On March 4th, Drive By Truckers return with their brand new album, English Oceans. The follow-up to 2011′s Go-Go Boots was recorded with longtime producer David Barbe at Chase Park Studios in Athens, Georgia. According to the band, the 13-track effort is a return to form, reminiscent of their 1999 live album, Alabama Ass Whuppin’.

“I had forgotten what a punk-rock outfit that shit was,” co-frontman Mike Cooley told Rolling Stone. “The new record has kind of gone back to that simple sound. It sounds like a smaller band again.”

English Oceans also marks the first Truckers album where both Cooley and co-singer Patterson Hood shared the songwriting duties evenly. Together, they covered a range of topics, including “scathing take-downs of right-wing demagogues (“Made Up English Oceans,” “The Part of Him”), tender tales of mental breakdown (“When Walter Went Crazy”) and bittersweet celebrations of lost friends and life on the road (“Grand Canyon”).”

In support of the release, the band has revealed the first batch of 2014 tour dates, which includes stints in Asheville, NC and their hometown of Athens, GA.

English Oceans Tracklist:
01. Shit Shots Count
02. When He’s Gone
03. Primer Coat
04. Pauline Hawkins
05. Made Up English Oceans
06. The Part of Him
07. Hearing Jimmy Loud
08. Til He’s Dead or Rising
09. Hanging On
10. Natural Light
11. When Walter Went Crazy
12. First Air of Autumn
13. Grand Canyon

Drive By Truckers 2014 Tour Dates:
01/31 – Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel
02/01 – Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel
02/13 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
02/14 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
02/15 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
05/10 – Dublin, IR @ Vicar Street
05/11 – Glasgow, UK @ ABC
05/12 – Manchester, UK @ Ritz
05/13 – London, UK @ Shepherd’s Bush Empire
05/15 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso
05/16 – Antwerp, BE @ Trix

Any word on what ever became of her? I seem to recall reading "you haven't seen the last of me" right before I saw the last of her.

And Kyle FWIW she and your old pal Johnny Neff are all shacked up and domesticated and shit.

waitwhat

Yeah, that's why he left DBT.

The Drive-By Truckers’ terrific new album, English Oceans, arrives after a tough stretch of years for the group. Tensions on the band bus had led to painful separations with singer-guitarist Jason Isbell in 2007; with bassist Shonna Tucker, Isbell’s ex-wife, in 2011; and with guitarist John Neff, Tucker’s new boyfriend, in 2012. Mike Cooley, one of the band’s two leaders, had hit a songwriting dry spell from 2009 through 2011. During these difficulties, the band was recording and touring non-stop till they were ready to drop from exhaustion.

“It’s supposed to be fun,” says Patterson Hood, Cooley’s co-leader. "We all know parts of the job are going to suck: the long drives, the hurry-up-and-wait, a lot of the interviews. But if the two hours on stage aren’t fun, something’s wrong and you’ve got to fix it. But it’s hard to fix it on tour, especially when you get off tour and you know you’re going back out in two weeks.

“So problems fester and get worse, and it’s a downward spiral. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to put out those two records from one session. We released Big To-Do in March of 2010, toured behind that for 10 months, took two weeks off, released Go-Go Boots in February of 2011 and then toured for another year. We weren’t doing ourselves or our fans any favors by running ourselves into the ground. We said, ’We’ve got to get off this conveyor belt.’”

So they did. They cut way back on their touring schedule in 2012 and 2013. In 2012, Cooley released his first solo album, the unaccompanied, acoustic The Fool on Every Corner, and Hood released his third solo album, Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, with a rhythm section of Truckers drummer Brad Morgan, Truckers producer/bassist David Barbe and Truckers pianist Jay Gonzalez. Cooley started writing again, and the band decided to carry on as a quintet without replacing Neff (but retaining bassist Matt Patton of the Dexateens). They reentered the studio in January 2013 with a fistful of new songs that they were excited about.

“My writing thing wasn’t happening when we recorded those two previous albums,” Cooley admits. “I started getting stressed and that only made it worse. I only had a few songs to bring to those sessions, and some of them were old songs we hadn’t recorded. I was bummed. So taking some time off was healthy. It was time to give the whole thing a rest.”

“In retrospect,” Hood admits, “I think I did Cooley a disservice by making two records at a period when he was going through a rough period and wasn’t writing much. I think ‘Birthday Boy’ was the only new song he wrote in that period. He wasn’t as engaged. I decided I wasn’t going to make another record until Cooley called me up and said he wanted to make a record. The reason I formed this band in the beginning was to have Cooley be part of it. He sent me the demo for his first song on this album, and I said, ‘God damn, that’s a great song.’ And I kept on saying that each time he sent me something.”

“I started getting ideas for songs again,” Cooley adds. “I’ve never been one to have the lightbulb go off, write it down and finish the song in an hour. When I have something good, that’s when I have to be my own boss and say, ‘Take this further, make it better.’ I have to twist my own arm. Maybe the chord needs to change; maybe the story needs a new scene. It’s almost like writing for the screen; you ask yourself, ‘What do you see? What’s she wearing? Is it sunny? Is it hot?’ I answer those questions and then I’m off.”

This resulted in songs like “Primer Coat,” the story of a factory foreman, a Southerner, sitting by his pool and thinking about his twentysomething daughter leaving home. This is an unusual subject for a rock ‘n’ roll band, which is more likely to focus on freewheeling characters in the no-man’s land between school and marriage/career. But the Truckers have always specialized in characters with jobs, spouses, little glamour and lots of debt.

This song is sung by the foreman’s son, who knows more than he’d like about painting houses. His mother may be as plain as a primer coat, he realizes, but there’s a clarity and necessity in that undercoat of paint that shouldn’t be underestimated. In four minutes, Cooley lets us know all four members of that family, while his Keith Richards-like, just-ahead-of-the-beat guitar riff and Morgan’s Charlie Watts-like, just-behind-the-beat drumming supply all the tension the story needs.

