Image by Jason Thrasher
Drive-By Truckers frontman, Patterson Hood is set to release his second solo album, Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs) this Tuesday. The humble singer-songwriter prefers to call it a side project “since it was certainly not done alone.” Hood began writing the songs on April fool’s day 15 years ago when he moved to Athens, Georgia in 1994, but shelved them to focus his energy on his then new band, the Drive-By Truckers. He revisited the project in 2005 and recorded it with David Barbe (Sugar), Will Johnson and Scott Danborn of Centro-Matic and his DBT band mates. This is also the first time Hood’s father, David Hood, famed Muscle Shoals bass player, joins him on a record.
When I spoke with Patterson last week, we discussed his excitement over the release of Murdering Oscar, his longtime relationship with Truckers guitarist Mike Cooley and big-box retailer deals.
R&G: Your upcoming album Murdering Oscar is 15 years in the making, but I imagine the last four years were the hardest for you [Hood completed the album in 2005, but could not release it due to a contract dispute with former label, New West Records]. How excited are you to be finally releasing it and what does it mean to you?
Patterson: I’m thrilled it’s finally coming out. It’s a project I really believed in and thought it was a good record, just something that needed to come out. It was a long frustration not being able to, so I’m just glad it’s coming out now. I didn’t do much to it in the intervening four years, but I think the little bit I did do made a big difference. I think it’s a much better record than it would have been if it came out in ’05, so I’m happy with that. It’s all been worth it.
R&G: It still had to be a hard time for you.
Patterson: Oh yeah. It was something I was pretty angry about for a long time – even bitter, at times. Like I said, it’s all worked out now, so I’m willing to put a happy ending on it and move forward. I’m really proud of the record. I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done, and everyone that played on it did such a great job. It’s already affected the band in a positive way. I think it could be easily argued that making that record kind of led to John Neff [Truckers guitarist] rejoining the band, and that’s been a very positive thing for all of us. It probably led to Jay [Gonzalez, Truckers keyboardist] joining the band, though he’s not on that record. That was the first record I did with a keyboard player, and I really liked it. In a lot of ways, there’s a closer relationship between that album and where the band is now – certainly than where the band was then. If the album had come out in ’05, it probably would have been seen as a peak-sized departure from what people thought I did or from what the band was doing, but having it come out now fits pretty nicely between the last and next Truckers albums.
R&G: Why didn’t some of the songs from Murdering Oscar make it on to Killers and Stars [Hood‘s first solo effort]?
Patterson: This is just a different era. The Killers and Stars songs were all written right then. It wasn’t meant to be an album; it was just a bunch of songs I wrote right then and there that I had demoed in my living room, and over a period of seven years between when I did it and when it came out, people were passing around copies of it. People kept asking for it. I decided to put it out. It wasn’t like Murdering Oscar. We actually set out to make an album when we made this record.
R&G: The Truckers went through a tough time in 2006. You were dealing with writers block, the band was strapped for cash and you guys were exhausted from non-stop touring. You ended up accepting an opening slot for the Black Crowes to make ends meet. What was that experience like for you and the band?
Patterson: Yeah, it was a tough time, but those times happen. Those are the times, I guess, that make you appreciate the better times. It’s something we had to go through to get where we are now. That tour was rough because it was a hard tour and we played a lot of dates. We were away from our families for longer than we wanted to be. My daughter was very little at that time – she was one. That’s a tough time to be away that long. The fact is that, as a band, we’ve been lucky that we’ve never really made many decisions based on money. Lord knows we were poor and broke for years and years, partly because of that. We turned down some things that probably would have been lucrative, but we didn’t want to do them, so we didn’t. With the Crowes tour, we were backed against a wall. We were in a lot of debt from decisions some of our former managers made that didn’t work out – we owed a lot of money. We owed so much that we didn’t even have the option to take time off to fix some shit within the band because we had to pay this huge bill we owed every month. That tour enabled us to wipe that slate clean and it bought us time off to go home and work on our lives, write another album and straighten things out in the band. It was a good thing. I don’t really want to talk about it, because I don’t want it to sound like there was any problem with The Black Crowes. They’re great – they’re a great band. They were nothing but good to us all the way through the tour and they helped us get through it. They were super-good guys. It was just a bad time for us. It just happened to be on their tour. That’s all.
R&G: One of the tracks off of Murdering Oscar, “Heavy and Hanging,” is about Kurt Cobain’s suicide. You wrote it shortly after his death and you were going through a divorce. Did you ever have suicidal thoughts during that time?
Patterson: I’ve felt these very suicidal tendency periods in my life. I’ve managed to keep that wolf at bay when it was probably the most pressing. I’m grateful that I never crossed that line. It wasn’t for lack of it occurring to me. That’s a big part of why I’m so involved in the cause that our band has – the Nuci’s Space foundation that we raise money for every year in Athens. That’s one of the reasons we all feel so closely connected trying to help that cause. The biggest part of their mission is suicide prevention for artists and musicians. It’s kind of a local thing, but it should be a bigger thing in more communities, especially places like Athens that have an arts community. There’s just not really anything helping those people. Nuci’s Space has had pretty remarkable success through what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
