Patterson Hood is staring right into a Zoom window from a comfortable-looking chair in a wood-panelled room at his house in Portland, Oregon. “I’m positively happier once I’m writing so much – I believe my mind works higher, at the very least,” he says, after which an alarm goes off on his telephone, reminding him that he’s bought an interview proper about now.

“However,” he continues, the digital squawk virtually pre-empting his subsequent level, “once I’m in writing mode, it’s exhausting to perform with my different obligations, like being a superb guardian, or doing what I have to do round the home. When the antenna is up, I discover the songs. However every little thing else is simply…”

Hood writes a whole lot of songs. He all the time has performed. Over the previous 30 years and alter, his prolific inventive drive has amounted to tons of and tons of of them. They’ve been an outlet or a dumping floor relying on the second, however they’ve additionally routinely supplied a contemporary set of eyes on occasions that will have in any other case slipped between the cracks of a life lived exhausting.

A lot of them have turn out to be shit-kicking country-rock staples due to his deeply influential run fronting Drive-By Truckers, whereas others have taken root in a solo discography that spans richly-drawn narrative work and brittle, weak missives from nearer to house.

Operating in parallel to each of those by traces, although, is another historical past made up of writing that’s all the time looking out for someplace to belong. It’s on this hinterland that you just’ll discover the place to begin for his fantastic new report Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams. “Via the years, I’ve seen that there’s all the time a few songs on each report, normally songs of mine, that I’m actually happy with however as soon as the report comes out, they by no means get performed,” he says.

“I believe it’s the character of how our present is, the rooms we play,” he continues. “These songs are usually just a little extra, nicely, just like the songs on this report. They get misplaced within the shuffle due to the quantity of massive, enjoyable, boisterous rock that happens at a Drive-By Truckers present. I began retaining a file of them. I’ll simply sit on it till there’s the precise place for it.”

Backwards Growing older

On Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams, his first solo report since he put out Warmth Lightning Rumbles within the Distance virtually 13 years in the past, Hood leans exhausting into this could-have-been actuality, rediscovering the blood and guts in mothballed emotions. There are moments of lockdown inspiration right here, slotted alongside writing that dates again to formative experiences from many years in the past, when he was a child turning into an grownup. “I believe each occasion on the report takes place earlier than I flip 30, and a whole lot of it’s from my childhood and teenage years,” he says. “It’s a coming of age story type of advised backwards.”

Texturally adventurous and melodically playful, Hood’s writing right here is attuned to concepts of change as a lot because it’s prepared to confess that what goes round, comes round. Life, he appears to recommend, is stuffed with little reminders of the place we’ve been – it’s as much as us whether or not we select to concentrate to them. However when he walked into the studio to start out work on Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams, he had no alternative however to reckon this concept. Settling in for day one, he couldn’t assist however discover the glistening aftermath of an ice storm blanketing every little thing outdoors. “We don’t get them right here in Portland,” he says. “As far north as we’re, our climate isn’t actually any extra winter-like than once I lived in Alabama.”

Hood just lately turned 60, that means that it was half his life in the past when he drove by an identical storm heading out of Athens, Georgia on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, previous the remnants of exploding timber attributable to the acute climate. He’d spent a day and night time within the metropolis with the particular person he was courting on the time and a good friend, pinballing between bars and catching Cracker and Counting Crows enjoying on the 40 Watt.

“A few weeks later I bought supplied a job so I moved there,” he says. “A lot of every little thing I’m identified for got here out of me shifting to Athens. My thirtieth birthday actually was an enormous turning level.”

Georgia On My Thoughts

It was in Athens that Hood and longtime good friend Mike Cooley co-founded Drive-By Truckers in 1996, releasing the landmark alt-country textual content Southern Rock Opera 5 years later like a rock thrown right into a pond, its ripples rising in dimension over time.

The band’s affect may be traced by most of the friends that dot Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams’ tracklist, from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, Xandy Chelmis and MJ Lenderman on the barn-burning rocker The Van Pelt Events to Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield on the lilting The Forks of Cypress.

