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5 Questions with Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers

Several talented musicians at some time or another have gone along for the ride with Drive-By Truckers. Among them: singer-songwriter Jason Isbell; his former wife, bassist Shonna Tucker; pedal steel player John Neff, and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, who used to record with the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (more on that later).

But at the core of the group, taking turns driving the truck, have always been the band’s co-founders, Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood, who have been playing together for ages, even before the band started in 1996.

We caught up with Hood by phone last month, in advance of Drive-By Truckers’ March 28 show at The Queen. He sounded jovial and energized. It was seven dates into the band’s 2018 tour and just a few nights after their concert in Portland, Ore., which has become Hood’s home after moving there with his family in July 2015—far from his longtime residence in Athens, Ga.

“I love Portland,” Hood says, adding that the transition from Athens was relatively easy. “They’ve got more in common than they do different, honestly. Obviously Portland’s a much bigger city, and I’m enjoying that a lot. But they have a very similar vibe. Athens has more in common with Portland and Brooklyn and Austin than it does most small southern towns.”

Drive-By Truckers is on a roll at the moment. The band is touring for the second time on the success of its most recent album, 2016’s American Band, which not only was one of their most critically-acclaimed albums—appearing on many best-of-the-year lists – but also one of their most overtly political. Sample lyric: “Ronnie Reagan must be spinning his grave; Putin’s on the rise, Ukraine’s under siege; Fascism’s knocking and Trump says ‘Let them in.’”

“This record has legs,” Hood says. “We’re out touring right now, and the route we’re on is really similar to what we did [right after American Band]. We’re playing a lot of the same rooms, and, in some cases, bigger rooms. And in every single town, attendance has been up.”

On that note, here is Hood, talking about the power of song-writing, recording, and his long-standing relationship with his musical partner, Cooley.

O&A: You really do have southern music in your blood. Your dad, David Hood, was the bass player for The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and later was a co-founder of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. What was it like growing up in that environment, with all these famous bands coming in and out (of the studio) and your dad being a southern rock legend in his own right?

Hood: Yeah, I was well aware of what was going on. I really kept up with it as much as I possibly could because I was really interested in it. I always wanted to do this, too. But, at the same time, I wasn’t really there. I was at home; I was a kid; and I wasn’t really allowed to be [at the studio].

Getting info from my dad about what was going on was sometimes next to impossible. I’d have to find out from other means [chuckling]. Because Dad was very much into keeping home separate. He was old school. In his day, you didn’t take work home with you. I hardly saw him pick up an instrument at home or anything like that.

He really didn’t want me to go into music, either, so he wasn’t particularly supportive of me doing it for a long time. Probably up until Southern Rock Opera. [The band’s third album, released in 2001.]

O&A: Soon after Southern Rock Opera, you recorded Dirty South in FAME Studios, which is where your dad and The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section got their start. Was that an attempt by you to tap into or reconnect with that southern rock history?

Hood: Yeah, you know, I grew up practically down the street! I mean I always had wanted to record there. So once we had the means to do it, we just did.

I still now want to record at 3614 now that they’ve reopened that [3614 Jackson Highway, the location of Muscle Shoal Sound Studio, which his father helped start and run]. I really want to go record there. Just as I have a list of places I hope we can record, you know, before time runs out. We got to record at Electric Lady a couple years ago, and that was cool. And we made our last record at Sound Emporium, and that was really great. So I’ve got this list of legendary studios that I’d like to capture while they’re still around.

Drive-By Truckers play to an enthusiastic crowd during their 2016 tour for English Oceans. Photo Jay Blackesberg

O&A: Do you find that recording at different studios affects the vibe or the final output to the point that it influences the overall theme of the record?

Hood: Oh, yeah. I’m sure it does. Everything affects it. At the same time, we made one of my favorite records in my living room. So it has to do with so many things as far as what we bring to the table. But the room can certainly affect things, positively or negatively, depending on the experience.

O&A: You and Mike Cooley co-founded Drive-By Truckers in 1996. But before that you were in a band together called Adam’s House Cat, which Musician magazine had listed as one of its Top Ten Unsigned Bands back in the late ‘80s. What was it that brought you and Mike together, creatively?

