Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood returns to the stage solo at City Winery

Beloved by fans for a seemingly endless string of freewheeling and often raucous live shows, the Athens-born Drive-By Truckers are finally getting back on the road this summer, after enduring a year and a half of pandemic disruption.

Right now, though, co-founder and singer-songwriter Patterson Hood is on a solo tour that will take him to City Winery in Atlanta on June 18. Later, Hood will join fellow Truckers co-founder and singer-songwriter Mike Cooley in their duo the Dimmer Twins, with shows in New York City and at the Newport Folk Festival.

During a recent phone call, Hood, who moved from Athens to Portland, Oregon, some six years ago, said he’d just finished two solo dates on Vashon Island in Washington state that offered a return to performing. “It was just beautiful. I got to bring my son along, and we had a big time,” he said. “I was just so ready to play in front of people. It was a pretty emotional experience.”

Hood also was able to get back to his hometown, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he visited his family, and had a chance to make some music with his father, David Hood, the legendary bassist of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. “That was my first time playing with other people in a really long time” he said. “It was great, and really great to see my mom and dad and sister.”

The Drive-By Truckers released their 12th studio album, “The Unraveling,” in January 2020. But the pandemic halted a planned year-long tour soon after a three-week east coast run, leaving Hood to return to Portland, and shelter in place with his wife and two children.

Credit: Christine Stauder (Red Light Management)

Credit: Christine Stauder (Red Light Management)

“I was unemployed for 15 months, so it was terrifying,” Hood said. “But our managers did an amazing job somehow keeping money coming in for us. We did Bandcamp sales every month, and our fans really rallied and supported us. I did two virtual shows a month up here in the attic. I think I did 19 in total. I won’t say I really enjoyed it, but doing it forced me to keep my chops up.

“Fortunately, I have a lot songs. I’ve been writing since I was a kid. There are 14 studio albums from the Truckers, three solo records, an Adam’s House Cat record, plus new stuff I’m working on. I did each one to be a themed show, so they were different every time. I really made it a point to do some deep cuts. I was playing songs that the Truckers hadn’t played in 15 years. I did one based around the songs we used play at the Star Bar in Atlanta back in the ’90s.”

As the pandemic wore on, Portland became a flashpoint for Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd. Among other things, Hood played the Georgia Comes Alive virtual benefit for the U.S. Senate runoff elections. He also was inspired to write some new songs that found their way onto the “The New OK,” the Truckers stirring surprise followup to “The Unraveling.”

Credit: Courtesy of Big Hassle

“I got really disillusioned. Seeing what was happening in Portland, then seeing how it was portrayed nationally, got me really depressed,” Hood said. “But we ended up with a second album out of that last year. I wrote ‘The New OK’ and ‘Watching the Orange Clouds’ about the protests. And we recorded those songs basically by sending the tracks back and forth to each other. That’s something we’d never done before.”

Credit: Jason Thrasher

In July, the entire band will be back together at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens to record some tracks for a new album. “I’ve written some songs. Cooley’s got a couple of really good ones,” Hood said. “We don’t really have a timeline about putting it out, but we want to go ahead and get started. It’s a good way to get us back to playing with each other, again.

“And we’re hitting it hard starting in August. We’ll probably play songs from our whole history. We’re a 25-year-old band this year. Of course, we never used a set list, so it will change from night-to-night. Once we figure out the first song, it just goes from there. To me, rock-and-roll is more fun when it’s not too planned out and structured.”

Before 2020, Hood was averaging six weeks of solo touring a year, and he hopes to get back to that pace next year. ”I literally played over 200 different songs during the course of my lockdown shows, and I actually used a set list, but I don’t have to follow it, necessarily,” he said.

“Right now I’m pulling out so many different things, and I don’t have Cooley to surprise me every other song, so it helps to have a set list. Obviously, when I play by myself, it’s not as big and loud as the band, and so to make up for that, there’s more storytelling, and more interaction with the crowd, and it’s a little more intimate.”