It's a spine-tingling feeling for a Drive-By Truckers album to begin a cappella; although it's only happened on three of them, it feels like a trademark, a wink. And when singer, songwriter and co-leader Patterson Hood comes in alone, it's like a single lightbulb flaring up, illuminating the dusty air, brighter than creation's dark.

"By the time you were born, there were four other siblings/ With your mama awaiting your daddy in jail," Hood warbles through his mealy Alabaman twang at the top of 2002's Decoration Day — one of the cult rock band's most beloved albums. "And your oldest brother was away at a home/ And you didn't meet him 'til you were 19 years old."

So begins "The Deeper In," one of Drive-By Truckers' prettiest and most affecting songs. With immense pathos and an odd sense of sweetness, Hood tells the true story of a brother and sister falling in love with each other, having four babies and going to prison for their incestuous relationship.

Despite this unconventional and taboo subject matter, by the end of these three minutes and 16 seconds, even the uninitiated can behold the Truckers' giant, beating heart.

"It's not like they grew up together as brother and sister gettin' it on," Hood remembered more than a decade later. "They didn't meet until they were grown-ups, and it was just such a sad story.

"A lot of the people I write about are nothing like me, but there has to be some aspect to them that I can feel a certain empathy for or else I'm not interested in writing it," he continued. "I try never to be condescending to the characters I write about, even the really s—y ones."

Which makes it the perfect gateway to Drive-By Truckers' fourth album.

Named for the day that southern churches place fresh flowers on the graves of their ancestors, Decoration Day is their most vulnerable album by some margin, and a pivotal entry in the Athens, Georgia-formed rockers’ discography. On June 17, the album will ring in two decades in DBT fans' ears and hearts.

Since then, Drive-By Truckers have evolved from scrappy, brainy, misunderstood road dogs to a bona fide rock institution. And their ex-guitarist, singer and songwriter Jason Isbell — who made his precocious debut on Decoration Day — has led a GRAMMY-winning solo career that involves things like a GQ spread, an HBO doc and a forthcoming Martin Scorcese flick, Killers of the Flower Moon.

As such, the story of Decoration Day has necessarily been told and retold:

After three failed bands together, Hood and his partner and foil, Mike Cooley — two incredibly distinct yet totally simpatico songwriters — finally get their big break with their fourth. Afterward, their band tours for two years, wherein a gifted, 22-year-old upstart jumps in the van as third guitarist. Within two weeks, he writes two of their finest songs, "Outfit" and "Decoration Day."

Given their breakneck touring schedule, relationships frayed back home. Hood and Cooley write about the attendant emotions, and their lyrical references, characters and themes swirling into a matrix of grief, despondency and regret.

"Everyone in the band was either going through a divorce or on the verge of one when we made that record," Hood tells GRAMMY.com of Decoration Day. "Because that was about the time that we had really hit a tipping point of being on the road 200-plus days a year, and no one making any money. And everyone's wife's saying, 'F— this.' Except for Cooley's wife, who's still here."

But when they picked up their instruments, the result was explosive joy; Hood, Cooley and Isbell remember the Decoration Day era as an unmitigated blast. But more than on any past Drive-By Truckers album, their candid, evocative lyrics made the material penetrate the heart.

In a single line in the shattered "Sounds Better in the Song," Cooley seems to sum up Decoration Day in its totality: "I might as well have put that ring on her finger/ From the window of a van as it drove away."

While it's been beloved by fans since its release — and as Hood says, it still sells well today — Decoration Day can be somewhat subsumed by the two other major albums that precede and succeed it.

But while 2001's Southern Rock Opera and 2005's The Dirty South also represent DBT at their finest — full of crackling storytelling, elephantine performances, sticky melodies, and idiosyncratic turns of phrase — there's a case to be made for Decoration Day as their crown jewel.

Because from the album opener onward to "My Sweet Annette," "Heathens," "Sounds Better in the Song," and so many other tracks — Decoration Day is arguably the most personal and heart-forward album the Truckers ever made.

Drive-By Truckers' first two albums contained some of their most representative songs, like "The Living Bubba," "Uncle Frank," "Love Like This," and "One of These Days." Still, those tended to be sandwiched between a lot of goofs and piss-takes, from "Steve McQueen" to "The President's Penis is Missing" to "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town."

As Isbell tells GRAMMY.com, Hood and Cooley's irrepressible humor and irony reached a crossroads on Southern Rock Opera.

"They finally fully accepted a persona, and wrote songs that were specifically for Southern Rock Opera, and a lot of those were in character," he says. "And I think once they did that, and got that out of their system, Hood and Cooley both felt freer to be themselves in songs, and take it a little bit more seriously."

Even when Hood sings in character — like the foreclosed farmer plotting a "banker man's" homicide in Decoration Day's one-take scorcher "Sink Hole" — there's a splash of real-life battery acid in his delivery; his fury feels wholly genuine.

Likewise, Cooley's "Marry Me" and Hood's "My Sweet Annette" — which Hood once characterized as "two very different views of marital bliss" — don't feel like character songs, despite being constructed as just that. Regardless of who the narrator is, Cooley's small-town bluster on the former, and Hood's pained, regretful delivery on the latter, hit you straight in the chest.