“I had this image of this guy, middle-aged and working class, sitting by his swimming pool,” Cooley explains. “I didn’t know what he was thinking about, but I liked that image. I thought he might be thinking about politics and how working class families can’t afford pools like they used to. But that wasn’t it; he was thinking about his daughter. The mother of the family’s almost always stronger, especially when it comes to things that kick you in the gut. She’ll do what she has to do; she won’t be moping by the pool.”

“Primer Coat” is just one of many songs on English Oceans filled with memorable Southern characters. Hood’s “Pauline Hawkins” is the story of a nurse telling a suitor that she’s just not interested in romance, no matter what he might say. Cooley’s “Made Up English Oceans” is the alcohol-fueled confession of a right-wing campaign manager, chuckling about how easy it is to fool voters. Hood’s “‘Til He’s Dead or Rises” is the story of a man who knows he’s being used by his teenage-sweetheart-turned-wife but has learned to live with it.

Cooley’s “First Air of Autumn” describes how the smell of early September can get a working man thinking about high school, “popcorn, heavy hairspray, nylon pantyhose” and all those things that are gone forever. Hood’s “When Walter Went Crazy” describes a dissolving marriage with the picture of a man carrying a can of gasoline and a pack of matches past a wife drinking Tab on the sofa and watching Matlock on TV. The characters may be on a downhill slide, but the five musicians singing and playing their stories sound like they’ve caught a second wind and are on the upswing again.

In mid-January 2013, the band took some time off from the studio to play their annual three-night stand at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga. The first night went great. Opening the show was an ad hoc band called Thundercrack doing Springsteen covers; the lead singer was the Truckers’ longtime soundman Matt DeFilippis, and the lead guitarist was longtime merch guy Craig Lieske. Lieske, the former manager of the 40 Watt, had become the band’s unofficial ambassador to the fans, if only because he charmed everyone who met him.

So it was devastating when everyone learned that Lieske had died in bed from a heart attack after the show. It was all the more difficult because the band had to finish the other two nights at the 40 Watt and then leave for a short tour with an empty bunk on the bus. It was during that tour, as the bus drove from Fort Worth to New Orleans, that Hood, sitting way in the back, scribbled down a song for Lieske called “Grand Canyon.”

“One of my fondest memories of my time with Craig,” Hood recalls, “was a trip to the Grand Canyon; he and I had spent a lot of time that day staring off into the glare of the distance. That memory unlocked the song, and I wrote it in 15 minutes; it took me longer to learn how to play it than to write it. I like the ascending and descending chord sequence that’s part of it, and I like the weird coda we added in the studio; it needed that kind of ending to pay homage to the improvisational music he did. I sang that song at his memorial service instead of reciting a eulogy.”

The recorded track begins with Hood’s ringing half-notes on the guitar climbing up a staircase of chords and then back down again; Morgan’s drums kick in and create the feel of hymn-like processional. Hood sings of standing with Lieske on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as “the rocks change color” in the fading afternoon light. Remembering that day much later, Hood sings, “I wonder how a life so sturdy could just one day cease to be.” He then immediately contradicts himself by shifting to a minor-key bridge and adding, “I’m never one to wonder about the things beyond control.”

Most of us struggle with that: asking unanswerable questions, resolving to stop asking such questions, asking them again. Hood tries to reconcile this dilemma by turning it all to metaphor. He describes the Drive-By Truckers’ bus rolling away from the Grand Canyon across the darkened, nighttime deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, the canyon’s glowing sunset fading in the memory, that memory packed away under the bus with the drums and amplifiers and with “our sorrows, pains and anger.”

And years later there’s a sunset over Athens, Ga., where Hood and Lieske lived, and the singer recalls the folk legend that “the recently departed make the sunsets to say farewell to the ones they leave behind.” If he can’t accept it as science, he can accept it as metaphor, and he can at last say goodbye. Meanwhile, the chords keep rising in hope and falling in disappointment, rising and falling.

“Everybody loses people, like your beloved grandmother,” Hood says, “but you know you’re going to lose them. It’s the ones like this that come out of nowhere that get you, especially when you’re coming out of a long dark period and finally breathing a sigh of relief. After I wrote that song, I had to recalibrate the whole album, because a lot of the songs, when they sat next to that one, suddenly didn’t seem good enough. As soon as I wrote it, I knew it was the last song. So the question became, ‘What songs lead us to that one?’”

During the previous autumn, Hood had been receiving song demos from his longtime partner Cooley 220 miles away in Birmingham, Ala. Hood’s first reaction was excitement that Cooley had finally broken through his writer’s block and was writing songs as terrific as those during the band’s peak years of 2001-2006. Then Hood started noticing the similarities between the songs he was writing and Cooley’s.

“Primer Coat,” for example, has a line about the daughter leaving her mama’s “apron strings,” and Hood’s “Hanging On” has a line about a twentysomething son cutting his own “apron strings” and going out on tour with a band that’s making no money. Cooley’s “Made Up English Oceans” is about a cynical, right-wing Southern politician, and so is Hood’s “The Part of Him.” Cooley’s “Natural Light” describes a woman ignoring her husband by watching TV, and so does Hood’s “When Walter Went Crazy.” Cooley’s “First Air of Autumn” uses the sun setting on the horizon as a metaphor for loss, and so does Hood’s “Grand Canyon.”

The give-and-take between Cooley and Hood reminds one of the relationship between co-leaders in other bands: John Lennon and Paul McCartney in The Beatles, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger in The Rolling Stones, Grant Hart and Bob Mould in Husker Du, Dave and Ray Davies in The Kinks, Liam and Noel Gallagher in Oasis, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac, Chris Bell and Alex Chilton in Big Star. Far better than most of their predecessors, Cooley and Hood have managed to remain friends and willing collaborators. Maybe that’s because they had their break-up before they became well-known.

