Drive-By Truckers
www.drivebytruckers.com
was a year of transition and reinvention for our band, having been on the road almost constantly since the fall of 2001 a break was desperately needed. A little time at home to recharge and perhaps rethink some things.
The blurring of the lines between the personal and the musical has always been an integral part of what this band does and part of what sets it apart from the corporate music machines that dominate so much of pop-culture in the name of what used to be called Rock and Roll. That said, when things go wrong it can become an unbearable situation on levels both personal and artistic. Such is what led to the amicable and mutually desired parting of ways with Jason Isbell in the spring of 2007. He had been an integral part of our musical family for five years and three albums but personal and creative differences brought about the need for change.
Moving on after such a loss seemed at first a daunting challenge. Our band’s survival instincts (much of what has kept mine and Mike Cooley’s partnership alive and well for 22+ years) led us to strip everything down to the essential elements of song and rebuild it from scratch. This led to us booking and playing a semi-acoustic tour we named The Dirt Underneath where we would go out without all of the trappings and decorations of “The Big Rock Show” and put the emphasis on the songs and stories. It also gave us a chance to acquaint everyone with our dear friend John Neff. Neff was a founding member of our band who continued to play on our albums from time to time and he became a full-time part of the touring band a couple of years ago. He’s an excellent guitar player but is best known for his amazing pedal steel abilities. His playing has graced acclaimed albums by Japancakes, The Star Room Boys, Barbara Cue and Lona among many others. During some troubled times, John’s playing was one of the few things we could all agree on.
Around this same time we were asked to back up soul legend Bettye LaVette on the follow-up to her excellent breakthrough album I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise. For that project we took her down to Muscle Shoals, AL and enlisted the help of another soul music legend, our dear friend Spooner Oldham. The resulting album Scene of the Crime (Anti Records) has furthered her comeback and showed off another side of our band’s versatility (something often overlooked by folks who often label us as some kind of “Southern Rock” novelty act). Working with Spooner on that project also directly led to us asking him to participate in The Dirt Underneath.
When we all convened to work up The Dirt Underneath show, everyone came in with lots of new material and it became almost immediately apparent that the show’s emphasis would be on working up our new album in front of a live audience over the course of the tour.
Cooley has always written my favorite songs in the band. Like so many other ways that we find ourselves as the polar opposites, I’ll write dozens of songs searching for that good one, he’ll skip the middle man and write one or two songs in a year but they might be “Zip City” and “Women Without Whiskey”. This year he came in with seven songs, each one as good as any he’s ever written.
I’ve been writing songs since I was eight years old and writer’s block had never been anything more than a week or two dry-spell, however the past several years had seen me slow down to a trickle. This finally ended with a vengeance around the time we came off the road last fall, as I wrote about 50 songs in six months, giving me a lot of material to choose from for the new album.
We spent two days rehearsing and premiered The Dirt Underneath at The Georgia Theatre in Athens, GA on April 27 and 28 then loaded the trailer and headed west for a three week tour that went far above and beyond our best hopes. By the end of the tour (at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, CO.) we were averaging 8-9 of the new songs a night, many of which were getting our best responses. It was really surreal hearing people sing along with Cooley’s “A Ghost To Most” considering we had yet to record it and had only worked it up three weeks earlier. We came home, slept for a couple of weeks and reconvened in the studio on June 11, 2007 (one day after our band’s eleventh birthday).