Patterson Hood explains why he put his electric guitar aside for his first solo record in 13 years
Patterson Hood is staring into a Zoom window from a comfortable-looking chair in a wood-panelled room at his home in Portland, Oregon. “I’m definitely happier when I’m writing a lot – I think my brain works better, at least,” he says, and then an alarm goes off on his phone, reminding him that he’s got an interview right about now.
“On the other hand,” he continues, the electronic squawk almost pre-empting his next point, “when I’m in writing mode, it’s hard to function with my other responsibilities, like being a good parent, or doing what I need to do around the house. When the antenna is up, I find the songs. But everything else is just…”
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Hood writes a lot of songs. He always has done. Over the past 30 years and change, his prolific creative drive has amounted to hundreds and hundreds of them. They’ve been an outlet or a dumping ground depending on the moment, but they have also routinely offered a fresh set of eyes on events that would have otherwise slipped between the cracks of a life lived hard.
Many of them have become shit-kicking country-rock staples thanks to his deeply influential run fronting Drive-By Truckers, while others have taken root in a solo discography that spans richly-drawn narrative work and brittle, vulnerable missives from closer to home.
Running in parallel to both of these through lines, though, is an alternative history made up of writing that’s always on the lookout for somewhere to belong. It’s in this hinterland that you’ll find the starting point for his wonderful new record Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams. “Through the years, I’ve noticed that there’s always a couple of songs on every record, usually songs of mine, that I’m really proud of but once the record comes out, they never get played,” he says.
“I think it’s the nature of how our show is, the rooms we play,” he continues. “Those songs tend to be a little more, well, like the songs on this record. They get lost in the shuffle because of the amount of big, fun, boisterous rock that occurs at a Drive-By Truckers show. I started keeping a file of them. I’ll just sit on it until there’s the right place for it.”
Image: Press
Backwards Aging
On Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams, his first solo record since he put out Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance almost 13 years ago, Hood leans hard into this could-have-been reality, rediscovering the blood and guts in mothballed feelings. There are moments of lockdown inspiration here, slotted alongside writing that dates back to formative experiences from decades ago, when he was a kid becoming an adult. “I think every event on the record takes place before I turn 30, and a lot of it is from my childhood and teenage years,” he says. “It’s a coming of age tale kind of told backwards.”
Texturally adventurous and melodically playful, Hood’s writing here is attuned to ideas of change as much as it’s willing to admit that what goes around, comes around. Life, he seems to suggest, is full of little reminders of where we’ve been – it’s up to us whether we choose to pay attention to them. But when he walked into the studio to start work on Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams, he had no choice but to reckon this idea. Settling in for day one, he couldn’t help but notice the glistening aftermath of an ice storm blanketing everything outside. “We don’t get them here in Portland,” he says. “As far north as we are, our weather isn’t really any more winter-like than when I lived in Alabama.”
Hood recently turned 60, meaning that it was half his life ago when he drove through a similar storm heading out of Athens, Georgia on the cusp of his 30th birthday, past the remnants of exploding trees caused by the extreme weather. He’d spent a day and night in the city with the person he was dating at the time and a friend, pinballing between bars and catching Cracker and Counting Crows playing at the 40 Watt.
“A couple of weeks later I got offered a job so I moved there,” he says. “So much of everything I’m known for came out of me moving to Athens. My 30th birthday really was a huge turning point.”
Georgia On My Mind
It was in Athens that Hood and longtime friend Mike Cooley co-founded Drive-By Truckers in 1996, releasing the landmark alt-country text Southern Rock Opera five years later like a rock thrown into a pond, its ripples growing in size over time.
The band’s influence can be traced through many of the guests that dot Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams’ tracklist, from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, Xandy Chelmis and MJ Lenderman on the barn-burning rocker The Van Pelt Parties to Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield on the lilting The Forks of Cypress.
In inviting these younger voices to join him, too, Hood neatly skirts any accusations of middle-aged navel-gazing. In their hands his story feels alive and partly unwritten.
“There were some cases where we would send the track out to where people lived,” he says. “The day I got the track back with Katie and Morby’s guitar part was fun, hearing what they had done. I got to be in the studio with Wednesday. I was in Athens for the Truckers’ annual homecoming shows. Wednesday was playing the 40 Watt, and I asked them if they would come do something while they were in town.
“They came over early the next morning. It was really fun watching them do that. They only had a couple hours, and they knocked it out in time to eat lunch with me before they had to drive to play their show that night.”
Of all the collaborators here, though, one stands out. Mirroring the songs in his files, Hood had been waiting for the right time to work with producer Chris Funk, whom he’d met a decade ago while spending six weeks at a Portland Airbnb with his family in a dry run for making the move to the Pacific Northwest.
“We had been introduced by mutual friends so he took me out to a bar,” Hood recalls. “We had a few drinks, and hit it off. Immediately I felt like we were lifelong friends. Once I moved here, every time I’d play a solo show in the Northwest, he would sit in with me. We have such great chemistry – as much as I have with my bandmates in the Truckers, but it goes in a different direction.”
Comfort In Sound
Working at several studios across Portland, Funk continuously pushed his friend out of his comfort zone. He insisted that Hood play piano on the record, for example, and helped to create a multifaceted palette that allowed for the LP’s many guests to find space to work, eschewing the fuzzed-out sounds that might have been a comfort blanket. “I’m not going to put any great piano player out of business but I’m proud that I was able to make it work without having to Frankenstein it to death,” Hood says.
From a guitar viewpoint, too, this tiered approach had a knock on effect on Hood’s playing. Every interjection, from the decaying noise-tape notes of Exploding Trees to the trembling licks that answer Lydia Loveless’s voice on the standout A Werewolf and a Girl, is intentional. They are determinedly part of the whole rather than boisterously clawing for attention. “I get to do a lot of the other stuff because I am in a very loud guitar band,” Hood says. “It was a conscious effort. There’s no shortage of loud guitars in my life. So it was nice to have a project that kept that in its place. It jumps out [when needed].”
Inevitably, this meant that the gear Hood relies on to make the big noises of his day job was relegated to a supporting role, with more time spent knitting together 12 string passages with Nashville-tuned chord washes in pursuit of a “Mott the Hoople sound or something” than kicking out the jams. “I think I played my SG on a couple songs,” he says. “It’s the guitar I play most for the Truckers, but I didn’t do much on this.”
Image: Press
Instead, he got into it with a couple of acoustics made by another Athens graduate in luthier Scott Baxendale, who’s spent the past few years of a decades-long career in guitar repairs “remanufacturing” old instruments such as the Harmony that Hood threaded throughout Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams.
“Scott’s amazing,” Hood says. “He’s out of Albuquerque now. He built a guitar for me, and then the vintage Harmony is from the 1930s. Baxendale fixed that up for me, it’s one of those old cowboy guitars that you could get from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. I’ve got an old ESP that looks like a Tele but it’s not. It’s probably an 80s guitar. I played that on The Van Pelt Parties.”
Doubtless, Hood will have filled another binder full of songs since wrapping work on Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams. Each of them, though, will hang differently due to the perspective-jolts and creative rewiring that he underwent while assembling it. “A song like At Safe Distance would have lyrically fit on [Drive By-Truckers’] American Band but it wouldn’t have had woodwind and upright bass and some things that really make it pretty cool,” he says. “I’m glad that in my older age I’ve learned a little more patience.”
Patterson Hood’s Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams is out 21 February through ATO Records.
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