In inviting these youthful voices to hitch him, too, Hood neatly skirts any accusations of middle-aged navel-gazing. Of their fingers his story feels alive and partly unwritten.

“There have been some instances the place we’d ship the observe out to the place folks lived,” he says. “The day I bought the observe again with Katie and Morby’s guitar half was enjoyable, listening to what they’d performed. I bought to be within the studio with Wednesday. I used to be in Athens for the Truckers’ annual homecoming exhibits. Wednesday was enjoying the 40 Watt, and I requested them if they’d come do one thing whereas they had been on the town.

“They came to visit early the subsequent morning. It was actually enjoyable watching them try this. They solely had a pair hours, and so they knocked it out in time to eat lunch with me earlier than they needed to drive to play their present that night time.”

Of all of the collaborators right here, although, one stands out. Mirroring the songs in his recordsdata, Hood had been ready for the precise time to work with producer Chris Funk, whom he’d met a decade in the past whereas spending six weeks at a Portland Airbnb together with his household in a dry run for making the transfer to the Pacific Northwest.

“We had been launched by mutual associates so he took me out to a bar,” Hood recollects. “We had just a few drinks, and hit it off. Instantly I felt like we had been lifelong associates. As soon as I moved right here, each time I’d play a solo present within the Northwest, he would sit in with me. We now have such nice chemistry – as a lot as I’ve with my bandmates within the Truckers, however it goes in a unique course.”

Consolation In Sound

Working at a number of studios throughout Portland, Funk repeatedly pushed his good friend out of his consolation zone. He insisted that Hood play piano on the report, for instance, and helped to create a multifaceted palette that allowed for the LP’s many friends to search out area to work, eschewing the fuzzed-out sounds that may have been a consolation blanket. “I’m not going to place any nice piano participant out of enterprise however I’m proud that I used to be in a position to make it work with out having to Frankenstein it to loss of life,” Hood says.

From a guitar viewpoint, too, this tiered strategy had a knock on impact on Hood’s enjoying. Each interjection, from the decaying noise-tape notes of Exploding Timber to the trembling licks that reply Lydia Loveless’s voice on the standout A Werewolf and a Woman, is intentional. They’re determinedly a part of the entire slightly than boisterously clawing for consideration. “I get to do a whole lot of the opposite stuff as a result of I’m in a really loud guitar band,” Hood says. “It was a aware effort. There’s no scarcity of loud guitars in my life. So it was good to have a venture that saved that as a replacement. It jumps out [when needed].”

Inevitably, this meant that the gear Hood depends on to make the massive noises of his day job was relegated to a supporting position, with extra time spent knitting collectively 12 string passages with Nashville-tuned chord washes in pursuit of a “Mott the Hoople sound or one thing” than kicking out the jams. “I believe I performed my SG on a pair songs,” he says. “It’s the guitar I play most for the Truckers, however I didn’t do a lot on this.”

As an alternative, he bought into it with a few acoustics made by one other Athens graduate in luthier Scott Baxendale, who’s spent the previous few years of a decades-long profession in guitar repairs “remanufacturing” previous devices such because the Concord that Hood threaded all through Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams.

“Scott’s wonderful,” Hood says. “He’s out of Albuquerque now. He constructed a guitar for me, after which the classic Concord is from the Nineteen Thirties. Baxendale fastened that up for me, it’s a type of previous cowboy guitars that you may get from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. I’ve bought an previous ESP that appears like a Tele however it’s not. It’s most likely an 80s guitar. I performed that on The Van Pelt Events.”

Probably, Hood can have crammed one other binder filled with songs since wrapping work on Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams. Every of them, although, will hold otherwise because of the perspective-jolts and inventive rewiring that he underwent whereas assembling it. “A music like At Protected Distance would have lyrically match on [Drive By-Truckers’] American Band however it wouldn’t have had woodwind and upright bass and a few issues that actually make it fairly cool,” he says. “I’m glad that in my older age I’ve realized just a little extra persistence.”

Patterson Hood’s Exploding Timber and Airplane Screams is out 21 February by ATO Information.