More than two decades into their career, the Drive-By Truckers released one of their best albums a few months ago, “American Band” (ATO). Not bad for a band that was teetering on the brink of a breakup a few years ago amid a series of lineup changes.
“We went through a rough time,” co-founder Patterson Hood says. “We were going through so many personnel changes. We would fix something and something else would break. It was a frustrating time. I’m not putting down anybody — they were all fine players, but sometimes the chemistry just goes wrong. I was proud of a couple of records we made during that era, but they didn’t seem to resonate or click with people that well. But when we came out the other end and landed on this lineup, it was an immediate explosion of inspiration for us.”
The core members — singer-guitarists Hood and Mike Cooley, and drummer Brad Morgan — found a new energy with multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez, who joined in 2008, and bassist Matt Patton, who came aboard in 2012.
The latest lineup debuted on “English Oceans” in 2014, but as Patterson notes, “American Band” has “taken everything to another level.” It’s an album that blows out the extremes of the band’s songwriting, and melds the contrasting styles of main songwriters Cooley and Hood better than ever before. It blends Clash-style anthems and folkish protest songs into a state of the political disunion album.
“We weren’t even planning on doing a record this soon, but the songs came quickly based on what we felt was a day-to-day feed of bulls—,” Hood says. “It’s strange, I’ve always been a cynical pragmatic optimist, which is a tough road to hoe. All that’s left is the cynical part. I don’t see anything pragmatic happening, and I have to dig deep to find optimism. I find it in my family, and the kids who make me feel better about the distant future, but otherwise it’s been a tough time.”
“American Band” was recorded in less than a week, an urgency befitting masterful songs such as Cooley’s “Ramon Casiano,” which turns a decades-old murder into a mini-history of America that Howard Zinn might endorse, and Hood’s equally bone-chilling contemplation on guns and race in “What it Means.”
“I didn’t think we were making a record necessarily — I wrote ‘What it Means’ just to get that off my chest,” Hood says. “I didn’t know if the band would even want to do a song like that. But we reconvened, and everyone in the band was really enthusiastic. Cooley responded with ‘Ramon Casiano,’ and it was like we were on the same wavelength.”
Hood says the tone of the album and how it might be received by the band’s fans didn’t factor into the songwriting. “It all comes down to how does it make us feel,” he says. “I don’t want to be the guy on the soapbox. I’m more concerned about, ‘Is this entertaining?’ It was a turnoff of political folk music — even (Bob) Dylan got bored by that aspect of it. Way before the 2000 election, (Ralph) Nader came to an event and spoke at the 40 Watt Club (in Athens, Ga.), where I was working as the monitor guy. People were playing folk songs, your basic save-the-world ‘Kumbaya’ stuff, and I was thinking this is terrible. No one on that stage was saying anything that this audience doesn’t already know, and that nobody outside the door would care about.”
Instead, the political edge of the new songs surfaced organically by drawing on music the band knew and loved from its past. “When we started thinking about this record and how up front it would be — it wasn’t set in a different time frame, like some of the George Wallace songs we used to write, but in the here and now — I thought a lot about how I felt about the Clash,” Hood says. “People dis (the Clash’s 1982 album) ‘Combat Rock,’ but it’s great and it was a hit. ‘Rock the Casbah’ — I can remember them playing that song at school dances. It would be on the radio even though it was extremely political, and it’s still timely. The other touchstone was a Tom T. Hall song, ‘Watergate Blues,’ from the early ‘70s. That was a direct inspiration on ‘What it Means,’ with the country storytelling voice talking about how (George) McGovern should have been president (in the 1972 election over Richard Nixon). It was pretty ballsy of a country artist to be doing that in 1973, and that song resonated in my head.”
The album also represents a peak moment in the collaboration between Cooley and Hood, who have been playing together more than 30 years after meeting in college. At first their partnership didn’t seem destined to last.
“He was 19 and I was 21 when we first started playing together,” says Hood, who is now 52. “I don’t know if either of us thought we had a long future — five years would be a stretch. There was always undeniable chemistry, but we tried to deny it back in the day. We both sucked early on, but together it had a spark about it. A handful of people liked our first band (Adam’s House Cat) and they would tell us, ‘Someday when you don’t suck, you’ll have something good.’
“We’re way less different now than then. As young men, I approached music from a writer’s perspective and he was coming from a musician’s perspective — there was that clash. I wrote songs, he didn’t. When he pulled out his first song, I was like, ‘Damn!’ Now he writes half our albums, and on this new one, we’re listening to each other’s demos and it occurred to both of us pretty quickly how these songs were interlocking and speaking to each other. Stuff like that makes me really excited to be in this band right now.”
Drive-By Truckers play the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto on Saturday.
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