They both grew up in the Quad Cities (aka the Shoals) of northwest Alabama. Cooley lived in Tuscumbia, next to Muscle Shoals and Sheffield on the south bank of the Tennessee River. Hood lived on the north bank in Florence. Hood’s father David was the bassist in the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section that played on records by Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, the Staple Singers, Paul Simon, Jimmy Cliff and many more. But Patterson Hood rebelled against that legacy by joining a succession of punkish garage-rock bands. He was 21 when he met the 19-year-old Cooley on that circuit.

“We had a shared desire to be in a band and a shared incompetence,” Cooley recalls with a chuckle. “We didn’t have the skills to play with those other people who were playing in bands around town. Because of that shared incompetence, we could relate to each other and we got better together—and sometimes got frustrated with one another. We seemed to have enough of the same idea about where we wanted to go, though we didn’t know how to get there.”

They formed the band Adam’s House Cat in 1985, named after the old Southern expression, “I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s house cat.” It was a prophetic choice, for the band would never be very well known outside northern Alabama. The group’s mix of Crazy Horse, Rolling Stones, R.E.M. and Replacements did win them recognition from Musician Magazine in 1988 as one of the nation’s “Ten Best Unsigned Bands,” and they lived up to that accolade by remaining unsigned.

They recorded a full-length album, Town Burned Down, in 1990 at the legendary Muscle Shoals Studio. But no label wanted to release it; the band had no money left to release it themselves, and the group collapsed during an ill-considered move to Memphis. Cooley and Hood formed an acoustic duo called Virgil Kane (named after The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) and then a short-lived group called Horsepussy. Frustrated by failure and tired of each other, the two men moved to different towns and didn’t speak for several years.

“Adam’s House Cat was trying so hard not to be the things we were naturally meant to be,” Hood confesses, “that we ran from our Southernness and so many other things that deep down we really were. Cooley was the one with the big Carl Perkins influence, and I was too caught up with the Replacements and R.E.M. to pay attention. The Drive-By Truckers are the band Cooley wanted Adam’s House Cat to be. All these years later, we’ve embraced our Southernness, but at the time that seemed too easy.”

“Patterson and I had dropped out of college to do that first band,” Cooley adds, “and we put so much pressure on ourselves because we were getting so much pressure from our families for throwing away our lives. We were like the guy at the party who’s not going to get lucky because he’s trying so hard. When we started the Drive-By Truckers, we didn’t care—and that’s when we got lucky.”

Cooley finally started writing songs after he separated from Hood, who had never stopped writing. When Hood played his new songs, he knew they deserved a band behind them and he knew that band had to include Cooley. So he scraped together some money to record a single in Athens and invited his estranged ex-bandmate to play on the session. Things clicked, and soon the Drive-By Truckers were born.

“On many levels we’re opposites in that classic-rock-archetype way,” Hood says. "We have very different temperaments. On the surface, I’m the warmer, friendlier one, and he’s got that dark, surly streak, though sometimes we swap roles. We’ve been able to coexist with that and even thrive on that; it’s one of the greatest strengths of the band.

“I’ve always loved the way he could deconstruct whatever I built. If I wrote a pretty song, he’d put an ugly guitar part on it. If I wrote an ugly song, he’d put a pretty guitar part on it. He was like a pain in the ass who was trying to fuck up whatever I did, throwing a hand grenade in the middle of the dinner party. That’s essential for great rock ‘n’ roll, and he provided that. When he wasn’t there, I missed that, and I couldn’t find anyone else to do that.”

The Truckers’ first album, 1998’s Gangstabilly, featured a line-up of Hood, Cooley, acoustic bassist Adam Howell, drummer Matt Lane and steel guitarist John Neff. Rob Malone replaced Howell for the 1999 album, Pizza Deliverance.The line-up really solidified, though, when Brad Morgan took over the drum stool in 1999. He, Hood and Cooley have been the unchanging core of the Drive-By Truckers ever since.

“In forming a band it’s important to have the two opposites that Cooley and I represent,” Hood argues, “but it’s just as important to have that guy who plays the role that my dad played in the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section or that Charlie Watts plays in the Rolling Stones: the calm guy who’s not hot-headed. That’s Brad; we call him Easy Bee. We have a saying in the band: ‘You know you’ve really fucked up if you piss off Easy Bee.’ I’ve never seen anyone work harder at getting better; he practices all the time. Every record, every tour, he’s a little better than he was before. When we did that record with Booker T., he was so complimentary about Brad’s drumming.”

The quartet of Morgan, Hood, Cooley and Malone recorded the live album Alabama Ass Whuppin’ in 1999 and released it in 2000. Featuring five songs from Gangstabilly, three from Pizza Deliverance, three new originals and a cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died,” it summed up the Truckers’ first phase so well that the band decided to re-release it last fall, with a new mix by their current producer, David Barbe.

“We were never happy with the way that album was mastered,” Cooley explains. “It now sounds so much better than it did the first time. I’m glad we got it out, because that band and that sound will never exist again. There was a sense of abandonment to it. That’s as good as that band ever got.”

The Drive-By Truckers finally burst onto the national consciousness with 2001’s double-CD concept album, Southern Rock Opera, a song cycle about Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Neil Young, Bear Bryant, George Wallace and “The Southern Thing.” Earl Hicks was on bass; Malone became the third guitarist, and Virginia artist Wes Freed drew the iconic cover—just as he would handle all the band’s artwork from then on. The band deserved all the attention it got, for it was a magnificent recording.

The best was yet to come. When Malone suddenly quit later that year, the band hired Jason Isbell, a green-as-grass kid from Green Hills, Ala., 17 miles northwest of Florence. He was hired as a guitarist but turned out to be a terrific songwriter and singer too, and he contributed key songs to a pair of albums as good as any back-to-back combo in rock ‘n’ roll history: 2003’s Decoration Day and 2004’s The Dirty South.

