
so get this, I thought this was really weird. My husband turned 50 last year and joined AARP and we get the magazine. And believe it or not its really a good magazine, great articles, not your grandmothers magazine, anyway it comes today and in the music review section is a little blurb about the Truckers new cd!! There was also a blurb about Elvis Costello's new cd too. Just thought I'd share that, thought it was funny!!
I still havent gotten one of their cd's but hey now that AARP says it good I may have to give them a listen.......LOL!!!
I still havent gotten one of their cd's but hey now that AARP says it good I may have to give them a listen.......LOL!!!
Blessing and a Curse Bonus Disc
Click on this link for a list of stores that will be stocking the bonus disc:
http://blessingandacurse.com/indie/table.htm
Get a limited edition bonus CD featuring outtakes from the new album and two live tracks only at select cool indie retailers and Tower Records. Bonus CD will be given away free to fans who pre-order the Drive-By Truckers A Blessing and A Curse CD. Supplies are limited, once they are gone, they are gone, never to be made again - get it now!
http://blessingandacurse.com/indie/table.htm
Get a limited edition bonus CD featuring outtakes from the new album and two live tracks only at select cool indie retailers and Tower Records. Bonus CD will be given away free to fans who pre-order the Drive-By Truckers A Blessing and A Curse CD. Supplies are limited, once they are gone, they are gone, never to be made again - get it now!
DBTs In the Studio video here:
http://harpmagazine.com/promotions/videos
-------------------------------------------------------
From Harp Magazine:
http://harpmagazine.com/articles/detail ... le_id=4149
Drive-By Truckers:
Drive They Said
By John Schacht
The foremost thing you need to know about the Drive-By Truckers’ decade-long career arc and how their new album, A Blessing and a Curse, fits snugly at its apex is this: After years spent debunking Southern stereotypes, the Drive-By Truckers reached a critical decision to not become one.
In the liner notes of the band’s 2001 breakthrough, Southern Rock Opera, head Trucker Patterson Hood made it plain that the “duality of the Southern thing” fueled the Truckers’ three-headed songwriting machine. It also became a touchstone for their growing legion of fans—not to mention a fresh opportunity for a slew of Southern-rock-starved critics to dust off their Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy allusions.
But in the process of foraging through their Southern roots for material, the Truckers grew uncomfortable with their role as Southern-rock torchbearers. Like homegrown carpetbaggers, the songwriting profits garnered from their fellow Southerners’ miseries came with a karmic price tag. 2003’s Decoration Day dealt with more personal material, but 2004’s The Dirty South once again dipped heavily into Southern history and legend. More and more, the Truckers became known as a band whose forte was bringing Southern characters, both great and small, into real-life relief by examining the gray areas between artifice and truth.
But remember: While Southern Rock Opera is nominally an album about Lynyrd Skynyrd, it is, at its core, a coming-of-age tale about a Southern kid who’s torn between a regional musical history that’s not necessarily his own and punk rock’s attractive pull. Despite the number of fans they’d attracted and the critical praise that had been heaped upon them, the Truckers felt increasingly penned in by the same Southern myths they’d become so adept at deconstructing. A Blessing and a Curse wouldn’t be repudiation, but an acknowledgment that there was more to being a Drive-By Trucker than being a Southerner. For the band, and especially Hood, blind pride in being Southern is just as reprehensible as redneck stereotypes.
“Instead of having an agenda of what we wanted to do with this record,” Hood explains, “We went in with an agenda of what we did not want to do: A concept record, a rock opera, anything that anyone would call Southern. I’m not running from where I’m from, but I don’t necessarily have to write about it all the time. There’s been enough said about that for now.”
Mike Cooley, who’s been in bands with Hood for 20 years, says the Southern-rock label is getting as onerous as the alt-country moniker attached to the Truckers following their first two records, Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance, released in the late ’90s.
“It’s gonna get written, it’s gonna get said, it’s gonna get put on a poster every now and then,” Cooley says. “But when you start hearing it too often, it’s time to run, no matter what it is.”
Mind you, the Truckers haven’t run far—the band hasn’t gone techno or turned to oblique song-poems requiring footnotes and the OED. Thematically, Blessing is still biscuits-and-grits Truckers’ fare. It’s about crosses borne, relatives and friends who’ve died too soon and those left behind in the crucible. It’s about relationships torn asunder or faded away. It’s also about a rock ’n’ roll band that drinks, smokes and carries on. Still, let’s call Blessing a preemptive strike, a cautionary broadside about the pitfalls of being pigeonholed and becoming a rock ’n’ roll cliché.
“We’d always been storytellers first and foremost, and everything was constructed around telling those stories. On this record we were more song makers than storytellers.” —Jason Isbell
Mike Cooley has a riff he says he hears in his head whenever “nothing else makes sense.” It’s a loose, ragged line that the Truckers casually riffed on during the Blessing recording sessions and eventually turned into the album’s pitch-perfect Rolling Stones/Faces synthesis, “Aftermath USA.” It’s a raunchy slab of Keith Richards/Ronnie Wood guitar lick-swapping that Hood happily admits, “skates on that line between homage and rip-off.” Isbell says, “It was almost like the bartender was there in the studio with us.”
Catching “Aftermath USA” on tape was a happy accident that wound up being a declaration of purpose for the recording of Blessing. From the beginning, the Truckers had approached the album from a different angle. The band’s three songwriters—Hood, Cooley and Jason Isbell—had spent months in a tour bus listening to the Faces’ retrospective box set, Five Guys Walk Into a Bar, immersing themselves in the slop of boozy British rock. Longtime Truckers producer David Barbe says, “Patterson and I had once talked about making a Let It Bleed—Sticky Fingers link album,” referencing the Stones albums that caught the band at a time of transition, right after Brian Jones had died and just after Mick Taylor joined the band to usher in a string of swaggering, drug- and sex-obsessed Stones LPs. While Lynyrd Skynyrd and Merle Haggard had informed earlier Truckers records, Blessing would give voice to other musical influences the band had been harboring, and in the process help to buck the notion of the band as just a simple, Southern-rock act.
“Southern Rock Opera was more of a theatrical kind of stab at describing a Southern-rock band, so it needed to be told that way,” Isbell says. “On this record we wanted to get a little bit more of the essence of what we really do and of the music we actually listen to.”
