Patterson Hood On New Drive-By Truckers Album, Remembering Wes Freed

In 2018, ATO records released the album Town Burned Down by Adam’s House Cat, a mid-80s rock act featuring Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley pre-dating the duo’s breakthrough work in Drive-By Truckers.

It was an album once thought lost and, even if subconsciously, its release struck a chord with Hood as he began work on the nine tracks that would come to make up the 14th Drive-By Truckers studio album Welcome 2 Club XIII.

The album title references a bar in Muscle Shoals, Alabama where Hood and Cooley performed together in Adam’s House Cat and the album itself takes a deeper look back at younger days and lessons learned (or in some cases not), the idea of parenthood once again informing proceedings.

The new album’s cover art finds the band in collaboration with artist Wes Freed, who illustrated the majority of the band’s album covers over the last 20 years. Freed passed away unexpectedly just three months after Welcome 2 Club XIII was released following a bout with colorectal cancer.

While some of the songs take on a darker tone lyrically, the music itself is a cause for celebration, the result of brisk work captured in just three days, with recording sessions doubling as tour rehearsals for a band whose members hadn’t seen one another in almost two years amidst pandemic.

On the road for most of the last year and a half, Drive-By Truckers wrapped up a grueling band run last month in Chicago over the course of two sold out benefit concerts for Chicagoland food pantry Beyond Hunger, giving back during the holiday season.

With the economics of touring upended amidst pandemic and inflation, continually raising an already high level of difficulty for independent artists, Hood is thankful his band continues to make it work.

“I’ve been on tour for three weeks now, something like that – driving myself, tour managing myself and selling merch, doing the whole thing. And I am burned out. I’m about to have about two months off and I’m looking forward to it,” said Hood from the road, phoning in from Atlanta during a solo run. “I mean, everything post-2020 has been kind of a s—t show financially for this business. But we’re still one of the lucky bands. Because we have a devout following,” he said. “The shows have been great. The tours have been great. Some of my favorite shows ever for the band have been really in the last year. Our Europe tour was just kind of over the top phenomenal that we did back in the spring,” said Hood, looking ahead to a spring 2023 U.S. tour for Drive-By Truckers set to kick off in March. “We’re able to continue doing this thing somehow.”

I spoke with Patterson Hood about Welcome 2 Club XIII, working with Freed, a partnership with Cooley nearing 40 years and stability. A transcript of our phone conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows below.

We spoke in Chicago on opening night of your solo tour in the summer of 2021. And you were telling me that night how you guys were just about to go into the studio and demo some of the songs that would become Welcome 2 Club XIII – that those sessions were basically taking the place of tour rehearsals after having not seen each other for almost two years. In fact you played “We Will Never Wake You up in the Morning” that night. How did starting the process for the album in that way impact things?

PH: Well, that ended up being the album. We made this record in about three and a half days of recording. We went in to work up those new songs and basically, at the end of the third day, Cooley, who’s pretty unflappable personality-wise in our band, was like “Man, I think we just did it.” And I was like, “I do too! I probably wouldn’t have been the one to bring it up but now that you mention it, I kind of feel that way too.” We just kind of kept listening to what we had just done. And it was like, “I don’t want to f-k with this.” I think there’s something magical that kind of happened.

We always work fast. But to go in where we had never even played the songs and have it go that fast… Everybody’s off-the-cuff take on what to do synced up kind of magically. It was like, “Mix it and put it out. This is a record.”

Everybody was so glad to see each other. And it was awesome seeing that even after a year and a half of not seeing each other, the chemistry picked up right where it left off. That was awesome.

I think it gave it sort of a positive image that kind of juxtaposed well with the fact that it’s a dark record. It’s a really dark record. But I think the energy kind of made it not come off quite so dark.

I was looking at Wes Freed’s album cover art this morning. Obviously, he passed away just a few months after the album was released. Looking at that artwork today, what does it mean to you guys having been able to work with him one more time?

PH: I wouldn’t take the world for the years I got to spend working with Wes. And I’m really thankful that we did this record while he was still with us. Because it was a magical thing working on that together. And it’s always been that way between he and I and between he and the band.