The band was no longer writing about celebrities; they were writing about their neighbors, the kind of blue-collar adults they might have become if the band hadn’t worked out—people who drink too much, earn too little, marry too hurriedly and grope for answers in a cryptic universe. The Drive-By Truckers did for those Alabama residents what Bruce Springsteen had done for New Jersey’s.

“We ended up writing about these working-class Southerners who weren’t having too much luck in life,” Cooley acknowledges. “I came from that kind of family; I had a lot of that around me. It’s something I can get my head around, and it’s something I feel strongly about. My brain doesn’t do pop fantasy. I appreciate people who can do it, but Patterson and I are more interested in people we know and what makes them tick.”

“I write about what’s bugging me,” Hood adds. “During the Dubya Bush years, politics were driving me crazy, but how do you express that without being just another guy with a guitar ranting about how life sucks? You tell a story about someone who’s not you. Maybe it’s the Uncle Remus influence, all those tall tales I had as a kid. I’ve always loved Southern storytelling, books and literature; that comes from my mom’s side of the family—a lot of frustrated writers on that side. Springsteen was an influence too, especially when he released Darkness, River and Nebraska when I was in my mid-teens.”

It’s not often that a rock ‘n’ roll band has three songwriters operating simultaneously at the peak of their powers—the Beatles on Abbey Road, the Byrds on Fifth Dimension, Buffalo Springfield on Buffalo Springfield Again, Fleetwood Mac on Rumours, few others.

“It’s very unusual to have three songwriters in the same band—especially nowadays—but it wasn’t very competitive,” Isbell claims. “Everyone was very open to everyone else’s songs; it was pretty obvious which ones were going to work. As a result, there wasn’t any pressure on any one of us to write a full album of material.”

“I knew we’d struck gold,” Hood told the New York Times last year. “This chubby kid—he was 22 but looked like he was 15—was going to be one of the great songwriters of our time.” But it all went sour. Isbell was married to the band’s new bassist, Shonna Tucker; then they weren’t married—there was tension, belligerence and alcohol, and it all blew up in 2007. It was portrayed as an amicable parting at the time, but the principals are more honest about it now.

“Some people get drunk and become kind of sweet,” Hood told the Times. “Jason wasn’t one of those people.” When Hood suggested Isbell take some time off, the latter replied that he wasn’t going to miss even one show. Cooley then called and said, “That isn’t going to work for us.”

“At the end it got to where it wasn’t very much fun creatively,” Isbell told me this year, “because it wasn’t very much fun personally. But I learned a lot from those guys. We worked really, really hard. They always recorded the songs they wanted to record. It was never about what was going to sell; it was always about what was the best song. I learned that you can make a living by taking that approach; if I hadn’t, I might have ended up writing songs like what was on the radio. I’m infinitely grateful for that.”

Last year Isbell sobered up, married Amanda Shires and released Southeastern, an album of songs as good as his contributions to the Drive-By Truckers. The best of those songs is “Elephant,” the unflinching story of a woman refusing to change her personality just because she’s dying.

“I didn’t ever not love Jason Isbell,” Hood insists. “I was so angry at him for a few years that I wanted to throttle him, but I’d never trade those years when he helped us make Decoration Day and Dirty South and tour behind them. And it did end happily, because I’m so proud of what he’s done. ‘Elephant’ is the best song ever written by someone I personally know, and I know a lot of great songwriters.”

If Southeastern is an impressive return to form, so is English Oceans. The songwriting balance between Hood and Cooley has been restored, and both men deliver the kind of Southern oral storytelling they’re famous for. We expect that from them; what’s surprising is the new sophistication to the music.

On the earlier records, the band relied on their smart lyrics and tremendous energy to compensate for the predictability of the music. But this time, the chords move in unexpected directions; the vocal melodies don’t necessarily sit on the triads, and unusual breaks and codas wordlessly expand the lyrics’ implications. A lot of this is catalyzed by keyboardist Jay Gonzalez, who has a newly prominent role in the soundscape.

“The shows are more streamlined now,” Cooley points out. “We got a third guitar when we did Southern Rock Opera, just to be true to the form. Then for some reason we never changed. Then it occurred to us that we didn’t start as a three-guitar band, why not go back to two guitars? We used Spooner Oldham on piano for an album and a half, then we did a record with Booker T. We segued from that into having Jay as a full-time keyboard player. I think he’s proud that the only keyboardists we’ve had have been Spooner, Booker T. and him.”

Hood and Cooley gained a new appreciation for the non-verbal side of their songs after backing up Booker T. Jones on his 2009 instrumental album, Potato Hole. The former leader of the MGs wanted to nudge his R&B sound in more of a rock direction, but the sessions did not begin well. On the third day of a four-day session, Jones and the Truckers had completed only two songs. They were working on a slow tune called “Reunion Time,” but it just wasn’t happening.

“Booker made this face like he smelled something he didn’t like,” Hood remembers. "It wasn’t like Bettye Lavette yelling at you, but you could tell he was unhappy. He stopped in the middle of the take and gathered us around in a circle. He asked us to imagine a family reunion with pumpkin pie, our aunts and everything else. Then we went back to our instruments and nailed the take. From then on, we did that for every take. He said, ‘Yeah, I realized that you were used to playing off the lyrics. I’m telling a story too; I’m just not using words.’

“He opened our eyes to so many musical ideas and concepts, and we’ve spent the last three records and my solo record trying to deal with that. I always used to say I wanted the lyrics to hold up just on a piece of paper, but after playing with Booker, I realized I also want the music to hold up too as an instrumental without lyrics. I wouldn’t want to listen to Pizza Deliverance as instrumentals, but I think these songs would work as instrumentals.”