Hood: Boredom and being broke. We met as roommates. I moved in with a guy I knew from college, and Mike was his other roommate. And that’s how we met. He had a guitar, and I had a guitar. We were broke, so we didn’t have money to go out. We’d buy a case of really cheap beer and sit in the living room and pick and jam.

I’d always written songs, so I was eager to mostly play my songs anyway, and he didn’t really want to play a bunch of covers. He kind of thought it was cool that I had a bunch of songs. Even before any of us were worth a shit at it, I liked what he did with my songs. I liked his approach to what I was writing. He attacked them in a way that I thought was very appropriate for what I wrote. It was kind of counter-intuitive because he would almost always do the opposite of what I heard in my head, but I liked that.

Shit, we’ve been playing together for 33 years! This is our fourth band. We had two bands between Adam’s House Cat and Drive-By Truckers that were, like, dismal failures. But we just kept coming back to it. It worked.

Ironically, we didn’t necessarily get along back then. It wasn’t like we were unstoppable close friends. We were close, because we played together forever. But it was kind of a—I don’t want to say stormy close—but we were like brothers who didn’t necessarily get along. I’ll put it that way.

It was that kind of relationship for a really long time. We were roommates for three different points of time, but we weren’t necessarily good roommates, either [laughs]. We were roommates that sometimes wanted to kill each other.

It’s all really funny now because I would say we’re super close now. We get along great now. But that was kind of the last piece of the puzzle. We figured out how to play together long before we learned how to get along [laughs].

O&A: You guys recorded the single “Perilous Night” in November. A lot of people have been talking about how political it is, how strongly worded it is. Then you donated proceeds of the 7-inch single to the Southern Poverty Law Center. How does it feel to do that—to come out and really say how you feel and, at the same time help an organization that you believe in like that?

Hood: Right. I mean to me that’s kind of the whole point to what we do. Writing was something I did because it made me feel better. It was a way for me to express what I was thinking about: either what was bothering me, or pissing me off, or hurting my feelings, or making me sad or depressed or whatever. Occasionally what makes me happy. But usually it’s a way of dealing with the more negative things.

So to be able to back it up with some modicum of action was good. Our donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t going to be a game-changer [laughs] Unfortunately. I wish it was. But at least I think we’re doing what we can.

We try to support various good causes. There’s no shortage of people who need support. We’ve been raising money for Nuci’s Space, a suicide-prevention non-profit from Athens, for 20-plus years now. That’s always been our pet cause. But it’s good we’re able to add a few more things, too.

This is the second thing I’ve done for the Southern Poverty Law Center. I did a song for them about a year ago—a solo thing—that was for a little EP they put out with Bonnie Prince Billy, myself, William Tyler and a couple of other artists. Really good artists. I was really proud to be part of that.

And it was the perfect use for a song like “Perilous Night,” because I’m not trying to profit from our country’s current failure of judgment [laughs]. I’m trying to support my family, but I’m happy to do whatever I can that helps fund the resistance.

I really didn’t see that song as being part of the next record. It’s more of an epilogue to the last record.

Patterson Hood and Drive-By Truckers play The Queen on Wednesday, March 28. For more info and tickets, go to TheQueenWilmington.com.

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5 Questions with Andrew Bird

The multi-instrumentalist comes to The Grand on Feb. 23

Los Angeles-based film score composer, multi-instrumentalist and lyricist Andrew Bird picked up a violin for the first time at age 4. As he grew up, he pursued a variety of styles, including early jazz, country blues and gypsy music, melding them into his own brand of pop.  Since beginning his recording career in 1997, he has released more than a dozen albums, including his most recent full-length Are You Serious (2016) and the instrumental Echolocations: River (2017), which is second in a series of short films and recordings documenting site-specific compositions. River was recorded while Bird stood ankle-deep in the Los Angeles River under The Hyperion Bridge. The first installment, Echolocations: Canyon, was released in 2015 after Bird played violin in a canyon in Utah.

