Interview: Patterson Hood
Patterson Hood could be considered the poet laureate of the loosely defined alt-country that genre his band, Drive-By Truckers, has helped define over 14 albums of brawny, three-guitar-slung rock 'n' roll and gritty, gothic storytelling.
And, at 60 years old, the Alabama native ranks among the elder statesmen of the Americana scene, with a younger generation of adjacent artists such as Waxahatchee and Wednesday crediting his band as a core influence.
While the Truckers — which Hood co-founded with Mike Cooley nearly three decades ago in Athens, Ga. — is the primary vehicle for his hardscrabble, character-driven songwriting, he’s also released a handful of records under his own name.
“My goal when I write a song is for it to be solid enough on its own to stand up with just me and an acoustic guitar,” Hood says.
In February, he’ll release his fourth solo album and first in over 12 years, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams. The mostly autobiographical 10-song collection marks Hood’s biggest departure from the Truckers palette by examining chapters from his past without the political context of, say, Southern Rock Opera, the 2001 concept album that explored the “duality of the Southern thing” and is arguably the band’s most popular release from its pre-Jason Isbell era.
“Most of it's pretty personal stuff,” Hood says. “A lot of it’s based around my childhood and my teenage years.”
Hood recorded Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams in his current hometown of Portland, Ore., with producer and multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk of The Decemberists, who helped execute Hood’s vision to make an album unlike anything in his catalog, both lyrically and musically. On the sonic front, strings, woodwinds, horns, and vintage analog synthesizers add texture and nuance to the arrangements.
“I wrote a lot of it on piano and initially intended to then get someone who actually knows how to play the damn thing to play on the record,” Hood says.
“Chris wanted me out of my comfort zone, so he informed me at some point last year that maybe I should be practicing the piano because I was gonna be playing it on the record. I was able to do it without wasting a lot of studio time, or having to Frankenstein it too much. I'm by no means a piano player, but I think it gets the point across. It definitely opened up my writing a bit, which was the point.”
Ahead of his Saturday, Dec. 7, solo acoustic performance at Asheville Music Hall, Asheville Stages spoke with Hood about the forthcoming release and revisiting Southern Rock Opera this year with a lengthy tour that found the band playing the landmark double album in its entirety.
Jay Moye: You’re heading back to Asheville just a few weeks after playing a pair of sold-out Truckers shows at The Orange Peel that seemed like medicine for folks here after a rough seven or eight weeks.
Patterson Hood: I know. It breaks my heart to see y’all go through all that. I love Asheville so much. Those shows were pretty over the top, and we had our buddy [and Wednesday guitarist] MJ Lenderman sitting in for a little bit on both nights, which was really special and cool. I'm such a huge fan of his work.
JM: Wednesday toured with you guys for a stretch. Is that how you first hooked up with them?
PH: Yeah. Someone turned me onto their music early on, and I was really blown away. So I lobbied to have them tour with us. We got to, and that led to a really good friendship. I've got a solo record coming out and they played on a song on that, which was really cool.
JM: Yeah, it was a nice surprise to schedule this interview a few weeks ago and then get that press release yesterday. So there's much more to talk about. The record sounds fantastic, with a bunch of great folks playing with you on it. How’d you connect with Chris Funk?
PH: My family and I moved to Portland almost 10 years ago. I met Chris about a year and a half before that, through friends who introduced us. We just hit it off immediately, like lifelong friends. And when I first moved to town, every year I played some shows right around Christmas, kind of an annual thing. He started sitting in with me and we just have a really great chemistry.
It's very different than the chemistry I have in my band. It’s its own thing. So I said, pretty much from the beginning, that I wanted to do my next solo record with him. We spent about 10 years talking about it before we ever did it, which probably worked out for the best because I’m pretty busy with my day job. But it was a real treat to make this record and I’m looking forward to putting it out and taking it out for people to hear.
JM: Tell me about the group [the Sensurrounders] you pulled together to back you on the album release tour early next year.
PH: It was tricky because there's different people playing on the record. Every song is kind of a different lineup. It sounds cohesive, because it all kind of flows from one thing into another. But as far as finding a band small enough for me to barely afford to take it out and somehow tour with it, I think I've got a plan. I’m feeling good about it. These shows coming up in a few weeks, including the one in Asheville, will be totally solo. But for the spring tour I’ll have a good bunch of folks out with me.
JM: You recorded everything in Portland?
PH: I did. I started in January 2023 for two or three days at a real small studio called The Panther. I demoed all but one of the songs on the record, and some of those tracks ended up solid enough that I built on them for the album. But we went in to record the majority of it in January of this year at Jackpot — a pretty landmark studio where Elliott Smith did a lot of his early stuff — during an ice storm, no less. We cut everything in about five days. We used some of the tracks we started the year before, and then I cut one song and worked on a second in Athens at David Barbe’s studio. That’s where we cut the song with Wednesday.
JM: You’ve got Katie Crutchfield [Waxahatchee] singing on one with you as well?
PH: Yep, and Kevin Morby playing guitar on a song. And Brad and Phil Cook. Steve Berlin from Los Lobos is playing baritone sax and flute. A guy named Stuart Bogie from New York is playing baritone clarinet, baritone sax, and harmonica on a couple of songs. Kyleen King, who was Brandi Carlile’s string section leader for several years, plays viola and did all the string arrangements. She's played on a couple of Truckers songs along the way, too — she's amazing. And a drummer named Dan Hunt, who’s played with Neko Case, She & Him, and M. Ward, is on most of it.
