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Drive-By Truckers sind eine Rock/Alternative Country Band aus Athens, Georgia. Gegründet 1996 von Patterson Hood und Mike Cooley machte sich die Band in den USA einen Namen durch zahlreiche Live-Auftritte und kann u.a auf eine Grammy Nominierung zurück blicken. Das neue neue Album wurde von David Barbe (Sugar) produziert.

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Who the hell are the Drive-By Truckers? Five big, loud Southern Men. 4 from Alabama, 1 from South Carolina, 3 of whom now reside in Athens, GA; 1 in Birmingham, AL; and 1 in Center Star, AL (just outside of Muscle Shoals).

Hit the road in 1998, played over 400 shows in 2 1/2 years while recording and releasing (independently) 3 albums. Took six months off to fight, mix and raise the money to release their 4th album. Put out Southern Rock Opera themselves (September 12, 2001) and hit the road again, playing over 250 shows in 14 months. Was one of the few independent bands in recent memory to receive a 4-star review from Rolling Stone.

Signed with Lost Highway Records in May of 2002 (Southern Rock Opera re-released on major label July 2002) but parted ways and signed on with New West in 2003.

Sometimes referred to as DBT.

Mike Cooley plays guitar and sings. He grew up in Tuscumbia, AL (where Helen Keller came from). As a boy, he took guitar lessons from bluegrass legend Al Lester and saw Carl Perkins play The Hayloft Opry. Formed Adam’s House Cat with Patterson Hood in 1985. Plays really cheap beat up guitars, and tears them up when they act up. Don’t act up.

Earl Hicks plays bass. He produced 2 of DBT’s albums before joining the band in 2000. He grew up in Florence, AL (as did W.C. Handy). He is an avid wine drinker. He is sometimes known as Bird Dog. He has an acute sense of smell and his doppelganger is a dead man.

Patterson Hood plays guitar and sings. He began writing songs when he was 8 and has written over 3000 songs. Most of the first 2000 suck. He is a very stubborn man and the poster child for persistence. His father, David Hood, is a session musician from Muscle Shoals AL. He played on “I’ll Take You There” by The Staple Singers as well as songs by Bobby Womack, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Bob Seger, and Willie Nelson.

Spent much of his childhood on a farm in McGee Town, AL, just down the road from where Sam Phillips grew up.

Jason Isbell plays guitar and sings. He is from Green Hill, AL. At 24, he is somewhat younger than the rest of the band. He joined the band in the fall of 2001 on half a day’s notice and learned the show on stage in Norman OK. 2 days later he wrote the title cut for their new album “Decoration Day”.

Brad Morgan plays drums. He would not be caught dead playing congas. He would not be caught dead in a band with a saxophone. He hates saxophones. He comes from Greenville, SC. where Lynyrd Skynyrd played their last show before the plane crash. He looks swell in a bathrobe.

One of the best goddamned Rock and Roll Bands you’ll ever see.

Since 2008's magnificent Brighter Than Creation's Dark, Drive-By Truckers have released both a live album and a catch-up compilation of B-sides and outtakes, and continued their occasional alliances with soul legends by playing Booker T's back-up band on his Grammy-winning Potato Hole album. In other words, all the kinds of diversionary tactics usually practiced by bands short of new material.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth: The Big To Do is well up to their usual standard, and it's soon to be followed, they claim, by their "R&B Murder Ballad Album" Go Go Boots, which sounds like it could be even better. As before, The Big To Do is stuffed with literate storytelling songs situated in the band's native Deep South milieu, delivered in sometimes brutally authentic voices. "Birthday Boy", for instance, opens with the great line, "'Which one's the birthday boy?' she said, 'I ain't got all night'" – a handful of words evoking all the sleazy shame of an adolescent "celebration" with cheap booze and hookers. Sometimes, songwriter Patterson Hood needs only the right title to bring an entire world to life – as with "This Fucking Job", a bilious rant against a system that forces the protagonist's family to "live on fast-food wages".

But the lives depicted in Hood's songs are not just the clichéd underclass complaints of some pious, protesting folkie; instead, a vein of droll, trailer-trash graveyard humour and unforeseen twists makes songs like "Drag The Lake Charlie" and "The Wig He Made Her Wear" the musical equivalents to My Name Is Earl. In the former, two sad-sack cops searching for missing low life Lester hope they find him drowned, as they don't want to face the wrath of his wife Wanda if he turns up drunk in town again; while in "The Wig He Made Her Wear", Hood relates the true story of a wife who murders her churchgoing, pillar-of-the-community husband, but gets a short sentence for voluntary manslaughter by claiming his imposition of depraved sexual demands as extenuation, including the high heels and wig he forced her to wear. Upon her re-emergence from jail, however, she's observed still wearing them.

Elsewhere, "Get Downtown" is a big-hat, honky-tonk number, in which a wife turfs out the jobless couch-spud husband "uglying up the house", with brusque instructions to find himself a wage. Musically, it's the exception on The Big To Do, for which the Truckers have reverted to something close to the big rock sound of their 2002 classic Southern Rock Opera, with waspish slide-guitar and organ fattening up the monster guitar riffs, and plaintive harmonies punctuating Hood's drawled tales from life's other side.
Quelle: THE INDEPENDENTE - URL

For 12 years now, Athens, Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers have been conjuring up a vivid world in which the swamps are choked with the victims of psychopaths, the local whores are shrinks and booze turns livers into leather. But never have Patterson Hood’s five-piece sounded quite so cranky and furiously righteous as they do on this terrific, ear-splitting sprawl of shit-kicking country boogie. Powered by a three-axe onslaught of shirt-billowing riffs – the sort J Mascis would give his greying locks for – this is the gnarly, heads-down sound of survival and when they growl “there was damage done but I made it home, woke up on the floor” (on ‘The Fourth Night Of My Drinking’) it sounds like they know their subject matter well.
Quelle: NME - URL