Drive-By Truckers – Holding on loosely
“That song came from me seeing how it’s very easy to not hold yourself to the highest standards,” Isbell says. “A lot of the songs we do are about not censoring yourself, and about living every day as if it were your last — and that is a good idea. But there’s a line. Most of the time every day isn’t your last, and the condition you wake up in is something you’re gonna have to deal with, and I know a lot of people who’ve ignored that at some point. But every once in a while you need to step back and realize what you’re working toward and what you have in front of you.”
More than its predecessors, A Blessing And A Curse steps well outside the Truckers’ geography. Unlike The Dirty South, which threw a hard light on the constituents of the same unromantic poverty bracket that Katrina brought into the national consciousness, the characters in Blessing are more broadly drawn and could hail from anywhere.
“Goodbye” is a somber send-off to a long-lost friend; “Space City” is Cooley’s tribute to a late grandmother. There’s dark comedy, too: Hood’s “Aftermath USA” is a stomper about blearily waking up to a house full of morning-after carnage, but its title suggests Hood may be hinting around about politics. “Crystal meth in the bathtub, blood splattered in my sink,” Hood howls, “Laying around in the aftermath, it’s all worse than you think.”
The album closes with “A World Of Hurt”, in which Hood speaks the conversational verses and sings the simple title-line chorus. The song came to him on the fly late at night after everyone had gone home; he convinced the assistant engineer to stick around to help demo it. Turning off his mesquite-grilled howl, Hood delivers a sober monologue in which he talks a friend down off the ledge: “Once upon a time my advice to you would have been go out and find yourself a whore, but I guess I’ve grown up, because I don’t give that kind of advice anymore.”
One of several Hood contributions that deal with the specter of suicide, it’s a surprisingly intimate coda that’s thick with the late-night feel, particularly when Hood drops the bluntly optimistic capper: “It’s great to be alive.”
Hood says the song “just hit like the better ones do for me, like somebody in outer space plays a record and my antenna hears it,” Hood said. “I heard it in my head played through, and tried to write it as fast as I could, so I could catch it before it was gone. I was afraid if I went home, I’d wake up and it’d be just a bunch of words on a page.”
Last year may have begun with at least the prospect of a vacation, but there’s no such hope for that in 2006. The Truckers did their usual workaholic thing in mid-March at South By Southwest — on Thursday they did four sets, including a crack acoustic one at the New West party in the late afternoon. Next up is an extensive nationwide tour that will include a string of dates with Son Volt.
After that, things get a little cloudier. Hood is waiting to release his second solo album, Murdering Oscar And Other Love Songs, until early next year; currently he’s co-producing the fourth record by Alabama band Dexateens at Barbe’s studio in Athens. He also co-produced Isbell’s solo record, which is finished but needs a label.
Hood also hints at one day returning to “other projects I’ve had to put on hold for a long time,” and claims he’ll take an “extended leave” from the band next year. In addition, he and Cooley have discussed doing something together: “We have a record in mind,” Hood says; “not a Trucker record, but the two of us and whoever we get to back us up.” (When asked what makes those songs different from Truckers songs, Cooley responds: “They’re just too damn old.”)
But this year is all about the Truckers. If they were a band that spent a lot of time assessing itself, this would be a good time to do it, but their plans, Isbell says, are simple as ever. “You can pretty much look back at all of your favorite bands and find the point in their careers where they made their biggest mistakes. [We’ll] just not do that,” Isbell said, with a mighty laugh. “We don’t want to make Bridges To Babylon.”
Hood thinks in perhaps slightly broader terms, yet never strays far from his perspective. “The bigger rooms we’re playing are cool, but I’d like to see the record sales go up a little bit more,” he says. “But we’re in a pretty good way. The shows are reaping the benefits from taking some time off. The energy level is so much higher now. Things are pretty good right now.” And it’s great to be alive.
Jeff Vrabel is a Florida-based writer who’s currently running an accidental experiment to see what happens when you make your two-year-old son listen relatively constantly to the Drive-By Truckers. His work has appeared in Playboy, Billboard, the Chicago Sun-Times, PopMatters, Modern Bride (long story), and Indy Men’s Magazine.