» Listings for 2023

1. 2023 Albums Thing 120 - Drive-By Truckers “A Blessing And A Curse”

   Posted on 9:00am Tuesday 27th Jun 2023

   “A Blessing And A Curse” gets a bad rap. Among fans and particularly amongst the band it’s regarded as their worst album. Well just to be the ornery fecker that I sometimes can be, I’m not having that. It is in no way the equal of the 3 albums previous to it, but it is so far ahead of its follow up, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark”, that it really does shock me the shade that gets thrown at this one.

   This is the last album featuring Jason Isbell and although the band were struggling under their intake of drugs and booze and interpersonal difficulties (Isbell had married bass player Shonna Tucker) their fierce righteousness still manages to shine through the haze.

   Isbell contributes just two songs, “Easy On Yourself” and “Daylight”, neither of which reach previous heights although the latter shines a light on what is to come from him when he soon goes solo. 

   Cooley also contributes just 2 songs, “Gravity’s Gone” and the sublime “Space City”. It’s back to the themes of “Putting People On The Moon” from “The Dirty South” but this time the story of a man who is mourning his wife, it’s another Cooley heartstring tugger.

   Patterson Hood supplies most of the songs, 7 in all, and, for me, he definitely gives us the highlight of “A Blessing And  A Curse” with “A World Of Hurt”. Over a measured Country backing track featuring John Neff’s wailing pedal steel guitar, Hood talks the lyrics to the verses laying bare his changing views on love and relationships as he’s grown older, getting more positive as he goes, starting with “Once upon a time, my advice to you would have been go out and find yourself a whore, But I guess I've grown up, because I don't give that kind of advice anymore” and finishing up on the much more optimistic “Remember, it ain't too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you got, It's great to be alive” those last 5 words being another of the Truckers defining phrases.

   Following this albums release Jason Isbell left the band to forge his own (now very successful) solo career with his band the 400 Unit and for me the Truckers lost their way for a good few years. “A Blessing And A Curse” certainly ain’t no “Southern Rock Opera” or “The Dirty South” but there is treasure to be found in here

   A World Of Hurt - https://youtu.be/LAW3oBQ-Nsg

2. 2023 Albums Thing 119 - Drive-By Truckers “The Dirty South”

   Posted on 9:10am Saturday 24th Jun 2023

   Not just my favourite Truckers album but one of my favourite albums full stop. Were I forced to set in stone a top 10 favourite albums this would definitely be in that list. There’s not a bad song in here, not a note or a lyric that isn’t exactly where it should be. There aren’t many records I’ve played as much as this one in the past 20 years. Not many albums to me are utter perfection (“Never Mind The Bollocks…”, “All Mod Cons”, “Handsworth Revolution” are all that), “The Dirty South” is definitely one of them… it’s magical.

    Son come running, Better come quick, This rot-gut moonshine is making me sick,

   Your Mama called the law, They’re gonna take me away, Down so far even the Devil don’t stay

   The lyric above derives from track 1, side 1 “Where The Devil Don’t Stay” a brooding Southern Gothic masterpiece about rich folks, moonshiners, drunkeness and illegal card games down in the holler. It feels as dark and humid as an Alabama night should, ominous. It’s a song I can listen to over and over and if Mike Cooley had never written another lyric he’d be a genius in my eyes just for this song alone.

   “The Dirty South” harks back to the themes of “Southern Rock Opera”, an album about the South and all its complexities. Jason Isbell’s contributions to “Decoration Day” seem to have driven Paterson Hood and Mike Cooley to new songwriting heights. We’re taken on another journey through (or should that be thru ?) the South, where “Tornadoes” rip through towns and leave them devastated and all anyone can remember is “it sounded like a train”; Patterson Hood takes a stab at re-writing a great American legend with “The Day John Henry Died” but in this story “John Henry was a steel driving bastard, but John Henry was a bastard just the same”; In “Puttin’ People On The Moon” Hood lays out how Reagan’s US ground down ordinary Alabamans while the government spent millions at NASA in Hunstville AL “If I could solve the world's problems, I'd probably start with hers and mine, But they can put a man on the moon. And I'm stuck in Muscle Shoals just barely scraping by”; Cooley’s “Carl Perkins Cadillac” is a trip back in time to the golden age of Sun Records “Mr. Phillips never said anything behind nobody's back, Like "Dammit Elvis, don't he know, he ain't no Johnny Cash" “.