The Truckers also wanted to feature more of Isbell’s keyboard work and showcase what has become an incredibly tight rhythm section in bassist Shonna Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan. There was also the matter of material. Whereas for previous records the Truckers had entered the studio with a backlog of songs to record, for Blessing the band came in straight from the road with a comparatively clean slate.
“Aftermath USA” is the Blessing track where the new influence is most palpable, but even the few songs the Truckers had written prior to entering the studio showed a new direction being taken. Cooley’s “Gravity’s Gone” is a meditation on fame and excess that’s thematically and sonically akin to the country-rock groove of Sticky Fingers’ “Dead Flowers.” And “Goodbye,” with its keyboard-driven groove and Tucker’s soulful bass line, could nestle comfortably next to “Memory Motel” from the Stones’ 1976 album Black and Blue.
To Drive-By Truckers fans, the band’s embrace of vintage British rock may feel like treason. The band has no such qualms. To the Truckers, Blessing’s influences emerged from the same Southern-rock petri dish that spawned Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers.
Patterson Hood’s father is David Hood, a sought-after Muscle Shoals, Ala., session bassist who has played on records by Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and Willie Nelson, and who also cut records in the mid-’70s with Faces singer Rod Stewart. The Stones recorded portions of Sticky Fingers at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, a facility started by David Hood and the rest of Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Birmingham guitarist Wayne Perkins, who lost out to Ron Wood when the Stones auditioned replacements for Mick Taylor on Black and Blue, is a friend of the Truckers; David Hood produced his 1972 album Smith-Perkins-Smith.
“Patterson heard all kinds of music at my house growing up,” David Hood says. “And it’d be impossible not to be influenced by a lot of it.”
“We’re a rock ’n’ roll band,” Patterson Hood says. “We’re just as influenced by the Faces and Stones and bands from England as we are by the Band—and four of them were Canadian. Of course we’re influenced by Southern musicians, too. And that’s why I can live with the label ‘rock ’n’ roll band,’ because that encompasses all of it.”
“Southern rock is almost redundant,” Isbell agrees. “All the really classic rock ’n’ roll music is either inspired by or came directly from the South.”
Two hours up the road from the Truckers’ Alabama home is Memphis, Tenn., where, in the early ’70s, a short-lived power-pop band called Big Star created a passionate brand of biting, bittersweet power pop. Big Star influenced many musicians, to be sure, but had an especially profound resonance in Minneapolis, Minn., where, in the early ’80s, the Replacements hit the American underground. The Minnesota band probably played a bigger role in the Truckers’ lives than Skynyrd ever did, energizing and inspiring the young, future Truckers with reckless, punked-up, angst-ridden pop whose influence is also palpable throughout A Blessing and a Curse, particularly on “Feb. 14” and “Wednesday.”
“I consider bands like the Replacements to be pop bands because what they have is very hooky, very catchy music,” Isbell says. “So I really enjoy playing those songs.”
The seamless mesh of influences and the Truckers’ three distinct songwriting voices is what makes Blessing so potent, and what may someday elevate it to iconic status. Just as Exile on Main Street synthesized the Stones’ core blues and rock roots with their interests in country, gospel and soul, Blessing is a confluence of the Truckers’ varied sources of inspiration.
“The more somebody makes music, the more their most primal influences start to emerge,” Barbe says.
“If our band in the ’80s had any kind of success at all, we probably would have all been total clichés.”—Patterson Hood
Patterson Hood is 42 years old, and his daughter, Ava Ruth, just turned 1. Cooley is 39 and has two young children, and Morgan is 35. Though Tucker, 28, and Isbell, 27, are younger, they’ve been married to each other for three years and have been playing in bands since their early teens. Barbe, who’s also 42, says that Blessing is the sound of “middle-age rebellion,” and he’s only half-joking. There’s plenty of rock ’n’ roll angst and indignation on the record, but the most rebellious aspect may be its acceptance that learning to live with the contradictions inherent in our lives is the only way to make it through.
“The duality thing is something that I’ve kind of come to terms with lately,” Hood says. He’s been reading the four-volume Robert Caro biography of President Lyndon Johnson, whom Hood refers to as “the duality president.”
“Dualities are just my obsession. I don’t know if it always will be, but it’s been such a recurring thing for the last 10 years in my writing, and just when I thought I was moving away from it, I find myself even more drawn to it.”
The Truckers may have new sonic influences, but the stories of people’s lives are still a prime component of their songs. But where older Truckers songs examined the specific lives of characters in uncompromising light, the new stories are generally less character-specific and more personal. “The songs are more about the emotions that accompany the stories,” Hood says. Blessing’s opening track, “Feb. 14,” is a lovelorn remembrance that’s all busted vases and broken hearts juxtaposed with a simple “be my Valentine” chorus. Hood’s “Little Bonnie” is about a cousin who died at the age of 4 and the legacy of guilt for fathers who “feel punished for what heaven takes away.” The simple conceit of “A World of Hurt” is that “to love is to feel pain.”
“Aftermath USA” contrasts a party with the morning after, just one of many songs on Blessing that exposes the contradictions and pitfalls of being in a rock ’n’ roll band: the rigors of touring 150 or more dates a year, the homesickness and the temptations that come with the territory. It’s a theme all three of the band’s songwriters address in their own inimitable ways.
Hood’s title track—the last song written for Blessing—examines the contradictions of fame in excruciatingly personal detail. “It’s calling your name and filling your head / With delusions of glory,” Hood sings. “But there’s more here than meets the eye / The real story is under the surface / We’re all so in love with the artifice / We don’t dare look too close.”
Cooley, too, addresses the perils of fame on “Gravity’s Gone.” Of the “champagne, hand-jobs and kissing ass by everyone involved” (as the song goes), Cooley says that he never wanted to be one of “those people that get to a level I was actually trying to get to and then b**** about it. That really p*** me off when people do that, but now I know why they do. [Fame comes with] ample opportunities to do the wrong thing, and we were given plenty of them. How do you avoid them? You write a song so that everybody who’s making the offer gets your counteroffer all at the same time.”
Isbell’s “Easy on Yourself” may be a warning to a friend who can’t remember right from wrong anymore, but “there’s some of myself in that story,” he admits. “When you get into being a heathen, the longer you do it, the longer you go, living a lifestyle that’s not necessarily the same as the way you were brought up, you start losing the concept of what’s good for you and bad for you,” Isbell says. “Sometimes you do have to hold yourself to higher standards.”