The Drive-By Truckers reached a similar impasse in the studio while working on English Oceans. Hood was trying to tape the lead vocal for his song, “Til He’s Dead or Rises,” but he just wasn’t getting it. It was an unusual song for him, a sludgy, bluesy, bottom-heavy rocker that tells an elliptical story about a couple who bonded as teenagers over an auto accident and now find their marriage a different kind of car wreck. It was a good song, a Drive-By Truckers song, but for some reason Hood couldn’t nail the vocal.

“It was late at night,” Cooley remembers. “Patterson went in to do another vocal, but he still wasn’t happy with it. He came into the control room and told me, ‘You know, this sounds more like your kind of song. Why don’t you sing it?’ I said, ‘I was just thinking the same thing.’ It’s funny; sometimes you write for a voice in your head and it’s not your voice.”

That’s the mark of a true band, a healed band, when one songwriter can sing the other songwriter’s song, when one guitarist can play the solo on another guitarist’s song (Hood’s favorite guitar solo on the new album is Gonzalez’s on Cooley’s “Primer Coat”). And the mark of a great songwriter is when he or she can write in someone else’s voice: a fellow band member’s, a neighbor back home, yours, mine.

Not long ago, the Melvins were doing an interview. They’re a lot like us in that they’ve been around a long time with the same core. They were asking them, ‘Well, what’s the secret to keeping a band together for 30 years?’ ‘Who said we did?’ The secret is kick somebody out every now and then. They said, ‘Usually when things are getting bad, it’s all coming from one source. Just get rid of that.’ Good advice.”

I’ve just asked Mike Cooley — half of the Drive-By Truckers brain trust — how his band has stayed more or less in one piece over the course of 18 years and 10 studio LPs, in spite of numerous defections and loads of interpersonal drama. And Cooley is attempting to answer me without really answering me. In an hour, I’m scheduled to meet the brain trust’s other half, Patterson Hood. He’ll arrive 20 minutes late, begging forgiveness, because his family has only one car, and his wife picked up their two kids from school and she can’t ever be on time for anything. When I ask Hood the same question, he’ll be a little more specific in his comments regarding the recent, not-so-amicable departures of bassist Shonna Tucker and guitarist (and Tucker’s boyfriend) John Neff. Cooley, as is his custom in songwriting or interviews, measures his words more carefully, though his way of saying nothing somehow says everything.

“I’m hoping that this whole album cycle will go by without any mention of former members. Because I’m an asshole,” he says, with a laugh and a crooked smile that implies I might tell you something if you turn that recorder off, but otherwise, no way in hell, buddy.

The standard-bearers for self-aware Southern rock, Drive-By Truckers have never been a mainstream success. Even a worshipful music media wandered away after championing early-’00s efforts like Southern Rock Opera and Decoration Day. After all, it’s not as if a band composed of guys in their forties (soon to be fifties) has a chance at being the Next Big Thing. To outsiders, Drive-By Truckers’ amalgamation of AC/DC, Tom T. Hall, Jim Carroll, and Walking Tall (Joe Don Baker edition) can be a little foreboding in its narrative density and bare-knuckle toughness. Also, the band name is pretty stupid, which Hood (DBT’s most prolific songwriter and chief theorist) will freely admit with a sheepish shrug.

When Hood named the band, he tells me later, he was obsessed with trucker songs and hip-hop, including early Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Too Short. “I thought, Wow, a name like that, I bet that name would go over well at the Star Bar in Atlanta, and it did. It was great for that,” he says. “Didn’t really have any thought of how it would feel to be in a band called that 10 years later. It’s like those hippies that name their kids Moonflower. Years later, you go, ‘Goddamn, I wish my parents hadn’t named me that.’”

If for whatever reason you’re not already onboard with Drive-By Truckers, let me make a quick case: No rock band has ever married thunderous guitar riffs with novelistic storytelling quite like them. Hood writes fantastically stylized songs about real people who seem fictional (like “The Buford Stick,” about two-fisted Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser), and Cooley authors awesomely naturalistic tunes about fake people who seem nonfictional (like the first-person hit man ode “Cottonseed”). Their concerts are communal experiences where bottles of bourbon are passed among band members and high fives and hugs are exchanged between strangers in the audience.

It’s a helluva lot of fun, and DBT’s body of work can stand toe to toe with any rock band of the past 20 years. (This includes the new English Oceans, the band’s best LP since 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark and its hardest rocking in at least a decade.) But it’s hardly big-time show business. The only way to keep it together if you’re in a band like Drive-By Truckers is to be stubborn about never ever falling apart, even when it appears from the outside that you are doing just that. If this band broke up tomorrow, nobody from Coachella or Bonnaroo would be writing out big checks for a reunion. So, your options are simple and unequivocal: Remain vertical or disappear forever into an unmarked grave.

Cooley and I are nursing bottles of Stella Artois and sitting in a loading area behind DBT’s offices on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia. The back part of the space houses the band’s gear, but the section we’re in has been converted into a clubhouse outfitted with (among other miscellanea) a couple of leather couches, a makeshift bar, banners from the band’s past tours, enough booze to adequately service an all-night after-show party, several photos from the set of The Magnificent Seven, roughly a dozen bass-drum heads, an ancient-looking, nonoperational organ that guitarist-keyboardist Jay Gonzalez bought at a Salvation Army store, a 16-track recorder that may or may not work and used to be installed at famed Alabama institution Muscle Shoals Studio Sound, a defaced black-and-white glossy of the Captain & Tennille, and a sign that reads “I’m Not a Hard Drinker, It’s the Easiest Thing to Do.”

This is where DBT would rehearse if DBT rehearsed.1 Actually, DBT has been limbering up all week at the legendary 40 Watt Club downtown, where the band is performing three shows from Thursday to Saturday. The gigs are a warm-up for the upcoming tour in support of English Oceans, as well as a long-standing tradition. For more than a decade, Drive-By Truckers have performed winter runs at the 40 Watt, a special treat for hard-core fans who travel from around the country to see a band that typically plays theaters back inside the confines of a sweaty, 500-person-capacity club.

