Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood’s fourth solo album and first in over 12 years, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams sees the veteran singer, guitarist, and songwriter exploring his youth and young manhood in a collection unlike anything in his ever-evolving catalogue. A baroque American song cycle spanning the time between early childhood and leaving his rural hometown in search of his musical dreams, the album gathers songs that have amassed over the remarkably prolific songwriter’s career, many of which provided him with distraction and creative sustenance during lockdown, others which have resided among his notebooks for years.
“This record has all these kinds of unintended themes,” Hood says. “It’s all subconscious, because I didn’t really set out with an agenda, writing-wise. It really just kind of occurred to me when I was actually putting it all together, just how much it seems to have a theme to it.”
The dozen years since his last extracurricular outing, 2012’s Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, had seen Hood accumulate a cache of material which did not quite fit into the Drive-By Truckers canon, songs which he set aside for “if and when” he got around to another solo project. Kept off the road during the 2020 lockdown, he found himself recording demos in his Portland, OR attic, without a clear plan but thinking “maybe this might be worth pursuing at some point.”
Hood had moved to Portland with his family in 2013 and swiftly found a place among the Rose City’s thriving music scene, including a friendship forged with producer/musician Chris Funk (The Decemberists). Having long discussed collaborating, in 2023 the two artists’ typically stacked calendars finally allowed them the opportunity to team up and they set to work recording what Hood intended to be “a bigger departure” from Drive-By Truckers and his previous solo efforts than ever before.
“The band has been in such a good place that I hadn’t really thought in terms of doing anything outside of the Truckers anytime soon,” Hood says. “I decided if I ever was going to do another solo record, I wanted it to be pretty different than the band, as different as it can be.”
Working largely at a number of Portland studios, Hood accomplished his goal, in part by writing much of the album on piano in a vigorous attempt to expand his parameters in new, heretofore uncharted, directions. While he planned to bring in a professional pianist for the recording sessions, Funk, eager to push his friend from his comfort zone, encouraged Hood to play the parts himself.
Hood further took the occasion to explore sounds outside the boundaries and obligations of his day job, deviating from Drive-By Truckers’ traditionally guitar-driven palette to craft richly textured arrangements marked by the inclusion of strings, woodwinds, and vintage analog synthesizers.
“There’s really not a lot of guitar work on this album,” he says. “I’m only playing electric on a few things. That was fun too, because, I’m in a really kickass guitar band so it’s great to do something outside of that. Everything ultimately suited the project. It’s not like these decisions were made just for the sake of it. There was a point to it, for sure.”
Auxiliary backing was provided by a stellar cast of friends and musicians including fellow Alabama native Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee), Brad and Phil Cook (Megafaun), Kevin Morby, Wednesday, Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, The Blasters), Brad Morgan and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland), Nate Query (The Decemberists), Steve Drizos (Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormons), Daniel Hunt (Neko Case, M Ward), and Stuart Bogie (The Hold Steady, Goose).
But as Hood says, “Everything was built around the songs.” To some extent, he notes, the album moves backwards in time, with “The Exploding Trees” being the most contemporary event in the timeline of the record, inspired in part by Hood’s own short story chronicling a natural disaster that occurred in his North Alabama hometown just as he turned 30 and relocated to Athens, GA where Drive-By Truckers were co-founded in 1996.
With its powerful textural clarity and Hood’s literary strengths at the fore, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams emerges as a staggering investigation into how time can shed light on the recesses of memory, revealing this exceptionally gifted songwriter’s resolute inclination to look back through the golden haze to grapple with the darkness and secret truths that perhaps weren’t understood or reckoned with at the time. As he has throughout his career - from Drive-By Truckers’ ceaseless investigation into American values and culture to his solo body of work’s autobiographical meditations - Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams sees Patterson Hood once again stripping away the facade of things to get to the core, lifting up life’s rock to see what lies underneath.
“You remember things one way,” he says, “but when you really dip into it, when you really look back, the world was a different place. Things were accepted that wouldn’t be accepted now and things you didn’t understand then make sense now.
“I don’t know if there was anything I set out to do on this record as much as it just kind of worked out that way. You know, there are a lot a lot of happy accidents in this record.”
Brudenell Presents...
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