Patterson Hood is a busy man. Earlier this year, his longtime band appeared on keyboardist Booker T’s first album in a decade, Potato Hole, and this June he released his first solo album Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs). In addition, the Drive-By Truckers are set to release both a DVD, Live from Austin TX and a B-Sides collecation, The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008), as well as a new studio album in the coming months. Below, Hood and Truckers bassist Shonna Tucker give us an update on Truckers’ various studio projects and recent collaborations.
Patterson Hood is a busy man. Earlier this year, his longtime band appeared on keyboardist Booker Ts first album in a decade, Potato Hole, and this June he released his first solo album Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs). In addition, the Drive-By Truckers are set to release both a DVD, Live from Austin TX and a B-Sides collecation, The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008), as well as a new studio album in the coming months. Below, Hood and Truckers bassist Shonna Tucker give us an update on Truckers various studio projects and recent collaborations.
[For more on Patterson Hood please read his recent interview in the August/September issue of Relix.
Patterson, you are currently working on a number of different projects, both on your own and with the Drive-By Truckers. Can you start by giving us a little State of the Union on all that you have going on?
PH: We finished mixing the Drive-By Truckers collection of outtakes and oddities and rarities that we’re putting out in September. We’re gonna master it on Thursday and then Monday we’re back to work for two weeks on the next official Drive By-Truckers record, which will be coming out at the beginning of the year. Plus, I [just did] a few dates with my solo album and played with Booker T. So it’s all kind of in one direction and I can sleep in my own bed. Multi-tasking kills me. I’m a one thing at a time kind of guy. It was a brutal month. It was all cool, great stuff, but the whiplash effect from it all was kind of overwhelming for me. I’m glad that this month all that I really have to think about it just a few things and they’re all in the same direction. Plus, I taught a class at Princeton, did the Seeger birthday party at Madison Square Garden and covered a Collins song for some crazy benefit in Atlanta.
Some of the tracks on the new Drive-By Truckers album date back to 2005. What took so long to release this project?
PH: It’s more music business stuff. There’s a strange grey area in our last record contract about exactly what was allowed and not allowed concerning solo side projects and that led to a disagreement and a standoff and one thing let to another and of course my opportunities to put it out have been limited because I’ve been really, really super busy with the band. When I made it in January of ’05, I thought it would come out in the spring or early summer, pretty much the time the band would have been going in to start recording the album and that became a blessing and a curse. So when that didn’t work out, I was busy touring for a couple years behind that record. And then the next chance I got I still couldn’t come to an agreement. So, I got busy doing something else.
You have collaborated with so many musicians over the years. Who did you initially approach to work on Murdering Oscar?
PH: There’s kind of a mixture of things. Some of which has turned out a little ironic in the years since I’ve recorded it. There were a couple of people specifically that I wanted to record with for these songs on this record. One of whom is John Neff who was an original member of the band but left the band pretty early on around the time of the second album. But we stayed friends and continued working together on a part time basis. And particularly when I did solo shows around Georgia and when the band is off I’d play with him. I’ve always loved his playing and for these songs I particularly heard him on a bunch of them and now he’s in the band. And I guess about a year or so after I recorded Murdering Oscar he started playing the band again, now as a full time member. That was part of it. Part of it was I was gonna be home awaiting the birth of my daughter and couldn’t be on the road. I started working on this album right before she was born and now she is 4 and ½. We had toured so much and the band wanted a break. But the studio is five minutes from my house. Anyone that has a pregnant wife in her ninth month knows that sometimes having a place five minutes away to go to for a few hours a day is not a bad thing.
Also on the record are Scott Danbom and Will Johnson from Centro-Matic, who was one of my favorite bands and David Barbe, who has raised three wonderful kids who are now young adults. It wasn’t really a bad thing for me to hang out with him a bunch for a couple of weeks before the birth of my first child to get some good advice while we made a record. And he’s produced maybe four Drive-By Truckers records but I didn’t get to play with him as a musician at that point. And he’s one of my favorite bass players in the world. He’s phenomenal. I was a big Sugar fan. I was a big Mercy and fan and most of his other bands he’s played guitar in mostly for the last ten or fifteen years. He’s an incredible bass player. And so I kinda specifically wanted him to play bass on the record. I also wanted to record with my dad who’s a great bass player and we’ve never recorded together and it was a chance to work on that. So it kinda was all of the above all put together. The songs that were the foundation of the record all date back to before the Drive-By Truckers and the new songs I wrote for the record I wrote to go with those old songs. And that’s how the song cycle came about. So it just seems like a fitting project to do as a solo project even though all the band plays on it in various forms. It seemed like a good time to do something like that.
