Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do

Their new record comes out in March of 2010. First single is available for free download here.

If there's a better rock and roll band in America, I'd love to know about them.

Their only competition is The Hold Steady, and I love that they acknowledged this by touring together briefly.

not sure if this is the actual cover:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/Dbtbigtodo.jpg

Track Listing

1. Daddy Learned to Fly
2. The Fourth Night of My Drinking
3. Birthday Boy
4. Drag the Lake Charlie
5. The Wig He Made Her Wear
6. You Got Another
7. This Fucking Job
8. Get Downtown
9. After the Scene Dies
10. (It's Gonna Be) I Told You So
11. Santa Fe
12. The Flying Wallendas
13. Eyes Like Glue
14. Girls Who Smoke (Bonus track - vinyl only)

nope that is not it, here it is:

http://cdn.pitchfork.com/media/dbt_.jpg

Goddamn I love this band.

Love Shonna's harmonies on that single. Last album was great, really hoping for more good stuff this time round. But that's why I love them...even when they disappoint they're still great.

I saw on the DBT website they've got a documentary coming out too? Anyone heard anything about that?

love their album covers

ditto ^^^^^^^

cosign

I saw on the DBT website they've got a documentary coming out too? Anyone heard anything about that?

live around dc? gonna see it this friday.

http://www.afi.com/silver/new/nowplaying/events.aspx#secre

jealous!! would love to see it.

Track 3, Birthday Boy is available for free download at their site. It's another excellent Cooley song.

dang, cooley's on fire recently. good song.

I may be in the minority, but their album – bloat notwithstanding – was their best.

did you mean their last album, Alfred? completely agree. that crystal meth tune is chilling, and i think i love every single tune

I only recently found out what "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife" is about, and now I can barely listen to it.

I don't care for the girl's songs, and it really trails off after "You and Your Crystal Meth," but, wow, with "The Righteous Path," "Daddy Needs a Drink," and "Two Daughters and a Lovely Wife," I finally got why I should regard Patterson Hood as a great songwriter.

the album starts to lose me in the last 6 or 7 songs though there's a gem or two in there. but damn, everything up to and including Lisa's Birthday is amazing.

Patterson Hood (is) a great songwriter.

yes he is, although i prefer jason isbell's contributions to the last DBT album he appeared on.

her voice takes some warming up to, but I'm sorry Huston's become one of my favorites! xpost

I don't care for the girl's songs

That's an understatement.

That Man I Shot could be the best song Patterson Hood ever wrote. Almost unbearably intense.

I really like both of the Shonna Tucker tunes. "The Purgatory Line" is beautiful.

er, there's three of them. right.

yeah, last album took some getting into for me (hi, bloat, how's you?) but it soon enough grew to be my fave of the lot too. all the songs mentioned above are fucking AMAZING! but let's not forget my beloved "Bob."

I forgot who wrote a VV piece about the silliness of "Bob." Way to completely miss the point.

saw them play Bob live once and cooley was complaining about people thinking he was homophobic bc of that song. is that what the vv piece was referring to?

decided that The Opening Act is lyrically one of Patterson's alltime greats. you got the "urban bovine knievel" line, the way he calls deborah winger "deborah wanger," the part about giving his friend money for drugs and telling himself it's all just a necessary evil...

but mostly for the last line: and i turn on the radio / hear some preacher talking salvation / and the tank is half full / as i reach over to turn the station.

LEAKING

"birthday boy" is good, cooley's such a sharp lyricist. "working this job" is ok, but like a lot of hood's songs it makes me want to listen to the bottle rockets.

i'm liking this a lot after a couple listens. much lighter than the last
one. in fact, i'm just now realizing how pissed most of their songs (well
patterson's mostly) were on BtCD in comparison to the rest of their
stuff.

patterson's got 8 of the 13 here which is a little surprising since cooley
(3 songs) was so on point on the last album. guess he's just not as prolific.
makes sense given that his songs seem a little more sweated over than
patterson's. don't mean that in a bad way... seems to fit their
personalities. of his "birthday boy" is great and "get downtown's" a nice
one to swing your lady around to on the dance floor.

patterson's got the best stuff on here imo. "drag the lake charles" has a
bouncy "dead,drunk and naked" vibe; "the wig he made her wear," "santa fe,"
and the "flying wallendas" are damn good too.

i actually kinda like both of shonna's songs here - the first sounds like
one of those old piano ballads the Band was so good at and the other's a
nice little sing-a-long fist pumper. not bringing much lurically but she's
pretty good at making a memorable chorus.

overall another good un' from DBT i'd say.