"Hell No, I Ain't Happy" represents the other side of the coin; between your ears and Hood's psyche, there are zero obfuscatory layers. The sound of an opening beercan kicks off one of Hood's most face-peeling meltdowns — capturing the mother of all ragged, unmoored days on the road.

"There's a purdy little girl outside the van window/ 'Bout 80 cities down, 800 to go," he roars. "Six crammed in, we ain't never alone/ Never homesick, ain't got no home."

"Outfit," Isbell's debut song for the Truckers, is also as real as it gets. A fabulously witty, detail-stuffed rundown of advice from his father, it remains one of his signature songs, a hollered audience request ever since.

Isbell calls Hood's loping, gorgeous ballad, "Heathens" his "favorite song of Patterson's — one of my favorite songs anybody's ever written." (Years after getting booted from the Truckers and cleaning up his act, Isbell covered the song for Hood's birthday; today, Hood says the two have grown especially close over the last few years.)

From there, the three songwriters keep slugging out impossibly great song after impossibly great song. The straight-ahead rocker "(Something's Got to) Give Pretty Soon" is one of the band's most perennially rewarding deep cuts — as well as one of their most raw-nerved.

"Maybe what you need is for someone to send you flowers/ Someone strong and mean who can prove he has the power to/ Show you more than charm and take you on your way/ To where you want to be at the end of the day," Hood sings. "And it breaks my heart in two to know it ain't meant to be."

"But it ain't me," he concludes.

In its final stretch, Decoration Day heads into more elliptical territory — starting roughly with Cooley's chilling "When the Pin Hits the Shell."

Following the title track — Isbell's steely-eyed chronicling of a festering feud between families — the album concludes with "Loaded Gun in the Closet," featuring Cooley at his elusive, riddling best. To overanalyze the lyrics would be to spoil the mystery of whether the gun was ever used — and if so, which of the unwitting spouses will end up on the business end.

As a whole, Decoration Day is an album that you can revisit over and over and over, and still perceive new shades of meaning.

"That whole album is really about love and loss and the choices you make," Hood said about a decade after the album's release. "Dealing with the consequences of the choices you make is a huge overriding theme."

Which applies whether you're an incestuous couple on the lam; an exhausted, punchy rock band barrelling through the middle of nowhere; or a dysfunctional couple with an exit strategy in a waiting firearm: it's all Decoration Day.

In his nigh-definitive breakdown of DBT's discography, writer and musician James Toth characterizes the band's following album, 2004's The Dirty South as such: "If the divorce-themed Decoration Day examines the destruction of a relationship, the glacial, smoldering The Dirty South sounds like the monstrous diesel engine garbage truck that comes to collect the detritus and run over the small pieces."

A remastered, expanded edition, The Complete Dirty South, which features vocal re-recordings and tunes meant to be on the original album, is out June 16 — a day before Decoration Day's 20th anniversary.

Coincidence or not, this proximity shows how Decoration Day profoundly widened their aperture, and allowed for that masterpiece in its own right. From there, the Truckers have continued to fine-tune all dimensions of their cockeyed universe — the personal, the political, the philosophical, the devastatingly funny. (Many of their songs being all four.)

Thereby, this so-called "Southern rock" band with a deliciously regrettable name were able to transcend their rough-and-ready original parameters, and write songs that shake you to your foundation — a giant handful of which can be found right there on Decoration Day.

One could go on and on. But it sounds better in the song.

Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood On Subconscious Writing, Weathering Rough Seasons & Their New Album Welcome 2 Club XIII

At this stage, a Jason Isbell album isn't just an album; it's a juncture in his ongoing press narrative, another breadcrumb trail as per his personal life.

His first three after he left Drive-By Truckers represent the man in the wilderness; 2013's Southeastern and 2015's Something More Than Free were reflective of his newfound sobriety and marriage to musician Amanda Shires. 

The birth of his daughter figured heavily in 2017's GRAMMY-winning The Nashville Sound; that album's "If We Were Vampires," a duet with Shires, stands as Isbell's monument to mortality and won a GRAMMY.

With 2020's Reunions came a splashy New York Times feature about Isbell and Shires' marital struggles, with a lede about a brush with a relapse — suddenly, his ascendance seemed freighted, complicated. 

All this begs the question: is having his private life codified and illuminated with each record ever irksome, or frustrating, for Isbell?

"Honestly, I think I appreciate that. I think that serves the ultimate purpose of making art — to document your life, because it is really a way of holding on to these things," he tells GRAMMY.com. "If you leave those things behind, they'll sneak up on you, and then you'll find yourself in a bad place, and you won't know why."

Isbell's new album, Weathervanes, is out June 9; it's his sixth with long-running backing band the 400 Unit. At its essence is a psychologically splintered cast of characters, found on highlights like "Death Wish," "King of Oklahoma" and "This Ain't It."

"They're fallible and they're human. And I think they're all trying to do their best in one way or another," Isbell says of the ties that bind them. "There's a lot of me that's in each of them — some moreso than others."

Rather than commenting on his marriage or sobriety, Weathervanes is the product of his changed relationship with pressure, and being in the public eye. The album arrives in the wake of Running With Our Eyes Closed, a raw-nerved HBO documentary about Isbell. He just acted in his first major film, in Martin Scorcese's Killers of the Flower Moon, headed to theaters in October.

