A Drive-By Truckers Christmas with Patterson Hood

I've long believed that if you can't get a good interview out of
the Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood, you should hang up your
keyboard and mic. The Truckers are a richly layered project with
the loud guitars and pounding drums used to drive a lot of
meatheaded lyrics instead supporting subtle storytelling that
deals class and race as well as rock 'n' roll. For much of their
career, they've used their albums to come to grips with the
American South as it exists today, but the songs sound like
songs, not a sociology textbook. 


I caught up with Hood between legs of the "Southern Rock Opera
Revised 2024" Tour. Southern Rock Opera put the band on
the map in 2001 when it used the story of Lynyrd Skynyrd as the
pry bar to get into some of the issues mattered to them. It
charted the course for the band since then, so it has a lot of
legacy.


I expected the Christmas end of this conversation to be Hood
talking about the Christmas songs he likes and his relationship
to Christmas music, but while prepping for the interview, I
discovered there are two Drive-By Truckers Christmas songs in the
world. Those, obviously, get the 12 Songs breakdown as well.


To see if the Southern Rock Opera tour is coming your way, visit
DriveByTruckers.com. I wrote about the New Orleans stop on the
tour on my Substack page, The Cream. 


UPDATE: Since this episode went up, Hood announced his upcoming
solo album, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, due out
February 21, 2025. The first song, "Werewolf and a Girl," is out
now.