Tonight is the second concert at 40 Watt, which happens to fall on Valentine’s Day. Cooley lives in Birmingham, Alabama, a four-hour drive from Athens, and his wife and kids have joined him in town for this brief homecoming tour. I had spied the Cooley clan pull up in a Honda Odyssey just a minute after I parked outside the squat industrial-park building where DBT is unceremoniously headquartered. (Neighbors include a sign shop and an IT company.) Having seen Cooley tear through a Jack Daniel’s fog seven or eight times onstage, I quietly lurked inside my car so I could witness him in the incongruous role of patriarch. They rolled right past me — wife Ansley out front with the Cooley kids (two boys and one girl, ages 10, 8, and 6) while Dad trailed behind in leather jacket, shades, and long hair falling into his eyes, looking like a debauched but still handsome Fred Astaire crossed with Bill & Ted–era Keanu Reeves.

Once inside, Cooley dispatched the wife and kids out back to kill time on a basketball hoop while I put him through the promotional paces. Once the interview was over, Cooley’s plan was to escort his brood to a matinee of The Lego Movie before heading over to the 40 Watt.

Back to the original question: The Drive-By Truckers haven’t stayed together for the past two decades so much as moved in and out of different incarnations with the same two guys at the center.2 DBT was already undergoing its first significant lineup change when the band entered the national consciousness with its absurdly ambitious third album, 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, which addressed (in order of importance) the South’s conflicted class and racial politics, the struggles of dead-end rock bands, the mythology of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the virtues of mainlining whiskey versus maintaining healthy romantic relationships. Guitarist Rob Malone (who contributed two songs to SRO) was replaced in 2002 by a baby-faced 22-year-old singer-songwriter named Jason Isbell, and bassist Earl Hicks (who coproduced SRO’s predecessor, 1999’s brilliantly titled Pizza Deliverance) departed the following year, making room for Tucker, who was married to Isbell at the time. If there is such a thing as a “classic” lineup of Drive-By Truckers, this would be it — Hood, Cooley, Isbell, Tucker, and drummer Brad Morgan — though it held only through 2006’s troubled A Blessing and a Curse.

But the Hood-Cooley partnership hasn’t broken. The roots were inauspicious: It goes back to Florence, Alabama, where they met in 1985 when they were students, then roommates, then dropouts at the University of North Alabama.

“I remember he called the apartment. The first time I ever talked to him. Somebody had been calling and hanging up and I was getting pissed,” Cooley says.3 “The phone rang and I just picked up the phone and started screaming obscenities into it, and then he introduced himself to me over the phone. So that was how it started.”

On Southern Rock Opera, Hood ruminated on “the duality of the Southern thing,” weighing the region’s progressive artistic legacy (personified by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant4) against its regressive social history (depicted on the album in the guise of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace). On English Oceans — a garage-y, heavily Stones-influenced gut shot that was bashed out in a scant two weeks — the band explores the duality of the Truckers thing: DBT has always projected a unified front as a rock band’s rock band, a real unit for whom old classic-rock tropes like “The Road” and “The Rock Show” are still sacred, near-spiritual concepts. But in reality, DBT has only ever been a union between two guys who met over a misunderstood phone call. It’s a complicated real-life relationship tucked inside a bombastic celebration of rock-and-roll romanticism.

Most Drive-By Truckers LPs feature at least a song or two from a third writer, whether it’s Malone, Isbell, or Tucker. But English Oceans is structured like a conversation strictly between Hood and Cooley, alternating songs from both writers like a Hüsker Dü record. Hood and Cooley don’t write together, and they usually don’t share their new songs until it’s time to record. And yet the songs on English Oceans achieve a natural harmony that at times suggests an unspoken telepathy between the band’s composers. For instance, at the heart of the record are two songs — Cooley’s psych-folk tune “Made Up English Oceans” and Hood’s country-rocking “The Part of Him” — that are about phony, Bible-thumping politicians. Cooley’s song is characteristically impressionistic, with scores of killer lines. (My personal favorite: “6-by-9 and counting down in one after the other / They’ll go running up and down the road, angry as their mothers.”) Hood’s track, meanwhile, is typically cinematic, unfolding like a four-minute ’70s neo-noir. (“He was a piece of work, more or less a total jerk / His own mama called him an SOB.”)

Elsewhere, English Oceans is thick with songs about broken romantic relationships as seen from the point of view of the woman. No matter DBT’s macho reputation, Hood and Cooley have long been sympathetic to female perspectives in their songs, and it’s even more pronounced on Oceans. Hood’s “When He’s Gone,” “Pauline Hawkins,” and “When Walter Went Crazy” are about women stuck with men they’re too good for. Cooley addresses similar themes on the drunken slow dance “Natural Light,” where a woman is torn between her cell phone and the advances of a love-struck barroom admirer. Taken together, Hood’s intense character studies and Cooley’s laid-back observations act as perfect complements.

“Before either one of us were worth a shit, there was a great chemistry between us,” Hood says. “When we started playing together — he was 19 and I was 21 — we didn’t particularly get along most of the time. Sometimes we really didn’t get along. Sometimes we just fought like brothers, just fought for months.”

Back then, according to Hood, “we couldn’t have been more different.” Hood grew up immersed in music as the son of bassist David Hood, a member of Muscle Shoals’ fabled house band. (You can hear David Hood on Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” and Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” among many other tracks.) Cooley, meanwhile, “lived in a bubble inside a bubble” growing up. (“I heard what was on the radio, just like everybody else my age did,” he says.) Hood wrote songs every day as a kid, to the detriment of his schoolwork, accumulating hundreds of compositions by the time he (barely) graduated high school. Cooley didn’t start writing songs until he was 25, and only after constant encouragement from Hood.