"It's OK to say, 'This is a scary thing to do. I'm afraid that people aren't going to connect with it in the same way, and my work is not going to have the same impact on folks that it's had in the past,'" Isbell says. "And once I learned how to admit that to myself and the people that I care about, things got a lot easier."

Read on for an in-depth interview with Isbell about the road to Weathervanes, how being directed by Scorcese informed his process in the studio and surviving his hard-partying, hard-touring Drive-By Truckers days.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Can you draw a thread between where you were at during the Reunions period, and where you're at during the Weathervanes era? The HBO documentary certainly captured the former.

Yeah, yeah. And then, in the middle, we had the lockdown and all that kind of stuff.

For me, the pandemic era — although it's not finished yet, but what we call that pandemic era, that year or two where we were all stuck in the house — was ultimately a good time for me to revisit some psychological, emotional questions that I had for myself, and I sorted a lot of that stuff.

When the bulk of the documentary was made, I was having a hard time dealing with the pressures of my work, and the pressures of family. And the main reason why I was dealing with that was because I just wasn't recognizing it for what it was, and I wasn't aware of the effect that those things were having on me.

Getting stuck in the house with my family and myself for that long, I think, really helped me; it forced me to confront that stuff and admit what it really was that was causing me difficulties. And once I got through that, things opened up and got a lot easier for me.

I had a really, really good time making Weathervanes. I don't know if I had a good time writing it, because I don't know if that's ever exactly fun. It's fun when you finish a song; it feels like you just left the gym. 

But when you're sitting down in front of the blank page, it feels like you're walking into the gym, and you might have just gotten four hours of sleep the night before.

What were you dealing with internally? Just childhood stuff, stuff bugging you from the past?

There was some of that. It was also just relationship difficulties; they were just constant. 

Amanda and I have been married for 10 years, and it's the kind of thing where you get in this rhythm of life where you go through the same sort of rituals every day, and you ask the same questions and you get the same answers, and it's easy to get into that monotony and not really reach and look for ways to grow.

I think before the pandemic happened, I'd gotten to a point where I was in this rhythm: go out and play shows, make records, come home, spend time with the family. I was sort of ignoring the pressure of all that, and especially in the work.

I've been very fortunate with my last few albums that they were well-received and things have gone really well. And when I go into the studio to make a record… it was hard for me to admit to myself that that caused me anxiety and a lot of stress, because I didn't like how it made me look. I wanted to look tough and look like I had everything under control.

And after making Reunions, I realized that that's not necessarily the case. And once I learned how to admit that to myself and the people that I care about, things got a lot easier.

What psychological or spiritual wells were you drawing from for these songs?

I try to make these characters, and then I follow them around. And I don't know exactly what they're going to do next. I think that's the only way to keep it really natural.

There's a lot of me that's in each of them — some moreso than others. Some of the songs I write, I am writing about me. 

But one of the things that I like about songwriting is that you don't really categorize music in that way. You categorize movies and books in that way; there's fiction and nonfiction, there's documentaries and other movies. But for songs, it's all of the above.

So, a lot of this is me, and a lot of it is synthesized characters that have characteristics of multiple people that I know. Then, I just let them act naturally and follow them around, and the themes find there way in there. 

I don't have to insert the themes, because there's enough in my unconscious mind that the songs will wind up dealing with real things — as long as I'm honest with everybody.

There's a wide variety of perspectives and experiences in these songs. What do the Weathervanes characters have in common?

I think when it's done right, they have the same things in common that the listeners have. They're fallible and they're human. And I think they're all trying to do their best in one way or another.

That's maybe what I'm exploring more than anything else — not as a mission statement, but a connector, in hindsight, is this idea that people have different circumstances, influences and pressures exerted on them. But what does it mean to try to keep hope, and survive, and do your best in all these different stations of life?

I'm a Randy Newman fanatic; he can dispense a novel's worth of detail in just a few lines, by implying so much negative space. I've noticed you've written in character from the beginning, like him.

When I met Randy at Newport [Folk Festival], I told him the thing about how much I loved his work and everything, and he leaned in really close where nobody could hear and whispered in my ear, "I like your songs, too." That was a huge, huge moment for me. I said, "Well, you don't strike me as much of a bulls—er, so I'm going to take that."

**One of your guiding lights for Reunions' sound was the '80s rock you enjoyed as a kid. What was the aural aesthetic for Weathervanes? And can you talk about the learning curve of self-production?**

I started thinking, OK, here's how these records by Dire Straits and the Police sounded, and this is why they sounded that way, and this is what worked about that, and what translates to now and what doesn't, and what can be replicated and what can't. 

So, I brought some of that with me into the Weathervanes recording. Most obviously, on a song like "Save the World," there was an intention I had before I went in the studio. This happens to me a lot. I'll get a big idea, and I'll think, Oh, this is great. We can do the whole record this way.

And by the time I'm in the studio, I'll think, OK, maybe we just use this as a tool. We don't do the entire record like this. Because then, that would take over the concept and distract from everything else.

At first, I wanted to make a dry record. I was listening to [1978's] Outlandos [d'Amour], the Police record, and there's hardly any room or reverb or anything. "Roxanne" — all those songs are right in your ear. And that's a flex, because to do that, you have to be able to sing and play with great tuning and great timing.

And the Police — first of all, there's just three of them, so it's easier to do than it is with five or six people. But they also were master musicians, and you have to be really on point to make a dry record like that, or it's going to be a mess when you go to sing the harmony.