“There’s something wonderful and so physically satisfying about standing in a crowd and screaming ‘Let there be rock’ along with the Truckers. I’m 34 years old and it still feels great.”—Will Johnson, Centro-Matic leader and frequent Drive-By Truckers touring partner It’s Shonna Tucker’s 28th birthday, and the Truckers are celebrating with a sell-out crowd of 1,000 at the Orange Peel in Asheville, N.C. It’s a Friday night, and the audience—evenly divided between tattooed college kids and trucker’s-cap and cowboy-hat-adorned men and women—is well-lubricated and primed for a Truckers hoedown. The applause is deafening when the band hits the stage to the strains of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Beneath a ceiling-to-floor Drive-By Truckers banner by regular Truckers artist Wes Freed, the band delivers, turning in a rawk show: 30 songs, three-hours long and three encores. Throughout, the scruffy, bearded Hood sports an ear-to-ear grin, reveling in his role as MC, storyteller and chief instigator. After one encore he urges the folks who have to work with a hangover the next day to remind their bosses that, while he’s all for working hard, a Friday night “rock show” always takes priority.
This show spans the Truckers’ entire catalog. Hood’s weather-beaten voice is front-and-center, snarling, roaring or cooing, and he delivers Gangstabilly’s “Buttholeville” and Blessing’s “Feb. 14” with fervor. He dedicates “18 Wheels of Love” to Tucker and Isbell, and narrates portions of “World of Hurt” with the conviction of a Sunday sermonizer. He makes the crowd swoon with the bittersweet country-rock ballad “My Sweet Annette,” then works them up during the Crazy Horse-like cautionary suicide tale “Lookout Mountain.” Isbell pours his heart into “Goddamn Lonely Love,” with his clarion voice playing the yin to Hood’s gravel yang, and he recites the most affecting line from “Decoration Day”—“I’ve got a mind to go spit on his grave”—with spine-chilling venom. Cooley delivers “Marry Me” and “Zip City” in his best Don Williams baritone, and ends the main set with a scorching version of the heavy-riffing Skynyrd send-up “Shut Up & Get on the Plane.” As Morgan drills out a final press-roll on the snare, the three guitarists briefly hold their axes aloft like offerings to the rock gods.
During the familiar songs, the audience is totally plugged into the music. When Cooley, Hood or Isbell steps to the edge of the crowd to solo—and this happens a lot at Drive-By Truckers shows—the audience goes nuts, arms stretch out toward the stage in a near-religious fervor that matches the soloist’s rapture. Fans shout along with every chorus and sway like grass in the wind with each ballad. They raise liquor-sloshing toasts when lyrics reference certain geographic spots and punctuate any Southern reference with a fist-pump. If the show wasn’t performed and received with such joyous abandon—and if the songs weren’t so damn good—it might cross the line into Spinal Tap-like parody.
But for their legions, the Truckers are everymen, sons and daughters of their South. Two of the songs that draw the most reaction this night are Isbell’s “Outfit,” a warning litany about putting on airs and the importance of remaining true to your roots, and Hood’s “Dead, Drunk and Naked,” with its full-throated shout-along line—“The South will rise again!”—shorn of its semi-ironic intention. All of which makes the set opener, Blessing’s “Wednesday,” such an intriguing gambit. Few in the audience have heard it yet, and it’s unlike anything else in the Truckers’ catalog. An obvious homage to the Replacements, it’s an elegiac, chorus-free tale of love-gone-to-s*** told in memorable images, accompanied by roaring minor chords, angular punkish guitar licks and a runaway-locomotive crescendo, all tucked neatly into an inspiring four-minute package. Both Cooley and Hood say it’s much closer to the music they played in their mid-’80s college-rock incarnation, Adam’s House Cat. On this night, the crowd’s reaction to “Wednesday” is tentative by comparison. Heads bob along as the song hurtles forward, but since it offers no scream-along chorus or any Southern-state-of-mind touchstones, you wonder if its reception can be chalked up solely to its unfamiliarity. Reaction is more effusive for Blessing’s other songs, and the band is confident the faithful will embrace Blessing’s new directions.
“The connection we have with people in a live setting makes it a lot easier for us to do whatever we want in the studio and still stay honest with those people,” Isbell says.
“The thing I like about the Truckers is that their personality comes through in everything they do,” Barbe says. “Those three songwriters’ personalities are always completely apparent in their songs. It’s never, ‘Now we’re doing a Neil Young thing,’ or ‘Now we’re doing a Stones thing.’ It just seems like they’re always themselves.”
That honesty—not the Southern-rock thing or the alt-country thing or the Stones and Faces thing—is what makes the Truckers special in the first place.
The Sixth Drive-By Trucker
The casual listener may not care a lick who’s twiddling the knobs, but behind almost every great rock record you’ll find a producer upon whose shoulders stands a band. A producer can be a dictatorial visionary like Phil Spector, a consigliere like Jon Landau, a sonic magician like Brian Eno or an inspired madman like Guy Stevens—and sometimes the producer needs to be all of the above to get a band’s sound and vision on the same wavelength.
David Barbe has manned the booth for the Drive-By Truckers’ recent spate of critically lauded records. First brought in to salvage 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, Barbe’s surgical mix transformed the $5,000, warehouse-recorded double-album into a raucous sonic rave-up that appeared on countless year-end best-of lists. The 42-year-old ex-Sugar bassist and member of Athens’ legendary garage-punk bands Mercyland and Buzz Hungry has been at the helm for the Truckers ever since. “He’s been in the band longer than half the band,” Trucker guitarist and songwriter Mike Cooley says with a laugh.
“Southern Rock Opera was made under the most extremely horrible conditions imaginable,” Patterson Hood says. “We all kind of agreed that if we were ever going to make another record, it was going to have to be done in a different way or else none of us were ever willing to do it again. So Barbe kind of saved the day.”
Since then, Barbe has helped construct the last three Truckers records from the ground up—sometimes adding his own bass, guitar and keyboard parts. Decoration Day (2003) and The Dirty South (2004) were recorded in Barbe’s Athens, Ga., Chase Park Transduction studio, and he has played live with the Truckers on occasion. He co-produced the Truckers’ DVD, The Dirty South–Live at the 40-Watt, and also played bass on and produced the as-yet-untitled follow-up to Hood’s solo record, Killers and Stars. For A Blessing and a Curse, Barbe and the band relocated to Mitch Easter’s roomier Fidelitorium studio in Kernersville, N.C., where they bashed out the record in two six-day sessions in August 2005.
