Drive-By Truckers: Everything Is Broken
Overcoming a bad case of writer’s block, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley bounce back with the most politically charged album of Drive-By Truckers’ politically charged career.
Patterson Hood was admittedly a “weird kid”—the kind of eight year old who came home from school and flipped on the Watergate hearings. “I actually got in trouble in fourth grade for writing a paper about Watergate that was very critical of the president,” he recalls. “This was an Alabama public school, and my teacher did not like it. She sent a note home to my parents, and it was one of the few times where they actually took my side. They were like, ‘We’re OK with this.’”
Almost five decades later, not much has changed for the Drive-By Truckers songwriter—instead of scribbling about the political corruption of Richard Nixon on notebook paper, he’s using his Southern rock band’s 12th LP to document the horror, divisiveness and all-around insanity of living through the Donald Trump era.
Hood and longtime bandmate Mike Cooley, who formed the group in 1996, have written longer-form conceptual pieces before— including their 2001 opus Southern Rock Opera, which uses the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash as a springboard into misconceptions about the American South. But the thematic connective tissue of this year’s The Unraveling is essentially “everything is broken.” Across nine cathartic cuts, the band touches on mass shootings (the folky “Thoughts and Prayers”), migrant separation (the soulful “Babies in Cages”), drug abuse (the tightly coiled rocker “Heroin Again”), bloodshed born from white privilege (the somber “Grievance Merchants”), domestic violence (the thundering “Slow Ride Argument”) and shriveling job prospects in dilapidated small towns (the twangy ballad “21st Century USA”).
“We’re very political people,” Hood says. “I consider Southern Rock Opera to be a very political record. [2004’s] The Dirty South was a political record that pissed off a lot of people because we were playing those songs during the Bush versus Kerry election cycle. We had rednecks in backward baseball caps shooting us birds when we played ‘Puttin’ People on the Moon.’ We’re not new to that rodeo. I grew up during the Vietnam War and I still remember that time, even though I was a kid. But this is different from anything I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.”
The Unraveling is the most nakedly political album in the Truckers catalog—more directly tapped into modern angst than 2016’s American Band, which plunged headfirst into gun violence and the lingering stain of racism. But the LP didn’t start out that way. In fact, Hood initially envisioned a reactionary project that veered somewhere new. Then Trump happened.
“We all grew up Neil Young fans with that whole notion of ricocheting from ditch to ditch, as he would put it,” he says. “The first instinct after American Band was, ‘We don’t want to do that kind of record again.’ But when we made American Band, we had no idea who was going to win the presidency. That wasn’t even a worst-case scenario that crossed anyone’s mind. We finished tracking it before the first primary of the 2016 election. It came out within about a week or two of when the ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’ tape surfaced. It didn’t even occur to me that he would go all the way. I was as wrong about that as anything in my life.
“For the first time, I took a year off from songwriting after I wrote [American Band’s] ‘Ever South,’” he continues. “It was almost exactly a year later that I started writing [the 2017 single] ‘The Perilous Night,’ and it took me eight months to finish that— that was the day after [Trump] did the press conference after the Charlottesville [protests] and said, ‘Both sides are to blame,’ and I was just in a rage writing that.”
The band originally planned to release “The Perilous Night” as an “epilogue” to that previous period of songwriting. But they found themselves newly fueled by the social injustice they were witnessing, and their plans changed.
“We thought, ‘We’ll move on to something different,’” Hood says. “But then they started throwing babies in fucking cages! One thing kind of led to another. We all write what we feel, and we all feel very strongly about the things going on. Even though our first instinct was to head in a different direction, there was a point where we all came to the conclusion: ‘We can’t. This is happening, and this is affecting us and the people we love. This isn’t political— it’s personal.’”
At the same time, Hood and Cooley were also battling the worst writer’s block of their careers, and that brought the entire band to a halt: Throughout the Truckers’ numerous lineup shifts, including lengthy stints from both bassist Shonna Tucker and singer/ guitarist Jason Isbell, the duo have remained the group’s central voices, penning the overwhelming bulk of the material. Yet, they have opposite tactics for processing that struggle.
“Patterson will write his way out of writer’s block,” says producer David Barbe, who’s essentially a non-touring member of the group, having worked with the band since Southern Rock Opera. “He’s always been the more prolific of the two. Cooley writes more in fits of inspiration, and sometimes you get records like [2008’s] Brighter Than Creation’s Dark or [2014’s] English Oceans that have six or seven Cooley songs. Other times, it’s just not happening. He’s not Burger King. He’s not ‘write to order.’ But he’s also a home-run hitter. His percentage of great songs might be higher than anyone else I know. He doesn’t write so many songs, but when he lays one on you, it’s usually something special.”
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But that magic wasn’t happening this time around—at least not at first. “There have always been periods of [writer’s block], but this was a really difficult one,” Cooley admits. “At different points in your life, you have to figure out where things, like your job and relationships, fit into where you are now. Maybe I’m at one of those points where I have to reevaluate my relationship with what kind of songs I write, how I do it, where it comes from and everything else in my life. But the closer we got to recording, the more I started stressing.”
Cooley pushed through and wound up with two tracks—maybe below his normal quota, but this time he batted a thousand. The biggest stunner is “Grievance Merchants,” which he says touches on the “replacement conspiracy” that many white supremacists chanted about during the volatile, violent Charlottesville protests of August 2017. The original spark came after the deadly Parkland, Fla. shooting the following February.