That was something that I wound up using as a tool. I think a lot of this record has less reverb and less room on it than you would expect. I think it was done in a way where you don't necessarily notice it off the bat.

Also, watching the Get Back documentary, I thought, Man, these guys didn't have tuners.  They just tuned it by ear for the whole record.

I didn't want to torture my guitar techs, so I wasn't going to make a whole record without any tuners. But there are some moments on this record where we tuned by ear rather than tuning to a machine, so it would sound more human. Really, a lot of my production style — if there is such a thing — is how do we get a little dose of humanity of something that is sort of slick and polished.

I interviewed [Drive-By Truckers co-leader] Patterson [Hood] on Zoom last year, and I was struck at how sweet and energetic he was. How did you guys walk away from those hard-touring years alive and intact?

We don't know the answer to that. We got very lucky. Also, we were white and we were male, and I think that plays a lot pinto it. I think if we had not been white, some cop would've shot us all a long time ago.

I don't know if there was some kind of divine intervention in some of those situations, but I still look back on it and think, I don't know how we survived all that. I really don't.

Were there any near-death experiences?

Oh, there were so many. We saw huge, disastrous accidents happen right in front of us. There were times when we'd be on snowy mountain passes and lose control of the van for 20 seconds, and then finally it would snap back into place. I don't know how it happened.

On a different note, you touched on gun violence in "Save the World." I was struck by how un-preachy it was. I felt like I was in your head, or privy to a family meeting.

That's the trick, you know? You have to be really personal with it, I think.

If you're writing a song about a big, heavy topic like that, don't try to ascend somebody else's perspective. Love, romance, breakups, heartbreak, death; we all have experiences with those things.

So, if that's what you're writing about, you're free to take other perspectives other than your own, because we all have that commonality. We know what those things feel like, or what the fear of those things feels like.

But when you're writing about something like school shootings: I have not been involved in one of those. I've not seen one of those go down firsthand. I've been close a couple of times, but it's not something that I could write from the perspective of somebody who was actually in the building.
So to be honest with the work, what I have to do is think: How does this affect me? How do I feel about this? And then write from that perspective. I don't think anybody's ever noticed this, but the songs where I'm tackling the biggest, most complicated issues are the ones where I'm writing from the most personal point.

**Give me your personal MVP moments from the members of the 400 Unit on Weathervanes.**

[Guitarist] Sadler [Vaden] has this old Vox guitar that has built-in fuzz effects, and he played on that on "Miles," the last song on the album, and really added something special to that.

It's a vintage guitar, but not a highly collectible, very expensive guitar. It's got this weird kind of freak-out fuzz tone that is included in the instrument, and he used that on that song to great success.

Jimbo [Hart]'s bass on "Middle of the Morning" is just a beautiful groove. It's a simple part, but the timing of it it is just exactly right. He's just right in the pocket.

Chad [Gamble], on the outro to Miles, where there's multiple drum kits happening — I think he handled that beautifully, and built up to that big cymbal crash at the end. 

We wanted a gong, but Blackbird [Studio in Nashville] didn't have a gong. They had this crash cymbal that was 72 inches or something; it was huge. It took up the whole reverb chamber. When Chad made the big crash at the end, we were all jumping up and screaming in the control room when it happened because it was so f—ing hilarious.

Derry [deBorja] — I feel like his synthesizer part on "Save the World" was a big moment for him. He spent a lot of time on that. We tried to send the clock from the Pro Tools session to the analog synthesizer and get it to line up.

It proved to be a very complicated exercise, because we were trying to marry new technology and old technology, but he found a way to make it work.

Let's end this with a lightning round. I polled my Facebook friends on what they'd want to ask you; it's a mix of New York music industry people and hometown friends from California.

This one's from Ryan Walsh, who leads a rock band called Hallelujah the Hills. He asks if when "white nationalist monsters" figure out your politics and tell you on Twitter they won't listen to you again, "do they really abandon ship, or is even that promise nothing but some sad barkin'?"

I don't think most of those were ever fans to begin with. I refuse to believe that those people have been actually listening to my songs all along. I think they see something that somebody's retweeted, and then they Google me and they see that I'm a musician, and they say, "I was your fan until just now." I think it's all just a b—shit tactic.

The jazz-adjacent singer/songwriter Dara Tucker says, "I'd like to hear his thoughts on Gordon Lightfoot."

Oh, Gordon was amazing. I played a song that I wrote, "Live Oak," last week, after Gordon's passing. I mentioned from the stage that I don't think I could have written that song without Gordon's work. The way he dealt with place, and the way he made folk music very specific to his own life.

I think "Carefree Highway" was the first song where I had that kind of lightbulb moment, where I thought, Oh, he's feeling really bad about something. This is not a celebration. This is not hippy-dippy s—. This is somebody saying, "I'm sorry." And that was a big moment for me.

Journalist Tom Courtenay asks, "Does he think Nashville/radio's gatekeeping is fixable, or does it only make sense for anyone remotely subversive to work outside of it at this point?"

I think what, if anything, will fix it, is when this particular brand of straight white male country music is no longer as popular as it is. 

