It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and Patterson Hood appears via Zoom from his Portland, Oregon kitchen in the midst of brewing coffee. He asks how my holiday went, to which I reply that the Ruggiero Household hosted 31 humans.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he laughs. “We only had seven of us. And we do usually end up with some stragglers that have nowhere else to go. We’re collectors of lost souls. But it was a lot of cooking and prep!”
Though he’s best known as the co-founder/singer/guitarist/songwriter for the Drive-By Truckers, Patterson Hood (like fellow co-founder/singer/guitarist/songwriter Mike Cooley) has also maintained a parallel solo career. One that finds him alone onstage with little more than a guitar telling his stories sans the “rock show” experience of a Truckers gig.
A short run of shows this month will find him solo at the Dosey Doe on December 13. Well, almost solo.
“For the Texas dates, I’m gonna have Scott Danbom from the band Centro-Matic with me. He’s picking me up at the airport in Fort Worth and driving around. He’s played on some of my solo stuff, and it’s gonna be a treat.”
As to what kind of charge a solo gig offers him personally that a Truckers show doesn’t, Hood says it’s all about a closer connection to the audience through his storytelling in song.
And Patterson Hood is one of music’s most gifted and literate songwriters of character-driven tunes whether the subject is himself, his family, historical figures, or fictional folks with deep and sometimes dangerous pasts—and presents.
“It’s kind of the opposite end of the thing I do. It’s a lot of the same songs, but there’s more banter and storytelling. And it’s not loud, because the Truckers are pretty damn loud!” he laughs.
“With this, I had to learn how to make people feel certain ways without the Big Loud Thing. So, it’s intimate. And it’s a challenge. It’s probably been more than 20 years since I played a solo show in Houston at the Continental Club.”
As for the setlist, fans can expect Truckers songs, covers, and material from Hood’s three solo records: Killers and Stars (2001), Murdering Oscar (and other love songs) (2009), and Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance (2012).
He’ll also preview some tracks from his upcoming new solo record, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams. It’s set for release in February.
Hood says it will be a very autobiographical record, based on his childhood and coming of age, with most material being written in the past decade. Though “Airplane Screams” was penned just over four decades ago.
The first single, “A Werewolf and a Girl,” is already out. A duet with Lydia Loveless, it’s based on the real-life rocky romance between a teenage Hood and his then-girlfriend. It mentions the movie An American Werewolf in London and the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You record, which sets the timeline in 1981.
It’s got some raw sexual imagery, so we must ask: Has Hood warned or at least mentioned the song to the now-mature lady in question?
“Uh…I haven’t warned her!” Hood offers. “We’re friends, and I think very highly of her. The last time I talked to her was in 2020 right before lockdown. I think she’ll be fine with it,” he says, a bit unsurely. “But sometimes things come out different than you intend them to be. I thought it was pretty sweet! I can’t imagine she’ll have anything except a smile for it. Though I would hate to be wrong on that!
Hood says that it’s also a bit of departure musically in that it’s more piano-based. Growing up, he says that he loved the music of ivory tinklers like Elton John.
“People think of him as an older icon. But in the ‘70s, albums like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road were big rock records. And that’s when I learned to write songs,” he says. “Todd Rundgren was also a huge influence. There’s also a lot of analog synthesizers, like on ‘Frankenstein’ by the Edgar Winter Group. I love that shit!”
Of course, being mainly a guitar player, Hood believed “that shit” would be played in the studio by a more experienced piano man. He was wrong.
“My producer, Chris Funk, informed me about six months before we recorded ‘By the way, I hope you’re practicing, because you’re playing piano on the record.’ I said ‘No, I’m not!’” Hood laughs. “But I’m glad he made me do it, because otherwise I wouldn’t have.” There are also woodwinds, baritone sax, and even a flute in the instrumentation mix.
He’ll also be on the road with a full, hand-picked band, The Sensurrounders, with the tour for that album starts in March.
Also released now is the record’s album cover.
It’s a somewhat disturbing painting by Frances Thrasher, a young artist from Athens, Georgia and a Hood family friend. He saw the image at one of her gallery shows and knew immediately he wanted it for the album. “I honestly didn’t have a second choice,” he notes in the press release.
“She’s the same age as my oldest [daughter] and painted that when she was like 17. It blew me way,” he continues on Zoom. “I really felt that was the cover. And then I realized that it’s the second of my four solo albums to have a lobotomy theme on the cover. I don’t know what that says about me!”
Killers and Stars featured a drawing of Frances Farmer with a small knife. Farmer was a troubled movie actress of the ‘30s and ‘40s who developed psychiatric issues and erratic behavior, was hospitalized, and subjected to shock therapy. Whether or not she had an actual lobotomy has not been definitively established, though the 1982 biopic Frances starring Jessica Lange shows her undergoing the controversial procedure.
In Drive-By Truckers world, the band recently completed the highly successful Southern Rock Opera Revisited tour in which they performed their celebrated 2001 concept album in (almost) its entirety with related tracks from their catalog. Hood and Cooley spoke with the Houston Press prior to their June 2024 gig here at the House of Blues.
Unfortunately, as our review of the show detailed, a portion of a Houston audience showed its ass again by talking loudly among themselves while Hood was introducing and explaining songs. This caused him to chastise the crowd more than once, and at one point simply cutting short the song they were playing at the time.
It seems like part of a new trend in bad behavior, as other even bigger stars have been subjected to selfie-taking talkers and idiots who throw things on stage or at the performer.
When asked if he’s seeing more of that in person, Hood answers cautiously.
“I hate to say this out loud, especially as I’m about to come back to town and don’t want to piss off a bunch of Texans, but that was really about the only night like that on the tour. I don’t know. There must have been something in the air,” he says.
“Which is odd, because we always have good times in Houston. But it only takes a handful of dickheads to make a night seem like it wasn’t a good one.”
He adds that his relationship to the record—written and put down during some of the band’s most harrowing and financially skint times—has changed.
“It’s made me appreciate it more. I’ve always been proud of it, because the damn thing almost killed us,” he says. “It’s still not my favorite thing we’ve done, but it took a long time to get over some of the things that happened when we were recording it. We didn’t have any money, we were fighting, and our personal lives were falling apart.”
Finally, while the Drive-By Truckers have always written about political topics in their music, a recent string of three albums, American Band (2016), The Unraveling and The New OK (both 2020) are of note with songs about contemporary things like Donald Trump, Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter, immigration issues, and church/school shootings. Post-Presidential election, he doesn’t see things moving in a positive direction.
“Racists didn’t die off, they’ve come back pretty strong,” Hood says, noting that he recently got some hate mail from a MAGA man. He had walked out of their show at the Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium when Hood compared Donald Trump to the late segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace.
“The things I’m seeing now, it’s right out of the old Wallace playbook,” Hood says, a bit dejectedly. “I saw how it affected my home state of Alabama, and in some ways it still hasn’t overcome that. I hate to see it happen more now on a national scale.”
Patterson Hood plays 7:30 p.m. on Friday, December 13, at the Dosey Doe Big Barn, 25911 I-45. For more information call 281-367-3774 or visit DoseyDoeTickets.com. Ticket includes a three-course meal and soft drinks. Aaron Goodvin opens. $78-$118.
For more information on Patterson Hood, visit PattersonHood.com
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