“I think I’m going to use [Barbe and Hood] as an example to the people that are uptight,” Easter says. “[They] were constantly just joking around and living it up, and at the end of the week you look up and you have basically made a record.”
“But it ought to be fun,” Barbe says. “I thought that was one of the main reasons to make rock ’n’ roll records instead of getting a job.”
That relaxed atmosphere resulted in some of Blessing’s best moments, like the in-studio discovery of the backbone riff for “Aftermath USA” and the rough mix of “Goodbye” that survived its more polished follow-ups. “As is frequently the case, I’m just standing on the corner and the bus pulls up and the doors open without me really seeming to do anything at all,” Barbe jokes.
It’s more likely that these happy accidents are the logical extension of Barbe’s fine-tuned studio style. Engineer, producer and Athens fixture John Keane (R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt) first tutored Barbe in the intricacies of the control room in the early ’90s. After Barbe quit Mercyland in 1995 to remain closer to home and family (he has three children), he turned primarily to production to pay the bills in addition to recording his first solo outing, 2001’s Comet of the Season. His 200-plus credits include a wide array of sonic styles, from Son Volt’s Wide Swing Tremolo to the Rock-A-Teens Cry to Azure Ray’s Burn and Shiver to Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s Stag and Prom. The experiences taught him the conditions conducive to quality work.
“Over time, I have basically bid farewell to worrying about what people think about my opinions in the studio,” Barbe says. “However, I will not be bashful with them whatsoever. And with the Truckers I’m probably less bashful than I am with almost anybody else.”
“Each record we do with Barbe, it gets a little better,” says Hood. “The only way I could ever imagine not working with him as producer is if we lured him into being in the band and had to bring in an outside person to keep us all in line.”
http://harpmagazine.com/promotions/videos
-------------------------------------------------------
From Harp Magazine:
http://harpmagazine.com/articles/detail ... le_id=4149
Drive-By Truckers:
Drive They Said
By John Schacht
The foremost thing you need to know about the Drive-By Truckers’ decade-long career arc and how their new album, A Blessing and a Curse, fits snugly at its apex is this: After years spent debunking Southern stereotypes, the Drive-By Truckers reached a critical decision to not become one.
In the liner notes of the band’s 2001 breakthrough, Southern Rock Opera, head Trucker Patterson Hood made it plain that the “duality of the Southern thing” fueled the Truckers’ three-headed songwriting machine. It also became a touchstone for their growing legion of fans—not to mention a fresh opportunity for a slew of Southern-rock-starved critics to dust off their Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy allusions.
But in the process of foraging through their Southern roots for material, the Truckers grew uncomfortable with their role as Southern-rock torchbearers. Like homegrown carpetbaggers, the songwriting profits garnered from their fellow Southerners’ miseries came with a karmic price tag. 2003’s Decoration Day dealt with more personal material, but 2004’s The Dirty South once again dipped heavily into Southern history and legend. More and more, the Truckers became known as a band whose forte was bringing Southern characters, both great and small, into real-life relief by examining the gray areas between artifice and truth.
But remember: While Southern Rock Opera is nominally an album about Lynyrd Skynyrd, it is, at its core, a coming-of-age tale about a Southern kid who’s torn between a regional musical history that’s not necessarily his own and punk rock’s attractive pull. Despite the number of fans they’d attracted and the critical praise that had been heaped upon them, the Truckers felt increasingly penned in by the same Southern myths they’d become so adept at deconstructing. A Blessing and a Curse wouldn’t be repudiation, but an acknowledgment that there was more to being a Drive-By Trucker than being a Southerner. For the band, and especially Hood, blind pride in being Southern is just as reprehensible as redneck stereotypes.
“Instead of having an agenda of what we wanted to do with this record,” Hood explains, “We went in with an agenda of what we did not want to do: A concept record, a rock opera, anything that anyone would call Southern. I’m not running from where I’m from, but I don’t necessarily have to write about it all the time. There’s been enough said about that for now.”
Mike Cooley, who’s been in bands with Hood for 20 years, says the Southern-rock label is getting as onerous as the alt-country moniker attached to the Truckers following their first two records, Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance, released in the late ’90s.
“It’s gonna get written, it’s gonna get said, it’s gonna get put on a poster every now and then,” Cooley says. “But when you start hearing it too often, it’s time to run, no matter what it is.”
Mind you, the Truckers haven’t run far—the band hasn’t gone techno or turned to oblique song-poems requiring footnotes and the OED. Thematically, Blessing is still biscuits-and-grits Truckers’ fare. It’s about crosses borne, relatives and friends who’ve died too soon and those left behind in the crucible. It’s about relationships torn asunder or faded away. It’s also about a rock ’n’ roll band that drinks, smokes and carries on. Still, let’s call Blessing a preemptive strike, a cautionary broadside about the pitfalls of being pigeonholed and becoming a rock ’n’ roll cliché.
“We’d always been storytellers first and foremost, and everything was constructed around telling those stories. On this record we were more song makers than storytellers.” —Jason Isbell
Mike Cooley has a riff he says he hears in his head whenever “nothing else makes sense.” It’s a loose, ragged line that the Truckers casually riffed on during the Blessing recording sessions and eventually turned into the album’s pitch-perfect Rolling Stones/Faces synthesis, “Aftermath USA.” It’s a raunchy slab of Keith Richards/Ronnie Wood guitar lick-swapping that Hood happily admits, “skates on that line between homage and rip-off.” Isbell says, “It was almost like the bartender was there in the studio with us.”
Catching “Aftermath USA” on tape was a happy accident that wound up being a declaration of purpose for the recording of Blessing. From the beginning, the Truckers had approached the album from a different angle. The band’s three songwriters—Hood, Cooley and Jason Isbell—had spent months in a tour bus listening to the Faces’ retrospective box set, Five Guys Walk Into a Bar, immersing themselves in the slop of boozy British rock. Longtime Truckers producer David Barbe says, “Patterson and I had once talked about making a Let It Bleed—Sticky Fingers link album,” referencing the Stones albums that caught the band at a time of transition, right after Brian Jones had died and just after Mick Taylor joined the band to usher in a string of swaggering, drug- and sex-obsessed Stones LPs. While Lynyrd Skynyrd and Merle Haggard had informed earlier Truckers records, Blessing would give voice to other musical influences the band had been harboring, and in the process help to buck the notion of the band as just a simple, Southern-rock act.