I don't think that's a good thing. I would love to see it fixed from the inside. But the way I picture the state of popular country music right now is they're staring at a machine with a whole bunch of buttons, and there's one button that they know will spit out money when they hit it, so they just keep hitting it.

They won't take their hand off of it long enough to try any of the other buttons, even though some of the other buttons might spit out more money. 

Singer/songwriter Ephraim Sommers asks, "What is his greatest difficulty, obstacle or weakness as a songwriter, and how has he worked to overcome it?"

Humor is hard. It's hard because I laugh a lot in my everyday life, and it's hard to find a way to work humor into a song. The way that I work to overcome it is just by trying to notice different situational details that would create a funny image in a song.

It's something I'm not very good at. John Prine was great at it; Todd Snider's great at it. But to be funny without being bitter in the kind of songs that i write is a real challenge.

I don't want it to be funny in a self-referential way. I would like for it to be funny no matter who was saying it or writing it. That's a tough one for me, but I just keep trying over and over and over, until finally the joke is present enough for somebody to get it.

I'll close with my own question: What's grist for the mill creatively for you right now? What are you listening to, reading or watching?

Jennifer Egan, The Candy House; I'm reading that right now. Last night, we watched Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, the war movie. That was good. Of course, I like "Succession."

Right now, I'm just super excited about the Scorcese movie that I was in. I heard rumors that the trailer's coming out tomorrow.

Tell me about that.

That process of working on that movie really found its way into the studio when I went back to record — just the way Scorcese was able to hear other people's opinions and collaborate while still keeping his vision. 

Actors are people — they're not instruments — so you can't completely manipulate them, no matter how good you are at directing. So, it's not like the director is the guitar player and the actor is the guitar. There are a bunch of real humans in the room, so they're all going to have opinions and ways of delivering things.

To see him navigate that and hear everything — and still make the movie that he saw in his mind — was a pretty incredible thing for me.

Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood On Subconscious Writing, Weathering Rough Seasons & Their New Album Welcome 2 Club XIII

For years, there was little mistaking what a Patterson Hood song was about.

While his partner in Drive-By Truckers, Mike Cooley, spun riddles even at his most polemical, Hood increasingly poured straight from the bottle. "Baggage" was about his lifelong battle with depression. "Thoughts and Prayers" skewered politicians' empty sentiments in the wake of mass shootings. "What It Means" opened with the extrajudicial slaying of Michael Brown. Whether dealing in the political, personal or both, Hood got franker and franker and franker.

But when Hood wrote "Shake and Pine," he didn't know what it meant at all.

"So you've gone astray in a New York minute/ Nothing left to say, or ways to spin it/ You've just gone too far, unsafe within it/ All spun out and swept away." Hood wrote in a burst of inspiration — he estimates it took only 15 or 20 minutes. When he played it for his wife, Rebecca, she hoped it wasn't about her. (He assured her it wasn't — but that was all he knew.)

Seven months later, Hood was performing "Shake and Pine" solo in Asheville, North Carolina. Right then, he had a lightbulb moment. "I had a friend pass away suddenly around the first week of November in 2020," he tells GRAMMY.com. "I realized: Wow, this is about my friend Jimmy. It's all here. All these different lines are codes for various things about him and our friendship and my sense of loss with him dying and our last conversation.

"It was all written on such a subconscious level," Hood continues. "Which of course, is my favorite aspect of being a writer — whenever it happens." And on Drive-By Truckers' refreshed and reinvigorated new album, Welcome 2 Club XIII, it happens all the time.

On their preceding trifecta of very political albums — 2016's American Band, and 2020's The Unraveling and The New OK — the Truckers dealt in carefully worded statements of purpose. Even comedic moments, like Cooley's "Sarah's Flame" (as in Palin), served to articulate their specific political perspective.

For all those albums' merits, it's a relief to hear them so introspective, so internal-facing on this one, out June 3 — which, naturally, contains "Shake and Pine."

In ominous opener "The Driver," Hood is a shiftless young man, clearing his heavy psychological weather by "f***ing around and wasting gas." The title track is an ironic ode to the dismal Muscle Shoals honky tonk where their pre-DBT band, Adam's House Cat, performed for indifferent or hostile audiences. "Forged in Hell and Heaven Sent," "Billy Ringo in the Dark" and "Wilder Days" swirl with memory, loss and regret.

But even when Hood and Cooley evoke concrete images — Klansmen scattering "like rats" away from a flaming dumpster, the "penny beer and cheap cocaine" in the title track — these songs remain impressionistic, their colors smeared in half-remembrances. And the shot-from-the-hip vibe of the songs applies to the one-and-done production; the Truckers tracked Welcome 2 Club XIII in three and a half days, added some overdubs and called it a record.

In an in-depth interview with GRAMMY.com, Patterson Hood discusses the inspiration behind the album, his 37-year partnership with Cooley and why he feels Welcome 2 Club XIII is their most personal record since 2003’s revered Decoration Day.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

One connection I made while enjoying Welcome 2 Club XIII was the recent resurgence of Adam's House Cat. How did it feel to reunite with those guys with decades of experience under your belts?

God, it was crazy. The original bass player has passed away, and the guy who replaced him in the band passed away. So, it was just Cooley and I and the drummer, Chuck [Tremblay]. He was older than the rest of us and kind of raised us. He kind of taught Cooley and I how to do this thing. He's an amazing drummer, so playing with him all these years later was really special. Plus, we just love the guy.