Were you continually working on the album over those four years?
PH: I recorded a chunk of it in 2005 and, every now and then, I would go back and revisit it or write a new song that I thought really fit the songs that I had so I’d go in and cut that. I just like to refer to it as music business bullshit. I have a life-long distaste for most of the music business shenanigans. I’ve never really held that high of a regard, which I’m sure made me not that easy to get along with sometimes from the point of view of the people in the music business. To me so much of what goes on in the business goes against what goes on creatively, and sometimes to the detriment of the business, in my opinion, is why the business has had so many problems in the last few years. I think it got into such a cycle of thinking short term profit they quit building artist careers. I think that led to the downturn of the music industry that we used to know. And ironically, since the industry kind of collapsed, we’ve done better. We’re not having to compete with the manufactured pre-programmed pretty boys that so much of the industry has been geared toward promoting. And taking that out of the equation has actually been kind of good for us.
The Truckers recently backed Booker T on his first album in over a decade, Potato Hole. Shonna, can you let us know how that collaboration came about?
ST: Our good friend Andy from Anti-Records, it was his idea. He came up with the idea for us to do the Bettye LaVette project 2 years ago and Booker and Bettye are both on Anti-Records, so it came about that way. We got to be friends when we made the Bettye LaVette record and it just has continued from there. They are great, they are a great label. We are not on that label but they are fantastic and they have been fantastic to us and they’re big fans and we are fans of theirs too.
Had you met Booker before you went into the studio or was it more of a blind date?
ST: We made the record in 4 days in Athens Georgia with Booker. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We had no agenda going into it and we finished the records. We all come from Muscle Shoals and, of course, he is one of the founders of sweet soul music and all. The way it all worked out, you know, he moved from Memphis to California when he was young and we’re all a little bit younger than him so we missed each other and all that but it’s the most natural thing I’ve ever done. He is an incredible person.
Neil Young is featured on most of the album’s tracks. Did he record his parts during the sessions with you and Booker?
ST: No. You know, we never saw each other face to face. And then, a couple of days later actually, Neil got the record and did his part in one, I think it was a 12 hour session at his studio in his house. After we finished recording, Neil laid down his parts out West. From what I hear Booker was there and they’re friends. And he said that Neil was all about the project as soon as he heard it. He saw him glaze over and go into mode like “OK, I’m going to be the guitar player on this record,” you know? It was an interesting experience for everyone making an instrumental record, first of all. None of us had ever done anything like that. I’m sure Neil has done that before, but I guess it has been a while. I love his guitar playing. He’s very, very happy with the record and rumor has it that he is going to show up out of nowhere without us knowing and sit in with us.
Patterson can you give us some insight into how your working relationship with your father, David Hood, has developed? He worked on the Truckers recent Betty LaVette project and appears on your solo album?
PH: Pretty funny. Growing up, he was extremely hands off. We never played together; I don’t think he ever so much showed me a guitar chord. He certainly never encouraged me in fact he discouraged me at about every turn. I don’t think he thought I was particularly very good for starters and I think he probably wanted to spare me some of the agony of the music business he’d gotten to know so well. And of course growing up I didn’t view all that so philosophically. I was kind of mad at some of that. In retrospect, looking back on it, I can see where he was coming from on that. It’s all fine. As we’ve gotten older, we both have really wanted to do some kind of project together. I usually play in a band so if he was a guitar player it’s easy to have someone just jump up on stage and just sit in but with a bass player it doesn’t really work out that way.
So, it was finding the right time and the right kind of project and the right kind of song and all of that. This was kind of a start on all of that. The three songs we recorded together for this solo project were kind of the start of our working relationship. I was thinking of something a little more democratic. It was definitely my record and he came in more as a session guy playing on my record, which was cool. He’s a session guy for a living so that was fine. At some point in the future I want to do something where he actually creates some pieces of music from scratch in a more democratic, band format. We kind of have a game plan for that but we haven’t had time to execute it yet.
Finally, shifting from the studio to the live show, can you talk a little bit about your recent gigs with Booker? How have you been able to balance your material with his catalogue?
ST: Yeah, most everything that we’ve done actually has been two different sets, complete different sets. We’ll do a Booker T and the DBTs set and then we’ll do a Drive By Truckers featuring Booker T playing our songs. So it has been going great doing both and we didn’t know how it was going to work but it was natural.