Equally creative and candid, Bird hosts a Facebook Live series “Live from the Great Room” which streams from his living room, putting the creative process on display for fans as he performs and converses with friends and collaborators. Previous guests have included Zach Galifianakis, The Lumineers, Fiona Apple, The National, and Jim James of My Morning Jacket.

Out & About caught up with Bird by phone as he prepared for his winter tour, which will hit Wilmington on Friday, Feb. 23, at The Grand at 8 p.m.

O&A: Can you talk about how you choose recording locations for your Echolocations albums like Canyon and Rivers?

Bird: The idea is to go into the spaces and try to be a blank slate and listen to the feedback I’m getting off the surfaces – whatever brings in all the reverberations of the instruments. I take the songs home and create a record around them, reacting to what I hear and remember. It gives me an excuse to improvise and to exercise other ideas. Then, at shows, I basically do what I did when building the record: I react to the film recording and improvise while watching the film.

O&A: Will there be more Echolocations installments?

Bird: These are part of a series of four albums I’m making. The next one is going to be in bunkers built into a coastal hillside during the ‘30s. And the one after that is in an aqueduct in Lisbon, Portugal; the reverberation of that one is insane. They’re all distinct environments.

O&A: Echolocations recordings differ in style from your other albums, which feature vocals and a full band – like 2016’s Are You Serious, which falls between these two instrumental albums. Instead, you approach Echolocations with a minimalist slant with just one instrument – the violin – and one musician – you. What made you take this approach, and did it present any new artistic challenges for you?

Bird: Between records I put out every three or four years, I do these projects that keep me able to exercise other things. A lot of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor when you’re making a pop album, so this just kind of gives me life and the ability to stretch out and play long-form pieces and explore textures and sounds. And to just be a player again. I think otherwise I would be withering creatively.

O&A: What inspired your collaborative Facebook Live series “Live from the Great Room”? What artists are you planning on working with in the future?

Bird: It relates to Echolocations in a sense that it began with the emphasis on being raw. I wanted to bring it back to music and collaboration and invite people into my house and play in my living room and fill that room with sound and have it be raw and live and messy. A lot of people tried to convince me to pre-record it and I thought, ‘I can’t do that, it has to be scrappy and live and reactive.’ It turned out to be more successful and gratifying than I imagined.

I’ve got a list of folks that want to do it, we just gotta find the time. I’m hoping to get back into it in the summer or fall. I’ve been trying to get Randy Newman for a while.

O&A: What’s next for you?

Bird: I’ll be finishing a new record that’s going to come out early next year. It’s on my mind ‘cause I just finished tracking it. It’s gonna sound different than the last one. I’ve been basing the sound off early ‘60s jazz and gospel records that were all recorded in one room. The subject matter is a bit more political, I guess you could say, rather than personal, though it’s never entirely one or the other. I guess the overarching theme is talking about how we need our enemies or how we seem to thrive off of conflict.

I’m also doing a run of symphonic shows in the fall, where I’ll be playing with the National Symphony Orchestra – that’s a totally new venture.

Don’t miss Andrew Bird at The Grand on Friday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. For tickets, go to thegrandwilmington.org.

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5 Questions with…

Josh David Barrett of The Wailers

It’s hard to pinpoint another touring musician who has bigger shoes to fill right now than Josh David Barrett.

For the past three years, Barrett has been singing lead vocals for The Wailers, the legendary reggae band that backed Bob Marley from 1974 until his untimely death in 1981, and whose mastery of laid-back island grooves helped sell more than 100 million recordings worldwide.

It’s hardly lost on Barrett that, as a musician, he is in an extraordinarily esteemed and yet possibly precarious situation: performing with the world’s most recognized reggae band where once stood an artist that The New York Times suggested “may the most influential musician in the second half of the [20th] century” —the same artist who wrote all but one-half of a song on Exodus, a reggae masterpiece that Time Magazine declared “Best Album of the Century.”

At the same time, it’s not like Barrett was simply a name randomly picked from a hat-full of possible Bob Marley replacements. Sure, it helped that Barrett is a distant cousin of longtime Wailers bandleader Aston “Familyman” Barrett and that two previous additions to the band were descendants of original members. But of equal importance, Josh David Barrett already had made a name for himself as a multi-instrumentalist, recording and performing with other multi-talents such as Kanye, Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones.