Finally putting that record out [2018's Town Burned Down] — hell, it was lost for almost 20 years. We thought the tapes had been destroyed; the mixtapes got destroyed in a tornado, of all things. But we were able to find the 24-track multitracks and mix it from that. I was really happy to finally put that out.

So, Chuck was the Ringo of the band — not just because he was the drummer, but because he was older. By the time the Beatles found Ringo, he was already a seasoned pro.

We thought he was ancient. He was, like, 35. Cooley and I were barely in our twenties; Cooley was a teenager when we started Adam's House Cat. We thought [Chuck] was this old guy! He had spent years and years playing in bands on the road and we were green as s***.

I don't know how he didn't kill us, because we were fighting all the time, drunk a**holes. He was really great with us and taught us how to be a band.

The title track reminds me of Richard and Linda Thompson's "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight," in the sense that it's longing for a night out that doesn't seem very fun — in fact, it sounds miserable. Was that the comedic crux of it?

[Laughs.] Yeah, that was pretty much it! It was the only club in town, so it was the only place to play. And it wasn't suited for what we did at all. They let us open for some hair metal cover band, and we were doing our post-punk, Replacements-y kind of thing. None of them liked us there! The place had disco lights and industrial carpet and the stage was [Gestures a shallow level] this high off the ground.

But it was all we had, so it was something! It's kind of the anti-glory-days song.

As you've noted, every Drive-By Truckers album is political to some degree. But after three straight albums of 90 percent political material, it seems like it was time to get 90 percent personal again.

I think that's pretty accurate. We didn't know we were going to do a trilogy of that. We did American Band as kind of a standalone thing, but then everything went from bad to worse.

And the next thing you know, The Unraveling was inspired by so many conversations I had with my kids about all the bulls*** going on during the early days of the Trump era. Which, unfortunately, isn't over, because we're still seeing it. It's still going on. What happened in Buffalo has roots with all of that. It's so far from over.

But at the same time, this record is probably the most personal we've made since Decoration Day, because so much of it was written during the lockdown. We were dealing with a lot of loss, a lot of stuff.

I've always heard that Decoration Day was borne of touring constantly while relationships were falling apart back home. Is that accurate?

Very much so. Fortunately, that's not happening on this one! Home's OK, as far as that goes.

But, yeah, everyone in the band was either going through a divorce or on the verge of one when we made Decoration Day. That was about the time we hit the tipping point of being in the road 200-plus days a year, and no one making any money and everyone's wives saying, "F*** this." Except for Cooley's wife! She's still here. But we're all in a better place as far as that goes. That's not part of this record, thankfully.

*Drive-By Truckers in 2004. (L-R) Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Brad Morgan, Jason Isbell, Shonna Tucker. Photo: Chris McKay/WireImage via Getty Images* 

When things were deteriorating in your personal lives back then, what kept you guys going? Why didn't you turn the van around?

I've been trying to do this thing we're doing since I was 8 years old. I started writing songs when I was 8. By the time we started Drive-By Truckers, it was my and Cooley's fourth band together. So by the time we started this band, he and I had been playing for 11 years already in three failed bands. Adam's House Cat breaking up damn near killed us.

When we started this band, we knew it was our last chance to do this thing we wanted to do. As hard as the early days were, it was still better than it had ever been. We were playing dive bars, but we were pulling people into dive bars. We were sleeping on floors and touring in a van, but we were touring. We were getting shows and selling merch and we could see it growing.

And we were stubborn. A lot of it was stubbornness. We believed in this thing we were doing. It was like, "I'm not quitting now! We've got a possible shot at getting to do this thing!"

It all worked out, but it was brutal at the time. I don't know how we didn't kill each other. Because after all the marriages imploded and we were trying to put out Southern Rock Opera and nobody wanted to put it out, we tried to raise the money to put it out ourselves, we weren't even speaking to each other. 

We were literally mixing that record, having to talk through [producer] David Barbe. We would tell him and he would tell us. But, somehow, we got through it. I give Barbe a lot of credit for that. He definitely helped save the band because we were all too close to it to see things that were right in front of us. But we all trusted him. He could sit us down and go, "Look, guys. I know this sucks. But you're so close. At least see this through, and then if you want to break up, break up."

By then, we'd seen it through and were like "We're not breaking up now! We're getting some momentum!" That all led to Decoration Day, which was definitely an important record for our band.

*Drive-By Truckers in 2022. (L-R) Patterson Hood, Brad Morgan, Matt Patton, Mike Cooley, Jay Gonzalez. Photo: Brantley Guitierrez*

There has always seemed to be one dark cloud or another following the band. I know depression over the state of the world has been a struggle for you. How are you doing lately?

I started writing as a kid, basically, to deal with my depression. I was a misfit, kind of lonely kid. I grew up in Alabama; I didn't play sports; I was bullied. My way of dealing with it was to write; that was always my go-to way of dealing with whatever my problems were.

In 2020, when everything shut down, I got really, really super-depressed and I couldn't write much. I did a little bit; I wrote a couple of songs for The New OK that were directly about the federal occupation of our town, when Trump sent the troops in and all that bulls***.

But I wasn't really able to write about personal stuff for a bit, until the clouds started lifting at the end of it all — after the election and the vaccine got approved and it looked like we were about to start living our lives. And then the floodgates opened, and I wrote the majority of my songs on the record around that time.