“Southern Rock Opera was more of a theatrical kind of stab at describing a Southern-rock band, so it needed to be told that way,” Isbell says. “On this record we wanted to get a little bit more of the essence of what we really do and of the music we actually listen to.”
The Truckers also wanted to feature more of Isbell’s keyboard work and showcase what has become an incredibly tight rhythm section in bassist Shonna Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan. There was also the matter of material. Whereas for previous records the Truckers had entered the studio with a backlog of songs to record, for Blessing the band came in straight from the road with a comparatively clean slate.
“Aftermath USA” is the Blessing track where the new influence is most palpable, but even the few songs the Truckers had written prior to entering the studio showed a new direction being taken. Cooley’s “Gravity’s Gone” is a meditation on fame and excess that’s thematically and sonically akin to the country-rock groove of Sticky Fingers’ “Dead Flowers.” And “Goodbye,” with its keyboard-driven groove and Tucker’s soulful bass line, could nestle comfortably next to “Memory Motel” from the Stones’ 1976 album Black and Blue.
To Drive-By Truckers fans, the band’s embrace of vintage British rock may feel like treason. The band has no such qualms. To the Truckers, Blessing’s influences emerged from the same Southern-rock petri dish that spawned Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers.
Patterson Hood’s father is David Hood, a sought-after Muscle Shoals, Ala., session bassist who has played on records by Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and Willie Nelson, and who also cut records in the mid-’70s with Faces singer Rod Stewart. The Stones recorded portions of Sticky Fingers at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, a facility started by David Hood and the rest of Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Birmingham guitarist Wayne Perkins, who lost out to Ron Wood when the Stones auditioned replacements for Mick Taylor on Black and Blue, is a friend of the Truckers; David Hood produced his 1972 album Smith-Perkins-Smith.
“Patterson heard all kinds of music at my house growing up,” David Hood says. “And it’d be impossible not to be influenced by a lot of it.”
“We’re a rock ’n’ roll band,” Patterson Hood says. “We’re just as influenced by the Faces and Stones and bands from England as we are by the Band—and four of them were Canadian. Of course we’re influenced by Southern musicians, too. And that’s why I can live with the label ‘rock ’n’ roll band,’ because that encompasses all of it.”
“Southern rock is almost redundant,” Isbell agrees. “All the really classic rock ’n’ roll music is either inspired by or came directly from the South.”
Two hours up the road from the Truckers’ Alabama home is Memphis, Tenn., where, in the early ’70s, a short-lived power-pop band called Big Star created a passionate brand of biting, bittersweet power pop. Big Star influenced many musicians, to be sure, but had an especially profound resonance in Minneapolis, Minn., where, in the early ’80s, the Replacements hit the American underground. The Minnesota band probably played a bigger role in the Truckers’ lives than Skynyrd ever did, energizing and inspiring the young, future Truckers with reckless, punked-up, angst-ridden pop whose influence is also palpable throughout A Blessing and a Curse, particularly on “Feb. 14” and “Wednesday.”
“I consider bands like the Replacements to be pop bands because what they have is very hooky, very catchy music,” Isbell says. “So I really enjoy playing those songs.”
The seamless mesh of influences and the Truckers’ three distinct songwriting voices is what makes Blessing so potent, and what may someday elevate it to iconic status. Just as Exile on Main Street synthesized the Stones’ core blues and rock roots with their interests in country, gospel and soul, Blessing is a confluence of the Truckers’ varied sources of inspiration.
“The more somebody makes music, the more their most primal influences start to emerge,” Barbe says.
“If our band in the ’80s had any kind of success at all, we probably would have all been total clichés.”—Patterson Hood
Patterson Hood is 42 years old, and his daughter, Ava Ruth, just turned 1. Cooley is 39 and has two young children, and Morgan is 35. Though Tucker, 28, and Isbell, 27, are younger, they’ve been married to each other for three years and have been playing in bands since their early teens. Barbe, who’s also 42, says that Blessing is the sound of “middle-age rebellion,” and he’s only half-joking. There’s plenty of rock ’n’ roll angst and indignation on the record, but the most rebellious aspect may be its acceptance that learning to live with the contradictions inherent in our lives is the only way to make it through.
“The duality thing is something that I’ve kind of come to terms with lately,” Hood says. He’s been reading the four-volume Robert Caro biography of President Lyndon Johnson, whom Hood refers to as “the duality president.”
“Dualities are just my obsession. I don’t know if it always will be, but it’s been such a recurring thing for the last 10 years in my writing, and just when I thought I was moving away from it, I find myself even more drawn to it.”
The Truckers may have new sonic influences, but the stories of people’s lives are still a prime component of their songs. But where older Truckers songs examined the specific lives of characters in uncompromising light, the new stories are generally less character-specific and more personal. “The songs are more about the emotions that accompany the stories,” Hood says. Blessing’s opening track, “Feb. 14,” is a lovelorn remembrance that’s all busted vases and broken hearts juxtaposed with a simple “be my Valentine” chorus. Hood’s “Little Bonnie” is about a cousin who died at the age of 4 and the legacy of guilt for fathers who “feel punished for what heaven takes away.” The simple conceit of “A World of Hurt” is that “to love is to feel pain.”
“Aftermath USA” contrasts a party with the morning after, just one of many songs on Blessing that exposes the contradictions and pitfalls of being in a rock ’n’ roll band: the rigors of touring 150 or more dates a year, the homesickness and the temptations that come with the territory. It’s a theme all three of the band’s songwriters address in their own inimitable ways.
Hood’s title track—the last song written for Blessing—examines the contradictions of fame in excruciatingly personal detail. “It’s calling your name and filling your head / With delusions of glory,” Hood sings. “But there’s more here than meets the eye / The real story is under the surface / We’re all so in love with the artifice / We don’t dare look too close.”
Cooley, too, addresses the perils of fame on “Gravity’s Gone.” Of the “champagne, hand-jobs and kissing ass by everyone involved” (as the song goes), Cooley says that he never wanted to be one of “those people that get to a level I was actually trying to get to and then b**** about it. That really p*** me off when people do that, but now I know why they do. [Fame comes with] ample opportunities to do the wrong thing, and we were given plenty of them. How do you avoid them? You write a song so that everybody who’s making the offer gets your counteroffer all at the same time.”
