One of America’s most revered live bands remains the Drive-By Truckers. A sold out Mainroom has been their home on Twin City stops for years This time around, they’ll hit a bigger venue in the Palace on March 14. Tickets and details can be found HERE.
Drive-By Truckers fans are extremely loyal. Most have ridden with the band for the better part of 25 years. Along the way, we’ve come to appreciate the duality of the band. On the one hand, this is a crew that’s always been political. Often angry. Writing from the perspective of the disenfranchised and outsider. On the other, this may be America’s premier, right down the middle of the highway rock and roll band. They mix the raw of classic, guitar driven Southern Rock, with the literary genius of William Faulkner. The live shows are incendiary. Rolling Stone called them the ultimate road dogs a couple years ago. Not surprising given their relentless 200+ shows per year touring schedule. Year after year.
2020 finds DBT back on the road with the brand new album The Unraveling. It’s been a long time coming. In fact, the three plus year gap since 2016’s American Band is the longest the group has gone between recordings. Founder Patterson Hood explains: “My partner Mike Cooley and I both worked through deep pools of writer’s block. How do you put these day to day things we’re all living through into the form of a song that we (much less anybody else) would ever want to listen to? How do you write about the daily absurdities when you can’t even wrap your head around them in the first place? I think our response was to focus at the core emotional level. More heart and less cerebral perhaps.”
The Unraveling is the first recorded by the band in legendary Sun Studios in Memphis. Sam Phillips, who discovered the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, is often attributed as the Godfather of Rock n Roll. Certainly, he’s been a character sketched in more than one prior DBT song. According to Hood and co-songwriter Mike Cooley, it was a dream come true. They absorbed the history and vibes embedded in the walls to cut the 9 tracks that comprise the album.
Expect political commentary, anger, a fair amount of Jack Daniels and a night of sweat soaked, all in rock and roll.