Shonna's tunes are killer, easily the album's biggest surprises. And yeah, it's as consistent as they've ever sounded.

It's not in the same league as Brighter Than Creation's Dark, but not many records are.

It doesn't have a "You and Your Crystal Meth", so that already gives it a leg up on Brighter, in my opinion.

yeah i'd probably put this one at the dirty south level. better than a blessing and a curse.

I do like this.

wrote about it some (and linked to my rhapsody review) here:

Rolling Country 2010

Underwhelmed by this one, as I was with their previous couple as well. To my ears, SRO was their best, followed by Decoration Day.

Me too -- they've never matched those -- but this might be my favorite since then.

jason isbell's contributions made the dirty south pretty damn special, too.

wrote about it some (and linked to my rhapsody review) here

Mostly otm, I like Tucker's fast song because it's, well, fast, and inserted at the right moment in the sequence.

To my ears they've mostly moved past the self-involved plod of their mid decade work, despite bloated album lengths.

My own take.

if all they ever did were hood songs i would be happy

cooley's voice turns me off i think because he reminds me of my brief childhood obsession with george strait

although i can't listen to "you and your crystal meth" because i laugh at it tbh

a little too self serious even for this patterstan

That's crazy talk about Cooley. He's responsible for some of their best songs. He deserves a monument for Zip City alone, not to mention Uncle Frank and Gravity's Gone.

see none of those do a damn thing for me tbh

if a hoos ain't hearing Zip City I just don't even know what to say but damn

I really like Shonna's singing voice. The songs themselves aren't much lyrically, and that does make them stand out against Cooley/Patterson's stuff, but I like her voice a lot. I still love her 'i'm Sorry Houston' from Brighter than Creation's Dark.

I liked Brighter more than I liked Blessing, and I like this album more than both of them...more uptempo stuff, faster-paced guitar stuff, and damn if 'Drag The Lake Charlie' doesn't sound like a DBT standard right out of the gate.

FWIW I love Cooley's voice, and his stuff is some of my favorite (3 Dimes Down, Checkout Time In Vegas, Where the Devil Don't Stay, Carl Perkin's Cadillac..hmm okay fine all of his songs) It's Patterson's 'Sands of Iwo Jima' falsetto that I cannot abide.

Singles Jukeboxers on "Birthday Boy":

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=2212

I think Cooley's voice on this and the last album in particular is straight up southern-affected Mick Jagger (only, you know, really southern).

Anybody seen the Truckers doc making the rounds?

BTW, I know the band got a relatively late start, and even now after all those years and great albums still feels in a sense like it's just really taking off, but is anyone else blown away that Hood is pushing 50? He carries his age well, but I've no doubt the extra experience is partly what makes him such an astute and empathetic writer.

So what are the best 3 or 4 tracks from this one?

"This Fucking Job"
"The Fourth Night of My Drinking"
"Drag the Lake Charlie

I might acdtually go for the three Cooleys -- "Birthday Boy," "Get Downtown," "Eyes Like Glue" -- though I'd have to pull the album back out to make sure. Would definitely opt for Cooley's no-job song over Hood's bad-job song, though.

Though yeah, okay, I'll concede that "Drag The Lake" probably beats "Eyes Like Glue" (which only Dads will get, probably.) But where Hood's songs are concerned, in general, the lake's not the only thing that's dragging.

I almost mentioned "Eyes Like Glue," but generally this is the first DBT album on which Cooley's songs aren't at least as good as Hood's.

Birthday Boy, After The Scene Dies, Santa Fe

Notice nobody is mentioning The Wig He Made Her Wear or The Flying Wallendas. Finally, something about the DBT we can all agree on.

^^^^ i actually dig both of those

Whatever else, this album boasts the Truckers' best song titles.

Not too hot on the Wallendas, but it sounded great live. I have a personal connection to Wig, so I'll leave that one out. So my top three would be Birthday Boy, Fourth Night of My Drinking, and One Day It's Gonna Be (I Told You So). I do think it's interesting that pretty much every song has been mentioned.