“I knew he was a great writer long before he started writing it down,” Hood says. “Just hearing the way he talks, it’s like, ‘Man, you should write that shit down, it’s fucking poetry.’”

In the mid-’80s, Hood and Cooley formed their first band, Adam’s House Cat, which was basically Muscle Shoals’ version of the Replacements rip-off every one-horse Middle American town had in the ’80s and ’90s. Adam’s House Cat’s mix of country, punk, and classic rock was a dry run for the Truckers, only with weaker material and virtually no vision beyond scoring a local gig in an area dominated by cover bands and session musicians.

“Our whole thing was basically born out of a mutually shared incompetence,” Cooley says. “There was one point where we got a little attention. It was a high point, but in a way maybe the kiss of death, too. Musician magazine back then used to have this ‘best unsigned band’ contest, and we entered it and made it in the top 10. We got offered a publishing-type deal and it started looking like things were going to happen. And then that deal got pulled away at the last minute. The funding wasn’t there for it anymore and then we kind of changed our sound, and then a lot of people who were looking at us didn’t really like our reinvention of ourselves, thought we were off on the wrong track. And we may have been.”

The problem back then, as Cooley sees it, was that they were spinning their wheels furiously without any sense of direction. “I’ve always said that the band was the guy at the club or the party that you know is going home alone because he’s trying too hard,” he says. “It was that guy in band form.”

Hood and Cooley were also butting heads constantly. They were friends, but they were also young alpha males with a constant need to assert control over the other. Finally, after too much squabbling, they took a breather from each other in the early ’90s. Hood moved to Athens, and Cooley took a job as a house painter. (“Great job for a pothead,” he advises.) Soon, Hood found that he missed his old sparring partner.

“I played with some great people during that time and loved them and all that, but they would make my pretty songs prettier and my rocker songs rockier,” Hood says. “They did whatever seemed called for, and Cooley, almost without exception, did the opposite. If it was a pretty song, he would make it ugly. If it was an ugly song, he would do something beautiful. I really missed that.”

In Cooley’s mind, Drive-By Truckers eventually succeeded where Adam’s House Cat failed because “we didn’t give a shit. It was pure fun.” But in reality, the appearance of not giving a shit was a calculated move on Hood’s part to lure Cooley back into the fold.

“I set this band up in a way that enabled him to be here when he could and still be free when he wasn’t able to come. Whenever we booked shows, I’d let him know when they were. Like, if you can come, play. If you can’t, we’ll play without you. He didn’t miss many — probably half a dozen in the first six months, and maybe one after that, at the most.”

By the late ’90s — before Southern Rock Opera, around the time of the band’s 1998 debut, Gangstabilly — Hood and Cooley and the rest of the band had quit their day jobs and were playing “ridiculous schedules” out on tour. “There was a lot of unhappiness at home, so we just quit coming home,” says Hood, who wound up divorcing his first wife. “We had this 10-year-old Ford Econoline and we pulled a trailer and we just did it. Even though we may not have been pulling enough people for some of the rooms we were playing, the people who came would drink so much that the club was happy and would have us back.”

“The first time we actually went on the road for real was horrible,” Cooley recalls. “We went north in December. Bad idea. The shows were pretty far apart. We got to Lansing, Michigan, and the snow started coming down. And the next show was Buffalo. The best way to go is up into Canada, but you know, that weed. We didn’t even know how to go about it, so we drove from Lansing through Cleveland and around Lake Erie in a blizzard. Not a blizzard [just] by Southern guys’ standards — it’s like snow that people up there are going, ‘My god, that’s a lot of fucking snow.’ The band that shared the bill with us put us up at their house, and they had kids who had come home from kindergarten with the stomach flu, so a bunch of people from our camp got it. Every day, somebody else would be sick. As soon as it was over, I wanted to do it again.”

Touring so much has taken its toll on Drive-By Truckers over the years, which is evidenced by the turnover in the band’s lineup.

“The road breaks you,” Hood says. “It breaks your gear, it breaks your vehicles, and at times it breaks your head. It can break your relationships. We’ve had a lot of personnel changes through the years. It’s always been almost like a revolving door on paper, yet at any given time, I never looked at it that way. Because I don’t really like a lot of change. I like working with the same people. Sometimes some things aren’t meant to last, and some things last a long time. I never would’ve imagined that Cooley and I would be together 29 years later. But there are people that I’ve played with along the way that I thought, Man, I might get to play with that person forever. And I don’t. Play with them two years, three years.”

The loss of Tucker and Neff is “sad to me,” Hood says. “I’d rather it be friendly. I hope at some point in time, it can be, but it’s just what it is. Of course, she and John were in a relationship, so after she left, he was in the band for another year, and that was very tense and very uncomfortable, and not good, not positive in any way. He’s a great player, and they both have a lot of talent, but sometimes it’s just time to move on.”

When reached by email, Neff claimed he and Tucker had problems with only two members of the band: Hood and Morgan. “There was never an issue between myself and Jay or [new bassist] Matt [Patton] or Mike Cooley,” says Neff, who drifted in and out of DBT as a sideman since 1998 before serving as a permanent member from 2007 to ’12. Tucker released her first solo record, A Tell All, in 2013, and Neff currently plays in her backing band, Eye Candy.

“Patterson struggled with Shonna and I being together,” Neff says. “Brad had problems with Shonna being a contributing songwriter, and in my opinion, felt threatened by the situation. He told her that she ‘should know her place.’”

Hood appears to be on good terms with Isbell, who went on to a critically acclaimed solo career after cleaning up from the rock-and-roll lifestyle he undertook while still in the Truckers. (“I love those guys, but I’m glad I’m not playing with them anymore” was how Isbell put it to the New York Times Magazine in 2013.) A talented writer with an aching tenor who carved out a popular niche as the band’s George Harrison figure, Isbell is the closest DBT has ever come to having a third front man.