Isbell’s “Easy on Yourself” may be a warning to a friend who can’t remember right from wrong anymore, but “there’s some of myself in that story,” he admits. “When you get into being a heathen, the longer you do it, the longer you go, living a lifestyle that’s not necessarily the same as the way you were brought up, you start losing the concept of what’s good for you and bad for you,” Isbell says. “Sometimes you do have to hold yourself to higher standards.”
“There’s something wonderful and so physically satisfying about standing in a crowd and screaming ‘Let there be rock’ along with the Truckers. I’m 34 years old and it still feels great.”—Will Johnson, Centro-Matic leader and frequent Drive-By Truckers touring partner It’s Shonna Tucker’s 28th birthday, and the Truckers are celebrating with a sell-out crowd of 1,000 at the Orange Peel in Asheville, N.C. It’s a Friday night, and the audience—evenly divided between tattooed college kids and trucker’s-cap and cowboy-hat-adorned men and women—is well-lubricated and primed for a Truckers hoedown. The applause is deafening when the band hits the stage to the strains of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Beneath a ceiling-to-floor Drive-By Truckers banner by regular Truckers artist Wes Freed, the band delivers, turning in a rawk show: 30 songs, three-hours long and three encores. Throughout, the scruffy, bearded Hood sports an ear-to-ear grin, reveling in his role as MC, storyteller and chief instigator. After one encore he urges the folks who have to work with a hangover the next day to remind their bosses that, while he’s all for working hard, a Friday night “rock show” always takes priority.
This show spans the Truckers’ entire catalog. Hood’s weather-beaten voice is front-and-center, snarling, roaring or cooing, and he delivers Gangstabilly’s “Buttholeville” and Blessing’s “Feb. 14” with fervor. He dedicates “18 Wheels of Love” to Tucker and Isbell, and narrates portions of “World of Hurt” with the conviction of a Sunday sermonizer. He makes the crowd swoon with the bittersweet country-rock ballad “My Sweet Annette,” then works them up during the Crazy Horse-like cautionary suicide tale “Lookout Mountain.” Isbell pours his heart into “Goddamn Lonely Love,” with his clarion voice playing the yin to Hood’s gravel yang, and he recites the most affecting line from “Decoration Day”—“I’ve got a mind to go spit on his grave”—with spine-chilling venom. Cooley delivers “Marry Me” and “Zip City” in his best Don Williams baritone, and ends the main set with a scorching version of the heavy-riffing Skynyrd send-up “Shut Up & Get on the Plane.” As Morgan drills out a final press-roll on the snare, the three guitarists briefly hold their axes aloft like offerings to the rock gods.
During the familiar songs, the audience is totally plugged into the music. When Cooley, Hood or Isbell steps to the edge of the crowd to solo—and this happens a lot at Drive-By Truckers shows—the audience goes nuts, arms stretch out toward the stage in a near-religious fervor that matches the soloist’s rapture. Fans shout along with every chorus and sway like grass in the wind with each ballad. They raise liquor-sloshing toasts when lyrics reference certain geographic spots and punctuate any Southern reference with a fist-pump. If the show wasn’t performed and received with such joyous abandon—and if the songs weren’t so damn good—it might cross the line into Spinal Tap-like parody.
But for their legions, the Truckers are everymen, sons and daughters of their South. Two of the songs that draw the most reaction this night are Isbell’s “Outfit,” a warning litany about putting on airs and the importance of remaining true to your roots, and Hood’s “Dead, Drunk and Naked,” with its full-throated shout-along line—“The South will rise again!”—shorn of its semi-ironic intention. All of which makes the set opener, Blessing’s “Wednesday,” such an intriguing gambit. Few in the audience have heard it yet, and it’s unlike anything else in the Truckers’ catalog. An obvious homage to the Replacements, it’s an elegiac, chorus-free tale of love-gone-to-s*** told in memorable images, accompanied by roaring minor chords, angular punkish guitar licks and a runaway-locomotive crescendo, all tucked neatly into an inspiring four-minute package. Both Cooley and Hood say it’s much closer to the music they played in their mid-’80s college-rock incarnation, Adam’s House Cat. On this night, the crowd’s reaction to “Wednesday” is tentative by comparison. Heads bob along as the song hurtles forward, but since it offers no scream-along chorus or any Southern-state-of-mind touchstones, you wonder if its reception can be chalked up solely to its unfamiliarity. Reaction is more effusive for Blessing’s other songs, and the band is confident the faithful will embrace Blessing’s new directions.
“The connection we have with people in a live setting makes it a lot easier for us to do whatever we want in the studio and still stay honest with those people,” Isbell says.
“The thing I like about the Truckers is that their personality comes through in everything they do,” Barbe says. “Those three songwriters’ personalities are always completely apparent in their songs. It’s never, ‘Now we’re doing a Neil Young thing,’ or ‘Now we’re doing a Stones thing.’ It just seems like they’re always themselves.”
That honesty—not the Southern-rock thing or the alt-country thing or the Stones and Faces thing—is what makes the Truckers special in the first place.
The Sixth Drive-By Trucker
The casual listener may not care a lick who’s twiddling the knobs, but behind almost every great rock record you’ll find a producer upon whose shoulders stands a band. A producer can be a dictatorial visionary like Phil Spector, a consigliere like Jon Landau, a sonic magician like Brian Eno or an inspired madman like Guy Stevens—and sometimes the producer needs to be all of the above to get a band’s sound and vision on the same wavelength.
David Barbe has manned the booth for the Drive-By Truckers’ recent spate of critically lauded records. First brought in to salvage 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, Barbe’s surgical mix transformed the $5,000, warehouse-recorded double-album into a raucous sonic rave-up that appeared on countless year-end best-of lists. The 42-year-old ex-Sugar bassist and member of Athens’ legendary garage-punk bands Mercyland and Buzz Hungry has been at the helm for the Truckers ever since. “He’s been in the band longer than half the band,” Trucker guitarist and songwriter Mike Cooley says with a laugh.
“Southern Rock Opera was made under the most extremely horrible conditions imaginable,” Patterson Hood says. “We all kind of agreed that if we were ever going to make another record, it was going to have to be done in a different way or else none of us were ever willing to do it again. So Barbe kind of saved the day.”