And then, of course, when we got together and recorded Welcome 2 Club XIII last summer, we hadn't seen each other in a year and a half. Instead of rehearsing before our first shows, we just decided to go into the studio and demo our new songs. We went in for three days to demo and see what we had, and at the end, we said, "I think this is our album." We didn't feel any pressure to make a record; we just went in to get to know each other again and play and show each other our new songs. It was magical!

I was so happy with the performances for the new songs. You could tell that even though the songs were, at times, really dark, there was a joy in the playing that I felt lifted the whole thing up. I think we all instinctually felt that.

You and Cooley have watched each other develop for 37 years. To you, is his writing getting deeper and deeper?

"Every Single Storied Flameout" might be my favorite Drive-By Truckers song of all time.

Really!

I think it's just a monumental song. I'm kind of used to him having my favorite song on any given record, because he usually does. But I don't know if he's ever written a better song than that one. I generally don't like talking too much about his songs, because he doesn't say a lot about them himself. I feel like whenever I talk about his songs, he reads it and growls [Laughs.]

But, my take on it — and he might totally disagree — is: There's that guy in "Zip City" 25 years later, raising a family, watching his kids live through the same things he lived through and trying to figure out his place in that. It's like, "OK, I created this thing. What the f*** do I do now?" And I'm a parent, too! So, I'm dealing with my own version of those things.

He absolutely nailed that thing I feel 99 percent of the time as a parent. I think it's such an amazing song.

I love how he never explains his songs. My favorite Cooley song of all time is "A Ghost to Most." I read that you asked him what it meant and he replied "It's hard to find a suit that fits me right."

[Laughs.] When I first met Cooley, he worked in a men's shop fitting suits! Cooley can look at you and fit you. Whenever someone gives us clothes on the road, we always have Cooley write down our sizes. He can still look at you and fit your suit!

I feel like Welcome 2 Club XIII is impressively cohesive — no wasted moments. Would you agree?

I do. I feel really strongly about this record. I'm like a parent: I love all my kids, even the one who had to go to jail for a while. All the different records are all closely related to me for sure. But there's something about this one.

Especially the way it was recorded. More or less, all our records are mostly live in the studio. But for this one, there was no rehearsal. There was no prep. It's like "OK, I've got this song!" And I'd play it for them and we'd cut it. There was no time to think about it. It was everyone's first, primal take on it.

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People make a big deal out of "authenticity" in country music, as if acoustic guitars and washtub basses were a crafted aesthetic and not simply the tools artists had at their disposal mid-century. But if Hank Williams showed up today, perhaps he'd be in a hoodie, making beats on Logic. His grandson, Sam Williams, knows he's probably bumming people out by embracing modern sounds and not wearing a 10-gallon hat. Still, he's clearly doing something right: He was just on Colbert.

"My grandfather passed away on the last day of 1952. This is pre-Elvis," Williams tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom from his parked vehicle. "I think that if he hadn't passed away so tragically, he would have been reinventing his sound and bringing rock elements into music that were spreading across America, you know what I'm saying? So it's not really fair to place those trappings." 

Granted, he still makes music with Americana leanings, but Williams is influenced by music from all over the place, including hip-hop and R&B. Still, his debut album, Glasshouse Children, which will be released August 20, ultimately just sounds like him—while preserving country's ability to throw a stark reality at your feet like a frying pan on tile. "I'd say I was forever changed after the fall of '99," he admits in the startling title track. "I got exposed at two years old to demons in my mama's eyes."

Sam Williams is a fresh signee to Universal Nashville and leaps into the music biz with boundless possibilities—far more, he says, than his father, Hank Jr., had when he got into the game. GRAMMY.com spoke with him about sloughing off the limitations of traditional country, Nashville's baby steps toward inclusivity and the artists he believes are pushing the envelope in the 2020s.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

With debut albums, there's often a lot of deliberation about what side of themselves the artist wants to present. What do you hope Glasshouse Children relays to the listener?

I try not to spend so much time thinking, "This is going to be so many people's first impression of me. What do I want to say? What do I want them to think?" and just try and go with my gut and be natural and write the songs that were coming to me and felt the most authentic to me, regardless of subject matter. With that being said, I wanted the first impression that this is really human and not industry-crafted. That these songs come from a really heartfelt and human place.

It's very richly recorded and listenable, but I don't get the sense you're trying to please everyone at once.

Thank you. A lot of the album was produced by Jaren Johnston. He's in a country-rock band called the Cadillac Three. It was really cool to do that because it helped bring some great musicality to it. There's a Nashville producer named Paul Moak who did "Glasshouse Children" and the interlude song, "Bulleit Blues." It was really awesome to bring in a live string section to bring the drama and the theatrics to the opener and bring the listener in.

I imagine you've written songs that reflect various parts of your psyche. What sides of you do these songs particularly contain?

Kind of a coming of age. A lot of contradiction and juxtaposition of loss and gain of heartbreak and healing. Of insecurity and stability. There are many songs that talk about trauma and upbringing and finding yourself.

The reality is that country music to the core is writing songs from the heart and telling your story and projecting your voice and hearing everyone else's voice and different perspectives.

Was there any trepidation about your surname being front-of-mind for people? Perhaps that it would be the horse leading the cart?