JM: The first single, “A Werewolf and a Girl,” chronicles your relationship with your high school sweetheart, with Lydia Loveless singing the choruses from her point of view.
PH: Lydia knocked it out of the park. She's going to be part of the tour, too. She's opening, and she's going to play bass and sing as part of my band. I'm super psyched about that because I've been a superfan of hers for a decade or so now, and we've become really good friends.
JM: The solo records and tours both you and Cooley do every now and then, what do those bring back to the Truckers, energetically or creatively? When you branch off and do your own thing, how does that ultimately benefit your “day job,” to use your words?
PH: I think it makes me better, for sure. It enables me to workshop ideas and get them ready to take to the band, and for whatever the band does to take it to another place. It's also a chance for me to take things the band does one way and explore them in a different way. My solo shows are more intimate. They tend to have a lot more banter and talking, and they give me a chance to expand upon some of the stories the songs deal with.
JM: You've been out playing Southern Rock Opera in its entirety this year. Why is now the time to revisit that record, which was so definitive for you as a band 20-plus years ago?
PH: People have been asking us all along to do it. I've always said, “Never say never,” but there just wasn’t a time when any of us were even remotely into the idea of doing it. We've turned down offers for years and years because there was always a new record we were touring behind or working on. But it worked out this time. We put out a string of records pretty close together, culminating with Welcome 2 Club XIII in ’22, so we knew that ‘24 might be a good year to do it. Part of deciding had to do with it being an election year.
Southern Rock Opera was the first of our pretty political records. Even though it's a coming-of-age story, it deals so much with the post-Civil Rights [former Alabama Governor George] Wallace South. And there are many parallels between Jim Crow and Wallace and a lot of what was being talked about during the [2024 presidential] election. The whole MAGA movement just reeks of the worst aspects of Wallace, so it was a chance to draw parallels and make it a more contemporary work than just something we did 23 years ago about the ’70s. Honestly, that was a big part of me agreeing to do it.
JM: Your tour poster includes the line, “It ain't about the past.”
PH: Right. That’s a line from a song on the record [“The Southern Thing”]. I made a point to put that on the poster.
JM: What do you want that to convey?
PH: That it’s still a thing. It's not so much North and South anymore. It's really become, sadly, an urban/rural divide more than a red state/blue state divide. It's a matter of what the population center is in the state. States that don't have a big city tend to be red, and states that are dominated — population-wise — by a bigger city tend to be blue. Most cities are blue because people have to figure out how to live together and work together. They have to embrace things like diversity. Whereas in your small town, it's easier to be insulated and think other people are “the other.” So that was an important part of us going out and touring with this.
JM: That record, and really your whole catalog, defined you as one of the strongest, most progressive songwriting voices of the American South. Has living in the Pacific Northwest shifted your perspective?
PH: I can tell you that I lived in the South for 51 years and never saw a [Ku Klux] Klan rally. But in Portland, in 2020 during [the] COVID[-19 pandemic], I accidentally drove right into the middle of a Proud Boys rally. They weren't wearing white hoods and they weren't burning a cross, but they might as well have been. And that was downtown in what's considered one of the most liberal cities in America.
I've always said that, in Portland, you can drive five minutes from any point in town and be out in the country and you might as well be in Alabama. Except, honestly, I think I find it a little less scary down here [laughs].
Portland’s a beautiful city, but we were occupied by federal troops during the summer of 2020. They did damage to our city that we're still rebuilding from. And they did damage to the liberal fabric of the city. And, believe you me, that was intentional.
JM: One last two-part question about Southern Rock Opera. Why do you think that record resonated as much as it did so many years ago? And how has it felt both for you as a band and your audience to present and experience it as a complete document?
PH: This is a thing we dreamed up all those years ago, driving around in a van for endless hours on the road in the late-’90s. That it still resonates with people, all these years later, and that people love it and are moved by it and want to pay money to come see us do it — I'm forever moved by that. I guess I get the appeal. I'm sure thankful for it. When we made it, everyone said we were crazy. Few people got the idea when we were talking about it. But somehow it worked, and it put our band on a very different trajectory. It gave me a career. So, I'm thankful for all of that.
There's always been a certain side of me with a bit of a love/hate relationship with it, because after that record, we moved on and we've done a lot of other things I'm really proud of. We've done records I think are better records. It's not my favorite record of ours, and might not even be in my top five. But I do think that when we perform it as a piece of work like we're doing right now, there is something special about it and it's made me appreciate that probably more than I did. I am very proud of it. But I won’t be sad next year when we go back to doing something else.
JM: This is the time of year when everyone’s pulling together their best-of lists. Do you have any favorite albums from 2024?
PH: I do, of course. MJ Lenderman[‘s Manning Fireworks] is going to be right there, as is Waxahatchee[‘s Tigers Blood]. The Hurray for the Riff Raff record [The Past Is Still Alive] is incredible. I’m in love with that Cure record, [Songs of a Lost World,] like everybody else right now. I think it's incredible. And [I Got Heaven by] that band Mannequin Pussy from Philly. That's a pretty kick-ass top five right there. It's been a really good year for new music.
IF YOU GO
What: An Evening With Patterson Hood
When: Saturday, Dec. 7, 9 p.m.
Where: Asheville Music Hall, 31 Patton Ave., ashevillemusichall.com
Tickets: $25 advance/$30 day of show
(Photo by Jason Thrasher)
