Drive-By Truckers release their new album ‘The Big To-Do’ through PIAS on 15th March. Recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios, Athens, GA, the album was produced David Barbe (ex-Sugar) and will be available on
Tracklisting:
1.Daddy Learned To Fly
2.The Fourth Night Of My Drinking
3.Birthday Boy
4.Drag The Lake Charlie
5.The Wig He Made Her Wear
6.You Got Another
7.This Fucking Job
8.Get Downtown
9.After The Scene Dies
10.(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So
11.Santa Fe
12.The Flying Wallendas
13.Eyes Like Glue
It seems simplest to understand Patterson Hood (son of David Hood from Muscle Shoals) as the director and/or producer of low-budget films, which is maybe what he thought he was doing when this all started. Each is released in record album form under the name Drive-By Truckers and features a closely held assortment of friends and combatants.
Ten of those, so far, going back to 1998’s Gangstabilly, plus two more under Hood’s own name, have delighted the critics and enthralled fans. Each release filled with carefully told, fiercely rendered short subjects. Cinematic songs. Not Ed Wood films, by the way. More…well, did you see John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer? Or, perhaps better, their friend Ray McKinnon’s short, The Accountant? The new one, the one we’re meant to enjoy just now, is called The Big To-Do and ushers in a new relationship. And it offers up the curious, abiding peace which only great rock can still bring.
Which is not to say that Hood and his long-time fellow-travelers — Mike Cooley (vocals and guitars), along with Brad Morgan (drums), Shonna Tucker (vocals and bass), John Neff (extra guitars, as if there could be such a thing), Jay Gonzalez (keyboards) and studio facilitator David Barbe — travel only on the darkest side of the street. But they do know the road tolerably well. Well-traveled, they have become a family band: Patterson has a new son, and a daughter; Cooley (nobody calls him Mike) has a trio of little ones, both men betraying more optimism than their songs might hint at. They took most of 2009 off from the road, in part because there was a child on the way and in part because Patterson ended up finishing their last tour on the sidelines with pleurisy. Dog sick. Way worse than hungover.
‘The Big To-Do’ was recorded in three concentrated sessions during the first part of 2009: ten days in January, five days in March, ten days in May. That added up to 25 songs, a dozen of which sequenced into The Big To-Do. “We had it mixed, mastered, and completely done, and Cooley wrote the best song that just needed to be on it,” Patterson says with his raspy chuckle. This happens a lot with the Truckers, and it’s always a good sign. “So we went back in and recorded, mixed, and mastered ‘Birthday Boy’ pretty much in one fell swoop.” Thirteen songs, then.
The clarity of purpose translates into a delicious assortment of Trucker songs themed loosely around crime and (self-) punishment. “The Wig He Made Her Wear,” Patterson says, is both a true story (as seen on Court TV) and the closest he’s come to making the movie he started out to make a decade or more back. “The Fourth Night of My Drinking” will speak for itself, and “This Fucking Job” (paired thematically with Cooley’s wry “Get Downtown”) is arguably the most political song the Truckers have made since “Living Bubba.” Which leaves the deceptive, airy simplicity of Shonna Tucker’s “You Got Another” and “(It’s gonna Be) I Told You So” to reckon with.
Off the road, incidentally, didn’t mean out of work. First off, there was the matter of cutting an instrumental album with the legendary Booker T, having previously served as the backing band to the equally legendary soul singer, Bettye Lavette. Potato Hole turned out all right, got a Grammy nod, and Neil Young added his touches separately even though it’s pretty much a Truckers effort.
As for the movie Patterson started writing all those years ago, well, he’s no closer to being done with it. “That might just be part of the drive to the songs I’m writing,” he admits. And brightens. “I placed a couple of songs in a movie that just came out, shot outside of Knoxville, called That Evening Sun. It’s Hal Holbrook’s new film, produced by Ray McKinnon.”