“My musical journey has been a long and blessed one,” Barrett says. “I’m grateful to have all those experiences to add to this current one.”

Barrett is looking forward to The Wailers’ new release on Feb. 6—Bob Marley’s birthday and just two days before the band’s much-anticipated performance at The Queen in Wilmington, a town Marley once called home.

We spoke to Barrett by phone last month, and here is what he had to say—in his Jamaican accent—about his upbringing, his outlook with The Wailers, and his Rastafari faith.

O&A: You were really on your way before you joined The Wailers. As a competent and up-and-coming musician you played with artists like Common, Mary J. Blige, Q-Tip and Solange. Which musical experience was the most important to you before joining The Wailers?

Barrett: I would have to say growing up and playing in church because I feel spiritual music is the essence of Rasta music as a brand of reggae. When one says reggae music, I want to think Rasta. It’s the spiritual “one love, one God, one aim, one destiny.” That is what we inspire and aspire to bring to the people. I think that is the most important part of my upbringing: that togetherness, that oneness, that making one sound giving glory to the Most High, Jah Rastafari.

O&A: You make a direct connection between [your upbringing] and what you are doing now. What does that connection mean to you? What does singing in The Wailers mean to you?
Barrett: Well, it means a lot because reggae music has three elements where we speak of as Rasta: word, song and power. The word is the message; the sound is the music; and the power is when we come together and sing and dance, as Bob Marley said, jammin’ in the name of the Lord.
That is what I find most valuable, that unity, how it brings people together throughout the four corners of the world. Seeing how it inspires people and liberates people—to be a messenger of that is a joy. To me, that is the greatest job me could ever have.

O&A: I know there are a lot of other reggae artists, and I’m not trying to diminish any of their roles. But Bob Marley is the king of reggae. How did you feel about trying to step into that role at first?
Barrett: I hold a great deal of respect for the legacy of Bob Marley and The Wailers. For years I felt the best way I could express my appreciation was through music—my own music—with which I’d formed a band called Judah Tribe with [other musicians]. Through that, we were able to express our joys, our woes and our great appreciation for this great work, the great message, Rastafari. So it was a natural progression.

Learning and understanding every day the magnitude of [Bob Marley] being the first one to do this great work, to make it reach where it did reach, is very important. And I understand, just a little bit, about the pressure that Bob Marley and the Wailers had to go through. I mean they were shot at for this music, for this struggle.

And I understand not everybody love reggae music or love Rastas when you are out there saying “one love.” So we’re out there to encourage those who love justice and hate aggression and counteract all the works of evil that seek to divide humanity.

O&A: How do you see the music you are performing fitting in with what’s going on in our country and throughout the world?

Barrett: As much as we love this music, this music and this struggle was born out of protest. While there is a joy to singing these songs, ina myself, I wish we didn’t have to sing these songs. But this message is still needed. Not all of it—some of it is more joyous. But when you sing “Them Belly Full” or “Heathen,” those are things we have to sing because we still see it prevalent on Earth. So the music is needed, and the message is needed.

The world I don’t feel is balanced. And if we are not wise, we’ll end up going backwards. All of us must take it upon ourselves to be a living example, be a Bob Marley, wherever you are in your sphere, in your work. It’s gonna take that to win this struggle.

O&A: Where would you like to see this go, playing with The Wailers? Do you have any long-term goals?
Barrett: Wow… I have a dream that one day The Wailers will play in Ethiopia when the royal dynasty of Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen is restored. That would be a glorious day, and I would love to be there as a participant in this great affair and blessing being that, for Rasta, Ethiopian history is crucial. We don’t want to convert anyone, but correct the abuse. We want to see that world power, that knowledge, that grace, restored in Ethiopia with we, the singers and players of instruments to celebrate this great occasion.

Catch Josh David Barrett and The Wailers at The Queen on Thursday, Feb. 8, for what will surely be a memorable performance. For details, go to TheQueenWilmington.com.