We always consider him part of the band. Even the two records where we did the photo type covers, he was still involved. He still had artwork and stuff like that. We just wanted to do something different for those two records. The idea with American Band was I wanted it to have kind of a photojournalism feel for the cover. And then The Unraveling kind of became its own thing too.

But to be able to get to work on Club XIII the way we did was really great. He never went there [to that club] – he never saw that with his own eyes. And yet he captured it. He absolutely captured it. Not to mention the inside gatefold piece of Adam’s House Cat playing at that place. It’s just uncanny how great it is.

Him dying has been really, really brutal. I’ve been about as grief-stricken as any loss I’ve ever suffered in my life – including my beloved grandmother who raised me. Because it was so sudden. He had gone through a cancer thing and kind of come out the other side and was doing great. He had gotten kind of a clean bill. He was literally getting dressed to come home from the hospital from the final step of his treatment. And I guess he had some kind of an incident – a pulmonary embolism I think, something like that. And he was dead. With no warning whatsoever. So we’re pretty destroyed over it.

The album title itself is a look back to some of you and Mike’s earliest gigs. And the look back doesn’t stop there. It made me wonder if revisiting the Adam’s House Cat material for the album release a few years back the way you did had an impact. Was that in the back of your head at all do you think as you started writing Welcome 2 Club XIII, even if it was subconsciously?

PH: I don’t think it was planned. But it definitely happened. It definitely happened. I wrote the song “Billy Ringo in the Dark” while mixing Town Burned Down. And it was completely a reaction to that. Because the fictional character Billy Ringo, who I’ve written about in other songs before, is pretty closely based on a real life person that was in that band. So hearing those vocal tracks in the control room isolated, definitely inspired that song. And it sort of set a pattern for a lot of the songs that came after it that kind of tied all of that in together.

The idea of looking back upon youth and perhaps lessons learned – or in some cases not learned – seems to be a bit of a theme this time around. How does that idea manifest itself in this batch of songs?

PH: Yeah. And the fact that we all have kids now. Everyone in the band has kids. And most of us have kids that are kind of coming up on the age – or in Cooley’s case the exact age – that him and I were when we started playing together. And so there’s a certain amount of juxtaposing those crazy times we had against not wanting our kids to make some of the f—k ups that we might have made along the way – while, at the same time, not wanting our kids to not live life. There’s a certain amount of f—king up that’s kind of part of life – you just want them to survive it.

So that’s a big recurring thing.

Your partnership with Mike is nearing 40 years. What does it mean having that – especially after these crazy last few years?

PH: Crazy. It is amazing. It’s amazing that we get along so well. Because we really do. And it wasn’t necessarily that way when we were young. We had to go through at least a decade of pretending that we were the Davies brothers. (Laughs) He never punched me out – although he did try to one time. But we somehow kind of fought our way through until we figured out how not to fight. And then for another 10 years, we coexisted peacefully and productively. And then, for about the last 18 years, it’s just been really great.

Once we started having kids, it kind of changed something for the better. We both started having kids at about the same time. And something about that kind of reset something. It’s kind of cool.

Ironically, our kids are pretty close buds – which is something that we didn’t really set out on. Obviously, you would prefer everyone to like each other. But they don’t necessarily see each other a lot – so we didn’t know how that was gonna go. But they’re all pretty tight and that’s awesome.

I was looking at the band’s timeline this morning. And you guys have had the same lineup now for a little over ten years – which hasn’t really happened elsewhere in the band’s history. What’s it like having that stability now?

PH: It’s amazing. That’s the way I always wanted it to be, you know? And it took a while. (Laughs) It took the better part of two decades to kind of get that. I hate personnel changes. I don’t like crew changes. I honestly don’t like to change anything.

But this has been a really magical lineup both musically and personally. Because we really just click well. We work well together and we travel well together. That’s a big thing – being able to coexist with 11 people living on a bus for weeks at a time. That’s not an easy combination to find. Because it only takes one person really to f—k up a chemistry. And it can be someone that is awesome and talented and amazing in every other way but they just don’t do that part well and it f—ks it up. It doesn’t take a lot to keep it from happening.

The first night of this official lineup – which was in Washington, D.C. at the 9:30 Club – I kind of instinctively knew at the end of that night, “Oh wow! Something crazy just happened. This is different. This is going to be special.”

And it’s truly been that way.