“I thought when Jason left, that was going to be the end,” Hood says. “I was scared to death. Because he was a very beloved member by everybody across the board. I thought the fans were going to revolt.”

Hood and Cooley decided to fire Isbell one night when DBT was on tour. They had the night off in Louisville, and the members all had their own hotel rooms. Hood couldn’t sleep, because “we saw the writing on the wall” regarding how dysfunctional the current band situation was. During the sessions for A Blessing and a Curse, “the songs that [Isbell] brought to the table just sounded like a different band’s songs. We didn’t play them the way he wanted them played, and we didn’t play the way he wanted it to sound. Of course, we’re all drinking a ton in those days and he was divorcing our bass player, and sometimes seeming to antagonize her on purpose, which would make for drama, which everyone gets really tired of quickly.”

To clear his head that night in Louisville, Hood went down to the tour bus, poured himself a drink, and sparked up a joint. Not long after, Cooley materialized; he was also losing sleep over the Isbell problem. “We sat there and drank about a half a bottle of whiskey and discussed what the fuck were we going to do,” Hood says. “Are we going to decide this is it and drive it into the ditch full speed ahead and let it go out in a ball of flames and explode onstage like Hüsker Dü? Or are we going to figure a way to soldier on? We decided, fuck it, we’ve come this far. Let’s don’t go out like this. It’s kind of cheesy.”

Drive-By Truckers are no longer on the 200-plus shows–per-year treadmill that Hood and Cooley happily climbed on back in the late ’90s. Hood turns 50 on March 24, and at 47 Cooley isn’t much younger. Cooley admits he was burned out after the consecutive album-tour cycles for 2010’s The Big To-Do and 2011’s Go-Go Boots, which was also a period when he struggled to come up with new songs. While tensions between Hood and Cooley never came to a head like they had with Tucker and Neff, Hood detected that Cooley was disengaging.

“It’s not like we were sitting around fighting, because it wasn’t,” Hood says. “It was almost more passive-aggressive. So that kind of takes a different toll. I think during some of that time — which had absolutely nothing to do with former members or whatever — Cooley was less than just happy being here, and I think it was becoming very much a job.”

Hood dealt with the discontent in the DBT camp by making another solo record, 2012’s Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, and touring with his side band, the Downtown Rumblers. He has also played out as a stand-alone singer-songwriter, relocating briefly to Portland, Oregon, in January for a monthlong residency at a club there. Hood was pleasantly surprised by how well the shows were received — Portland isn’t a great market for Drive-By Truckers — and says he is “pondering” a permanent move to the city. A lifelong Southerner, Hood has grown to hate the unbearably hot and humid summers. Plus, his wife might have a potential job opportunity there.

“The band’s going to be based here, period, whether I’m flying in or whatever,” Hood maintains. “But I could live there. It’s a great town.”5

As for the current state of Drive-By Truckers, Hood is bullish. “The lineup’s killer, Cooley’s got all these great songs, we’re all so happy with the record we made. He was so involved on every level of making this record, more than at any point ever, by far.” But there is a sense with Hood that even if the lineup weren’t killer, and Cooley didn’t have all these great songs, he would find a way to keep Drive-By Truckers going regardless. He talks about the possibility of Cooley walking away from him one day, but never the other way around. He’s seems to be locked in no matter what. “Well, what the fuck else am I going to do?” Hood asks rhetorically. “Form another band that has another name that pulls less people in and start over?”

The last song on English Oceans is Hood’s “Grand Canyon,” a ponderous sprawl dedicated to Craig Lieske, a friend and road companion who sold merch and acted as an informal liaison with fans in countless cities. Hood wrote “Grand Canyon” after the 48-year-old Lieske died suddenly in January 2013, right in the middle of last year’s 40 Watt run. It caused Hood to set aside the material he had earmarked for Oceans and start over, because “this record became something different when I wrote that song,” he says.

“We played that weekend because I had to play,” Hood recalls, his regular chatterbox effusiveness subsiding a bit. “Everybody’s come to town, it’s sold out, we’re here. Canceling the show wasn’t even an option. Craig would haunt us forever, and find ways to fuck us up if we did something like that. He was a very ‘show must go on’ kind of guy. So we played, and it was fucking brutal. After that weekend, we left for a two-week tour. Getting on the bus with an empty bunk, it was fucking terrible.”

When I saw them at the 40 Watt a few weeks ago, Drive-By Truckers ended the set with a lumbering rendition of “Grand Canyon.” A few hours earlier, it was preceded by “The Living Bubba,” from Gangstabilly, a similarly themed Hood composition about an Athens musician named Gregory Dean Smalley who kept on playing gigs right up until he died of AIDS. “I can’t die now, because I’ve got another show to do,” Hood sings in the chorus.

“Greg was one of those guys, and Craig was one of those guys, too,” Hood says. “He lived his life as long as he had it, until the very last moment. His last day on earth was about as good a last day on earth — other than it ending with dying — as I can imagine. He played a rock show, he played a great rock show. He hung out with his best friends, he went to bed with his beautiful fiancée, who he was very in love with, and he died in bed. If you gotta go … ”

Valentine’s Day at the 40 Watt wasn’t Drive-By Truckers’ best night. Tempos were occasionally woozy, vocals were inconsistently tuneful, and guitar riffs swerved dangerously close to the ground at times. But the feeling was there, as was the familiar boozy camaraderie onstage and in the audience. Besides, there will be plenty of time to tighten up in the weeks and months ahead. Because there’s always another show to do.

Thanks for the pieces, Bob. I like Hyden's stuff much more often than not.

First listen: Good, possibly great with more spins. Not as engaging or immediate as Brighter Than Creation's Dark but has potential to be my fave DBT since then. I'm sure the epilogue jams at the end of "Pauline Hawkins" and "Grand Canyon" annoyed some, but I loved them.

definitely their best since Brighter.

A very low bar.