   And on it goes, song after fantastic song, lyric after devastating lyric. Songs of veterans “George A. never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima”…of musical heroes like “Danko/Manuel”…two songs about the legend of Sherriff Buford Pusser who was immortalised in the movie “Walking Tall”…in “Cottonseed” Cooley reports on a former felon who “put more lawmen in the ground than Alabama put cottonseed” who on release from incarceration is asked to tell some schoolchildren the error of his ways, except he tells them “Stories of corruption, crime and killing, yes it's true, Greed and fixed elections, guns and drugs and whores and booze”…“Daddy’s Cup” might on the surface be about racing jalopies but it’s also about the close relationship between a father and son…

   It all comes to a close with Jason Isbell’s second Truckers classic “Goddamn Lonely Love”. I don’t think the Truckers have played this since Isbell departed the band but it still occasionally pops up in Jason’s sets to this day, it’s a quite superb song “So I'll take two of what you're having, I'll take all of what you got, To kill this goddamn lonely, goddamn lonely love”.

   Since I first came across this album it’s been a constant companion, I’ve played it to death, I absolutely adore it. These songs paint a picture for me of a South that probably no longer exists but is one I would love to have seen, illegal moonshine stills, kids playing barefoot in the yard, big ostentatious Cadillacs and hot sweaty summer nights picking tunes out on the porch. I’d say the two previous albums (“Southern Rock Opera” and “Decoration Day”) this and the next (“A Blessing And A Curse”) represent the Truckers at their absolute peak and I’d urge you to lend an ear to any of them, but especially “The Dirty South”.

   Where The Devil Don’t Stay - https://youtu.be/ubVlAbZsUTA

3. 2023 Albums Thing 118 - Drive- By Truckers “Decoration Day”

   Posted on 9:05am Friday 23rd Jun 2023

   The follow up to “Southern Rock Opera” saw some changes in Trucker world. They added a 3rd guitar player (trying to emulate that Skynyrd 3 guitar attack ?). Jason Isbell was significantly younger than Hood and Cooley but he could play like he’d been in the band for years and he wrote songs too. In fact he wrote so well that one of his two songs on this record lent its title to the album.

   That title song lays out the details of a family feud between the Hill’s and The Lawson’s. In a later interview Jason Isbell revealed that he is part of one of those families and somewhere around Mobile Bay, Lauderdale South and East Tennessee that feud is still alive !

   “Decoration Day” is a less focussed album that “Southern Rock Opera” and it’s follow up “The Dirty South”, it’s more of a regular collection of songs rather than the almost concept style of its neighbours. It is however packed with equally affecting stories of the South…Patterson Hood’s “The Deeper In” about an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister (don’t judge, listen)…Jason Isbell’s stunning “Outfit” (which we’ll get on a later record) is a list of good advices from father to sun…and once more Mike Cooley nonchalantly spills out more incredible writing particularly in “Marry Me” a proper rocker “Well, my daddy didn't pull out, but he never apologised, Rock and roll means well, but it can't help tellin' young boys lies”…Patterson’s “My Sweet Annette” is a lovely country stroll about an elopement, and when John Neff’s pedal steel makes it’s glorious entrance it’s a thing that sends shivers through me and makes my soul soar…and I mustn’t forget that Cooley closes things out with “Loaded Gun In the Closet”, a gentle acoustic strum rueing a relationship which is beautiful, sad and disturbing all at the same time.

   They’re working in Jason Isbell on “Decoration Day”. The line-up has shifted but it’s settling for a while, soon they’ll add Shonna Tucker on bass to form a steady rhythm section with Brad Morgan to support that formidable 3 guitar attack of the songwriters on the front line…great things are about to happen…

   My Sweet Annette - https://youtu.be/Pjy6vuvkfZM