“I wrote it mainly after Parkland, when those kids got so active and made such an impression on the whole argument,” he says. “Then I started noticing all those [mass shooters] who fit the same pattern: They’re young white boys raised to believe the world is theirs for the taking and, all of the sudden, it’s not just laying down for them. When you’d get a look at their browser histories and social media activity, it’s all the usual suspects. As far as this type of deranged person who commits an act of heinous violence: mystery solved.”
Hood initially had trouble figuring out “what [he] even wanted the record to be.” After writing some songs that didn’t feel quite right at the time, he plowed ahead until one showed him the way: “21st Century USA,” which came together quickly on a day off from touring outside the small town of Gillette, Wyo. (Despite the reference to Gillette razors, that company isn’t connected to the city.)
“The first verse is basically what I walked past from the Holiday Inn Express we were staying at to the—three-star on Yelp— Mexican restaurant we ate lunch at,” he says of the lyrics, which communicate a clear sadness with references to bleak fast-food chains and dying local businesses being crushed by Amazon. “I was hearing it in my head. It was freezing cold—January in Wyoming. We’d been in Sioux Falls the night before, where it was below zero. We’re all Southerners, so it’s still an adjustment. We were all bundled up and walking out of the motel, and our bus was parked under this giant billboard for Oasis Tanning Salon. I wrote the first verse on a napkin at a restaurant and ran back to the hotel and finished the song in about an hour. Once I played it back to myself on guitar, it was like, ‘Wow, this is the path forward.’”
Hood’s songs kept flowing. After initial sessions at Barbe’s Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, Ga., the band—including drummer Brad Morgan, bassist Matt Patton and keyboardist Jay Gonzalez—traveled to Memphis for a productive run at Sam Phillips Recording. The space became a character in the album with its glorious echo chambers and workmanlike vibe. “There are people who work in offices there,” says Barbe. “There’s real run-ofthe-mill grocery store coffee. It wasn’t ‘artisan’ everything.”
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The process was seamless: Hood says the giddy band, in prime “road mode,” blitzed through the Phillips sessions by working “around the clock for seven days” and wound up with 18 total songs. (They only used half of those for The Unraveling, deciding that the others—which they plan to revisit—didn’t fit the same vibe.) The quintet, now the longest-lasting lineup in Truckers history, are way past the days of studio bickering. “You get to a point to where it’s just not that big of a deal,” Cooley says.
But it wasn’t always this easy. “Probably Southern Rock Opera was the last time we had those [kind of tensions], and that was almost daily,” Cooley continues. “But that was a different band, different time, different kind of pressure.”
“Making The Unraveling and Southern Rock Opera were opposite experiences,” Hood adds. “Writing Southern Rock Opera was really fun. We were all still touring in vans, touring all the time, but we were still new enough to it that it was really exciting being in the van 200 days a year. We were still young enough where sleeping on the floor next to the cat box was something you laughed about, something you did in order to do this thing we loved. We were in our 30s, whereas most of the bands on the circuit were in their 20s. We were regarded as these older dudes, but we used that to our advantage: ‘We’re these older dudes who are gonna come out here and whip your ass!’ We didn’t have time to waste. We had this crazy idea [for Southern Rock Opera] and everybody we’d tell it to said it was the stupidest idea they’d ever heard. We’d tell everybody whose floor we slept on, and we’d watch their eyes glass over. It became a ‘we’ll show you’ thing. We knew there was something good in that crazy idea, and we knew we were going to make a great record out of it—we just didn’t know how.
“When it came time to record it, we had no money and didn’t have a deal,” he continues. “We were all broke, and we’d been on the road long enough that our relationships at home were breaking down. Things weren’t so fun anymore. We were recording in the upstairs of a uniform shop in Birmingham, Ala. during a heat wave—without air conditioning—and we couldn’t even have a fan on because the microphones could hear it. We were up there all night, every night, trying to record this thing that was way more ambitious than we had the means to pull off. We all had spent so many years telling everybody we were going to do it that we felt like we couldn’t back down. We felt trapped by our own ambitions. It was brutal. We’d come home for a break and see that our significant other had thrown our stuff on the curb and it’d gotten rained on. I was going through a divorce and went to buy gas for the van, and my credit card had been canceled. Six months later, when we were trying to come up with money to mix the thing and finish it, we were barely speaking to each other. When you go through that much stuff, you start taking it out on each other, whether you want to or not. Fortunately, we survived it and came out the other end, and it changed our lives. It’ll make a great book someday.”
Before they author that epic tome, Truckers’ songwriters will continue to throw their flashlights on the darkness that surrounds them—no matter who’s in the White House. Cooley, for one, is confident he’ll never write intentionally optimistic songs to combat that evil: “Hell no!” he interjects with a laugh. “I was writing really dark stuff back in the Clinton years when the radio was full of happy hippie-drippy bullshit. I’d love to be able to do that thing—those songs that sound so happy but are darker than anything. Those are the best, but I can’t do that.” “I can’t imagine not writing about this stuff,” adds Hood.
“I can’t imagine not being outraged by all of these things. I can’t imagine being a writer and not writing about it.”
