"I was always really phobic about dying on the road -- always thinking that it could happen to me at any moment," recalls Hood. "Touring has always been tough for me because I could never get to sleep in the van," explains Hood, whose punishing schedule has included as many as 200 live shows a year since the Truckers first hit the road in 1998. "I was always afraid that if I did fall asleep, something bad was going to happen."
But as it happens, the mysterious car on I-10 roared past in the left lane, avoiding a collision. "It flew by so quickly that, for a moment, I even questioned whether it happened," remembers Hood.
A frantic cell phone call right afterward ("Fuck! Did you see that?!") from friends in a car behind the van confirmed it.
"My next thought was a very calm realization that my number had just flew by me, so I guess it ain't up yet. From then on, I have never had trouble sleeping in the van, nor had any real fear of dying on the road. All the fear in the world couldn't have changed a thing if fate had placed me in the passing lane that moment. Realizing that was actually a relief -- and that ain't too crappy."
Naturally, this moment of truth became part of a song.
"Seen my number fly by on Interstate 10," Hood sings in "Hell No, I Ain't Happy," one of the intensely personal compositions on the new Drive-By Truckers album Decoration Day.
Out this summer on the New West label, Decoration Day is the Truckers' first CD since 2001's Southern Rock Opera, a fictionalized retelling of the Lynyrd Skynyrd saga, a story of life on the road that ended with a tragic crash. The double-disc set earned universal critical acclaim, including a four-star review in Rolling Stone and, more recently, a nod from Entertainment Weekly, hailing the Truckers as one of the 10 up-and-coming "bands to watch."
But Decoration Day is distinctly different from Opera, a less raucous and more introspective album in the style of the Truckers' earlier work. In fact, Hood asserts that it's actually a follow-up to 1999's Pizza Deliverance.
"When we set out to do Southern Rock Opera, we wrote it about fictional characters," he explains. "We put a lot of ourselves in it -- applying our experiences to other characters and finding common ground. But Decoration Day isn't about fictional characters. It's about us, and all the bullshit and personal trauma we went through while making Southern Rock Opera."
While the Truckers had fun writing Opera, the experience of recording it -- on the top floor of a uniform shop without air conditioning, in the midst of a summer heat wave -- was agonizing. During the same period, the musicians found their personal lives disintegrating ("Hell No, I Ain't Happy" refers to Hood's divorce), and increased arguing within the group eventually led to longtime member Rob Malone quitting the band.
Though Decoration Day was written during "those miserable times," Hood explains, it was recorded later, when the band had worked out its problems. The sessions ran smoothly, and the final result came in $30,000 below budget. But their label at the time, Lost Highway (which distributed Southern Rock Opera), was disappointed to discover that Decoration was not an amped-up, old-school, Southern-rock sequel to Opera. So disappointed, in fact, that the Drive-By Truckers suddenly found themselves in search of another label.
With assistance from friends in Slobberbone, they found a home for Decoration at New West, an outfit that has successfully promoted albums by artists as diverse as Stan Ridgway and Delbert McClinton.
Ironically, in light of its initial cold reception from the suits, Decoration is the Truckers' most personal album yet, heralding a return to the style of their earliest recordings.
Among the album's standout tracks are two new songs that address the suicide of a friend and former bandmate, the bassist from Hood and singer/guitarist Mike Cooley's earlier band, Adam's Housecat. Cooley tackles the subject with grim intensity on "When the Pin Hits the Shell," singing, "The same God that you're so afraid is gonna send you to hell/Is the same one you're gonna answer to when the pin hits the shell." And Hood confronts the same deed with naked outrage in "Do It Yourself," admonishing, "It's a sorry thing to do to your sweet sister/It's a sorry thing to do to your little boy." He is openly uncomfortable discussing the song, commenting only that, "What [suicide] leaves behind is so terrible for family and friends; it's horrible for the survivors."
While awaiting the new disc's release, the Truckers have been in the studio again, laying down tracks for a future album in the more hard-rocking style of Opera. Hood acknowledges the band's tone has become a bit more serious lately. "There aren't as many of the funny songs as there were before," he confesses, referring to crowd-pleasers such as "Buttholeville" and "The President's Penis Is Missing." "But we've still got all those songs, and we do pull them out and play them from time to time."
Maybe the changes have something to do with that eerie moment on I-10.
"I feel like I lead a charmed life," Hood says. "I spend every day surrounded by people I love and respect. Not that life's all roses, because we do fight. But you have to know how to fight, and how to work through it. And it's wonderful when audiences respond to what you're doing and like it. And it's all based on that."