Since then, Barbe has helped construct the last three Truckers records from the ground up—sometimes adding his own bass, guitar and keyboard parts. Decoration Day (2003) and The Dirty South (2004) were recorded in Barbe’s Athens, Ga., Chase Park Transduction studio, and he has played live with the Truckers on occasion. He co-produced the Truckers’ DVD, The Dirty South–Live at the 40-Watt, and also played bass on and produced the as-yet-untitled follow-up to Hood’s solo record, Killers and Stars. For A Blessing and a Curse, Barbe and the band relocated to Mitch Easter’s roomier Fidelitorium studio in Kernersville, N.C., where they bashed out the record in two six-day sessions in August 2005.
“I think I’m going to use [Barbe and Hood] as an example to the people that are uptight,” Easter says. “[They] were constantly just joking around and living it up, and at the end of the week you look up and you have basically made a record.”
“But it ought to be fun,” Barbe says. “I thought that was one of the main reasons to make rock ’n’ roll records instead of getting a job.”
That relaxed atmosphere resulted in some of Blessing’s best moments, like the in-studio discovery of the backbone riff for “Aftermath USA” and the rough mix of “Goodbye” that survived its more polished follow-ups. “As is frequently the case, I’m just standing on the corner and the bus pulls up and the doors open without me really seeming to do anything at all,” Barbe jokes.
It’s more likely that these happy accidents are the logical extension of Barbe’s fine-tuned studio style. Engineer, producer and Athens fixture John Keane (R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt) first tutored Barbe in the intricacies of the control room in the early ’90s. After Barbe quit Mercyland in 1995 to remain closer to home and family (he has three children), he turned primarily to production to pay the bills in addition to recording his first solo outing, 2001’s Comet of the Season. His 200-plus credits include a wide array of sonic styles, from Son Volt’s Wide Swing Tremolo to the Rock-A-Teens Cry to Azure Ray’s Burn and Shiver to Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s Stag and Prom. The experiences taught him the conditions conducive to quality work.
“Over time, I have basically bid farewell to worrying about what people think about my opinions in the studio,” Barbe says. “However, I will not be bashful with them whatsoever. And with the Truckers I’m probably less bashful than I am with almost anybody else.”
“Each record we do with Barbe, it gets a little better,” says Hood. “The only way I could ever imagine not working with him as producer is if we lured him into being in the band and had to bring in an outside person to keep us all in line.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... 6087c.html
Alabama band the Drive-By Truckers stay true to their Southern routes
Mention Southern rock and some people envision Confederate flags and a legacy of prejudice. Others focus on blissful guitar solos and some of America's most deeply rooted songwriting.
The Drive-By Truckers, who hail from Alabama, have made it their mission to wrestle with, and reconcile, such contradictions on albums like Alabama Ass Whuppin', The Dirty South and a CD anointed with no less lofty a title than Southern Rock Opera.
Conceived as a kind of down-home version of Jesus Christ Superstar, Southern Rock Opera uses the tragic history of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd as a jumping-off point to create a mythic folk tale of regional pride and loss.
"On the one hand, there's a very romantic idea out there of what the South is all about," explains Truckers' guitarist Jason Isbell. "On the other, you have a history of people like Gov. George Wallace, who was not only very close-minded and racist but very loud about it. He ruined the party for the rest of us."
To help redress the balance, the band's music revives some of the open-minded style that fired great Southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. To avoid rank imitation, the Truckers mix such below-the-Mason-Dixon-line touchstones with elements from Crazy Horse, Tom Petty, the Replacements and the Faces.
The Truckers' seventh and latest work, A Blessing and a Curse, arrives this week, and it should only extend their reputation as one of America's most sterling bands.
Once again it benefits from the band's use of three full-time singers and songwriters: Isbell, Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood. That triple threat puts the band in the tradition of talent-heavy acts like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Fleetwood Mac.
While the result may give the Truckers' a creative boon, it could easily turn into a personal time bomb, given the inevitable ego clashes of having three strong individuals in the same band. "Luckily, we're the sort of people who get along," Isbell offers. "And we have a great respect for each other's work."
Cooley and Hood, who met in college, started the Truckers in 1996. Hood came from an esteemed musical family. His dad, David, played bass in the house band at the legendary Muscle Shoals studio of the '60s and '70s. Over the years, he performed with everyone from the Staple Singers to Traffic.
The younger Hood had some strong role models for the self-aware, neo-Southern rock forged by his band, including the Georgia Satellites and the Bottle Rockets. The Truckers' take on the style debuted on the 1998 album Gangstabilly, followed the next year by Pizza Deliverance. While such titles took a jokey run at Southern stereotypes, in the music they dealt seriously with pain and heartbreak.
It wasn't until 2001's Southern Rock Opera that the group became a national issue. Critics compared the disk to Randy Newman's 1974 regional classic, Good Old Boys. Isbell admits that it took "gall" to rewrite Skynyrd's history, which comes complete with a retelling of that band's tragic plane crash. Small wonder the members of Skynyrd had a mixed reaction to Rock Opera.
"[Guitarist] Ed King loved it," Isbell explains. "[Leader] Gary Rossington said he appreciated the album but that it weirded him out. I can understand that. If somebody made a record about my friends dying, it would freak me out, too."
Isbell says there has been some talk of turning the album into a movie or play, but none of the artists who've proposed a take so far have come up with the right angle.
Some critics wondered if the band could live up to their Opera. But the two CDs since - 2004's Dirty South, and the latest - have proven the doubters wrong. A Blessing and a Curse boasts beautiful melodies and smartly turned lyrics. Cooley penned especially moving verse for his song "Gravity's Gone." In the song, he imagines what hitting bottom might be like, though he never seems to get there. "I've been falling so long/it's like gravity's gone/and I'm just floating," he sings.
In the song "Aftermath USA," a dazed narrator wakes to find crystal meth in the bathtub, blood in the sink and, worst of all, terrible music on the stereo.
That last detail tips off the Truckers' dark sense of humor. They use it to alleviate the considerable suffering found elsewhere in their songs. Maintaining balance is key. Even though the album's final song is titled "A World of Hurt," they make sure to end it with the declaration, "it's great to be alive."
"It's important for us to make hopeful creations - because Lord knows we've done enough of the other kind," Isbell explains. "We're just trying to give both sides of the story."
Alabama band the Drive-By Truckers stay true to their Southern routes
Mention Southern rock and some people envision Confederate flags and a legacy of prejudice. Others focus on blissful guitar solos and some of America's most deeply rooted songwriting.