I think that with my last name, it's said a lot that it's a blessing and a curse. I think that the music does speak for itself. It's not too similar to any music that's been released in my family or in country music in general. But that being said, I know there's a tremendous amount of people who would like to see me just dressing in suits like my grandfather and forcing an accent that doesn't reflect where or how I grew up. 

They're probably a bit thrown off when they see me wearing an earring or doing something that doesn't feel "country music" to the core to them. But the reality is that country music to the core is writing songs from the heart and telling your story and projecting your voice and hearing everyone else's voice and different perspectives.

Trying to play dress-up with the trappings of the '40s and '50s is pretty silly. Buck Owens was a cutting-edge musician. If your granddad were around today, perhaps he'd play an electric guitar or a synthesizer.

Exactly. I always think that because my grandfather passed away on the last day of 1952. This is pre-Elvis. I think that if he hadn't passed away so tragically, he would have been reinventing his sound and bringing rock elements into music that were spreading across America, you know what I'm saying? So it's not really fair to place those trappings.

What, exactly, is the thesis of country music to you? The cliché is that it's all about the stories, but perhaps it's also a vehicle to deal with some of the roughest parts of being a human.

I studied the entertainment industry at Beaumont in Nashville for a few years, and I remember having a course about the Irish and Scottish songs that you can trace country music back to. They're talking about people getting killed and buried alive. Crazy, crazy songs. One of my dad's songs is called "Knoxville Courthouse Blues" and it's gruesome.

It's just a lot more than what it's been watered down to by Nashville standards nowadays. I just try to kind of keep that out because it would just dampen me as an artist, trying to do something that I didn't feel really connected to. 

I wouldn't say this is country music to me. But as an artist, I like to sing about things that make the listener a little uncomfortable in their head and bring up things they don't typically think about because that's the kind of music I enjoy listening to.

Sam Williams. Photo: Alexa King

What were you pursuing as far as a production aesthetic?

I wanted some of the songs to have the country sound of just acoustic guitars and some live piano in the background and things like that. But a lot of artists that I admire and respect in country have pushed the boundaries of what you can bring into songs. I'm a big Jason Isbell fan. 

I think if you took the songs to their core of the songwriting, they'd be country, but when you add all these different [elements] and production, it's just a whole new world of possibilities. It's also important to me to try and experiment a little bit and do a little bit more pop production. 

Like, "Hopeless Romanticism" and "The World: Alone" are definitely influenced by younger artists that I listen to. It goes without saying that I'm from a generation that primarily grew up listening to Top 40 radio and [remembers] hip-hop becoming the biggest genre. I'm very R&B-influenced.

I like to take little pieces of each genre of music and artist I listen to and see what I can craft and come up with. There's a lot of music you can listen to where you may really enjoy it, but you don't feel as connected to the artist. That's something I wanted to make sure can be done.

There's a lot of talk about Nashville's incremental steps toward diversity and inclusion. But on the main, is it still this conservative Iron Man you have to face off?

[Knowing laugh.] It definitely can feel like that. 

I just signed a record deal with Universal a few weeks ago. What is kind of interesting about that situation is that my record was done prior to entering talks with or signing with Universal, and that's not typically how it goes at all. Usually, a major label is very involved in the writing process and production and who's going to be on it and what the cover's going to look like.

I would say it definitely can feel like that and that's the norm, but Cyndi Mabe and Mike Dungan at Universal Nashville have really opened up and taken a risk by embracing me. It's definitely slowly changing. You may not see it every day. It comes down to support, but there are a lot of artists out there now pushing the envelope than there have been in the past 10, 15 years.

Yola is someone I think of off the top of my head. She's truly amazing, and a few years ago, she may not have been able to enter the scene like she has. Even queer artists like Brandi Carlile that have been in the industry for a long time are able to do more and be more [included] and seen in this landscape is telling that it's heading in the right direction, even if it's not as fast as we would like it to be.

Is there anything we didn't touch on about Glasshouse Children that you'd like to express?

[Long pause.] I would just like to convey that I wasn't really trying to put anything across that wasn't me while making this record. It's a melting pot of traditional country songwriting and storytelling that's in the DNA.

My dad was really forced into the music industry and started to make his own sound of music and do his own thing later in his career, after standing in his father's shadow for a long time. I'm grateful I got to do something that was uniquely me from the get-go instead of being "Hank, Jr. Jr." for however many years and then switching it up. I'm grateful for that and I hope it just surprises the ear of the average country listener and that people are pleasantly surprised by it.

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In a songwriter's dream double-header, Lucinda Williams and Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit will team up for a run of dates next summer across the West Coast and Southwest U.S. 

The 15-date run kicks off in Vancouver on July 19 and wraps up with a pair of shows at Austin City Limits Live on Aug. 7 & 8. 

Williams recently released her raucous new offering, Good Souls Better Angels, on April 24, and you can read the Recording Academy's exclusive interview about the project here. Isbell and his band also dropped new music recently, treating fans to Reunions on May 15. Both efforts show a pioneer of Americana continuing to push their own songwriting limits.

"There's already a lot of songs in the world; a lot of really, really good ones about all kinds of things. So the challenge more often than not for me is to find a new angle," Isbell told NPR.

For a full list of tour dates and to purchase tickets, visit Williams' website.

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