Was gonna post this to Amazon but I'll post it here instead.

DBT circa Decoration day is still, to me, the finest rock band America has produced in my lifetime. But with Jason gone, the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Shonna writing songs that sound as if they were improvised on the spot, and Patterson (who is in need of an editor more than even Ryan Adams at this point) content to read police blotters and court TV transcripts over 'jams' and call them lyrics, fans have only Cooley to remind them of the glory days, back when this was a songwriter's band. But on TBTD (even the title is lame), even Cooley turns in his first bonafide dud - the turgid, sentimental "Eyes Like Glue."

Seems the band is more concerned with ridiculously pompous, elaborate stage shows (a circus? Really?) and philanthropy than writing good songs. Also, kinda hard to listen to Patterson wax empathetic about the plight of the working man or whatever when his band sells stickers for $5 and t-shirts for $30. Are board games and lunchboxes far behind?

I see four star reviews of this record and I know the reviews are for the band, who have maybe earned their role as 'elder statesmen' and thus deserve respect for sticking around this long, but this is no one's idea of a four star album, folks. I say that as a longtime fan, one who will most likely still pre-order their next album, and any after that, but this is the straight-up soundtrack to shark-jumping.

that review is a straight-up soundtrack to rongness.

Yeah, they shark-jumped years ago! (And they've done worse than this record since.)

Are board games and lunchboxes far behind?

trying to imagine a profitable market for drive-by trucker lunchboxes.

a board-game maybe!

STICKERS SHOULD BE FREE!!!!

And they've done worse than this record since

False. This one makes A Blessing And A Curse (prior to this new one, their worst of the post-SRO period) sound like Zuma fer chrissakes.

Brighter Than Creation's Dark is my favorite, so what do I now.

New one's the only one that hasn't ultimately bored me silly since Decoration Day, so what do I know.

Not saying it's as good as that one, much less Southern Rock Opera, but as DBT albums have been going lately, it's not bad. Then again, my expectations for these guys have admittedly gone way down. And I doubt I'll be playing the new one much in the future either, to be honest. But that would hardly make it unique in their catalogue.

my expectations for these guys have admittedly gone way down

i feel the same way.

That's crazy talk. At the rate the band is going? Hell, they've already got a new album out later this year!!!

wait, you're kidding, right? a new studio album?

These guys made it impossible for me to concentrate on their records. Even the supposedly half-great ones like Decoration Day and Southern Rock Opera sag with bloat; great tracks all over the place though. With BTCD they finally made an album whose Hood-isms were catchy and desperate enough to fool me into thinking Cooley had taken over. Were it not for the girl's songs, I'd call it a great record.

Actually, I'd argue that "BTCD" is both their most bloated and possibly their best. Anyway, from Hood in August:

This week marks the 25th Anniversary of my meeting and subsequently forming a band with Mike Cooley. 25 Fucking Years! Wow! I’ve always marked August 1st as the beginning of Adam’s House Cat, even though it was some time later before we actually played our first gig. We basically slugged our way through six years in that band, followed by two years of playing as a duo (Virgil Kane) and attempting another band (Horsepussy) before splitting for a couple of years, during which time I moved to Athens GA and began the process of forming what became DBT. The Truckers were formed with the intent of luring Cooley back into the fold and I have always kinda considered it ‘his’ band, as it has usually been closer to his initial vision of how a band should be than Adam’s House Cat ever was. We will celebrate our Anniversary month by completing our eleventh album (Go-Go Boots) but will hopefully commemorate it in a more definite way sometime in the not too distant future.

So, "Go-Go Boots" it is.

In that same missive:

Excited about getting a head start on DBT-12.

BTW, his tour diary about opening for Tom Petty is ace:

http://flagpole.com/Weekly/Homedrone/AmericanGirlSummer-15Jul10

BTCD" is...their most bloated

Think I do agree with this much, fwiw.

Ha:

Woke up to the news that Kings of Leon had to cancel the St. Louis venue (that we played last week with Petty) due to a pigeon shitting in the bassist’s mouth. I saw Mike Campbell (from The Heartbreakers) collapse on stage in 100 degree heat, get carried off (still clutching his guitar) and come back on to FINISH THE SHOW.

That’s what you do. Kings of Leon walk off after three songs.

What a bunch of pussies.

Love Hood's tour diaries!