The Drive-By Truckers, who hail from Alabama, have made it their mission to wrestle with, and reconcile, such contradictions on albums like Alabama Ass Whuppin', The Dirty South and a CD anointed with no less lofty a title than Southern Rock Opera.
Conceived as a kind of down-home version of Jesus Christ Superstar, Southern Rock Opera uses the tragic history of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd as a jumping-off point to create a mythic folk tale of regional pride and loss.
"On the one hand, there's a very romantic idea out there of what the South is all about," explains Truckers' guitarist Jason Isbell. "On the other, you have a history of people like Gov. George Wallace, who was not only very close-minded and racist but very loud about it. He ruined the party for the rest of us."
To help redress the balance, the band's music revives some of the open-minded style that fired great Southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. To avoid rank imitation, the Truckers mix such below-the-Mason-Dixon-line touchstones with elements from Crazy Horse, Tom Petty, the Replacements and the Faces.
The Truckers' seventh and latest work, A Blessing and a Curse, arrives this week, and it should only extend their reputation as one of America's most sterling bands.
Once again it benefits from the band's use of three full-time singers and songwriters: Isbell, Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood. That triple threat puts the band in the tradition of talent-heavy acts like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Fleetwood Mac.
While the result may give the Truckers' a creative boon, it could easily turn into a personal time bomb, given the inevitable ego clashes of having three strong individuals in the same band. "Luckily, we're the sort of people who get along," Isbell offers. "And we have a great respect for each other's work."
Cooley and Hood, who met in college, started the Truckers in 1996. Hood came from an esteemed musical family. His dad, David, played bass in the house band at the legendary Muscle Shoals studio of the '60s and '70s. Over the years, he performed with everyone from the Staple Singers to Traffic.
The younger Hood had some strong role models for the self-aware, neo-Southern rock forged by his band, including the Georgia Satellites and the Bottle Rockets. The Truckers' take on the style debuted on the 1998 album Gangstabilly, followed the next year by Pizza Deliverance. While such titles took a jokey run at Southern stereotypes, in the music they dealt seriously with pain and heartbreak.
It wasn't until 2001's Southern Rock Opera that the group became a national issue. Critics compared the disk to Randy Newman's 1974 regional classic, Good Old Boys. Isbell admits that it took "gall" to rewrite Skynyrd's history, which comes complete with a retelling of that band's tragic plane crash. Small wonder the members of Skynyrd had a mixed reaction to Rock Opera.
"[Guitarist] Ed King loved it," Isbell explains. "[Leader] Gary Rossington said he appreciated the album but that it weirded him out. I can understand that. If somebody made a record about my friends dying, it would freak me out, too."
Isbell says there has been some talk of turning the album into a movie or play, but none of the artists who've proposed a take so far have come up with the right angle.
Some critics wondered if the band could live up to their Opera. But the two CDs since - 2004's Dirty South, and the latest - have proven the doubters wrong. A Blessing and a Curse boasts beautiful melodies and smartly turned lyrics. Cooley penned especially moving verse for his song "Gravity's Gone." In the song, he imagines what hitting bottom might be like, though he never seems to get there. "I've been falling so long/it's like gravity's gone/and I'm just floating," he sings.
In the song "Aftermath USA," a dazed narrator wakes to find crystal meth in the bathtub, blood in the sink and, worst of all, terrible music on the stereo.
That last detail tips off the Truckers' dark sense of humor. They use it to alleviate the considerable suffering found elsewhere in their songs. Maintaining balance is key. Even though the album's final song is titled "A World of Hurt," they make sure to end it with the declaration, "it's great to be alive."
"It's important for us to make hopeful creations - because Lord knows we've done enough of the other kind," Isbell explains. "We're just trying to give both sides of the story."
-
12Volt
- Gypsies in the palace
- Posts: 401
- Joined: February 18, 2004 6:01 pm
- Number of Concerts: 0
- Location: Massachusetts
From Today's Boston Herald...
Drive-By Truckers
A Blessing And a Curse
New West | Critic: B
After a half-dozen raunchier Southern-fried efforts, Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers get tighter and more polished. As always, the wailing guitars and alternating vocals of the three core Truckers (Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell) drive the music. Genteel themes and snappier songs make this more radio-friendly, but erodes some of the band’s creative energy. Download: ‘‘A Blessing and a Curse.”
Drive-By Truckers
A Blessing And a Curse
New West | Critic: B
After a half-dozen raunchier Southern-fried efforts, Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers get tighter and more polished. As always, the wailing guitars and alternating vocals of the three core Truckers (Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell) drive the music. Genteel themes and snappier songs make this more radio-friendly, but erodes some of the band’s creative energy. Download: ‘‘A Blessing and a Curse.”
Drive-By Truckers "Goodbye"
4-20-06 Charlottesville Pavillion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmtQeV0gOE
4-20-06 Charlottesville Pavillion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmtQeV0gOE
Playing Hurt
The Drive-By Truckers Wrestle With Loss and Acceptance on Their Darkest Album Yet
RISEN AGAIN: The Drive-By Truckers represent for a new kind of southern rock By Geoffrey Himes
Novelist/critic George Pelecanos has called them “the American band of the decade.” Amazon.com extended it to “the greatest band in the world.” Blender said they were “the best country-rock band in America.” National Review offered “the best unheralded band in popular music today.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune awarded them the title of “the band of our day.” The Washington Post went for simply “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.”
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=11736
The Drive-By Truckers Wrestle With Loss and Acceptance on Their Darkest Album Yet
RISEN AGAIN: The Drive-By Truckers represent for a new kind of southern rock By Geoffrey Himes
Novelist/critic George Pelecanos has called them “the American band of the decade.” Amazon.com extended it to “the greatest band in the world.” Blender said they were “the best country-rock band in America.” National Review offered “the best unheralded band in popular music today.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune awarded them the title of “the band of our day.” The Washington Post went for simply “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.”
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=11736
-
Pencil Thin (inactive)
- Inactive User
- Posts: 1402
- Joined: February 22, 2003 9:18 pm
Not sure if anyone had seen this yet, but you can listen to the new album on CMT.com, here's the link if anyone is interested. I haven't listened to it yet, but plan on giving it a listen later on today.
http://www.cmt.com/artists/az/drive_by_ ... lbum.jhtml
http://www.cmt.com/artists/az/drive_by_ ... lbum.jhtml