DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS Come to Patchogue Theatre Next Month

Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts (PTPA) announces Drive-By Truckers on Monday, August 8th at 8:00pm. Lobby and bar concessions open at 7pm. Tickets range between $29-$59 plus fees and can be purchased online anytime at PatchogueTheatre.org or at the Box Office, (631) 207-1313, 71 East Main Street in Patchogue. Advanced ticket purchase is strongly recommended.

Boasting a mix of Southern pride, erudite lyrics, and a muscled, guitar-heavy attack, Drive-By Truckers became one of the most well-respected alternative country-rock acts of the 2000s and onward. Led by frontman Patterson Hood (vocals, guitar and songwriting) and fellow guitarist and tunesmith Mike Cooley, and featuring a rotating cast of Georgia and Alabama natives, the Drive-By Truckers celebrate the South while refusing to paint over its sometimes shameful past. History, folklore, politics, and character studies all shared equal space in the Truckers catalog, which offered up its first blast of gutsy, twangy rock with 1998's Gangstabilly. It was the band's ambitious double-disc concept album, 2001's Southern Rock Opera, that became its unlikely magnum opus and breakthrough release. The album explored Hood's fascination with '70s Southern rock (specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd) while tackling the cultural contradictions of the region, and it helped lay the groundwork for much of the band's later work. While they lacked the narrative cohesion of Southern Rock Opera, 2003's Decoration Day, 2008's Brighter Than Creation's Dark, and 2014's English Oceans found the band's deep-focus songwriting and smart but hard-hitting rock growing stronger than ever. 2016's American Band pushed their progressive political views front and center, and they doubled-down on their social and political commentary on their first two albums in the 2020s, The Unraveling and The New OK. 2022's Welcome 2 Club XIII saw them looking back with a more personal focus, though it was still informed by the challenging times of its creation.

Welcome 2 Club XIII took shape over the course of three frenetic days in summer 2021 - a doubly extraordinary feat considering that the band had no prior intentions of making a new album.

"We had some shows coming up and decided to get together and practice, since we hadn't even seen each other in a year and a half because of the pandemic," Hood recalls. "We started demoing song ideas, and pretty soon we realized we had a whole record. It was all sort of magical."

Featuring background vocals from the likes of Margo Price, R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, and Mississippi-bred singer/songwriter Schaefer Llana, Welcome 2 Club XIII was recorded live with most songs cut in one or two takes, fully harnessing the band's freewheeling energy.

"For us it's always about just getting together and having fun, but this time there was the added feeling of being set free after a long time of wondering if we'd ever get to do this again," notes Cooley.

Welcome 2 Club XIII pays homage to the Muscle Shoals honky-tonk where Hood and Cooley got their start: a concrete-floored dive lit like a disco, with the nightly promise of penny beer and truly dubious cover bands.

"There were no cool bars in town and Club XIII was the best we had-but it wasn't all that good, and our band wasn't particularly liked there," says Hood, referring to the vocalist/guitarists' former band Adam's House Cat. "From time to time the owner would throw us a Wednesday night or let us open for a hair-metal band we were a terrible fit for, and everyone would hang out outside until we were done playing. It wasn't very funny at the time, but it's funny to us now."

Much of the album serves as a free-flowing coming-of-age memoir.

"Cooley and I have been playing together for 37 years now," Hood points out. "That first band might have failed miserably on a commercial level, but I'm really proud of what we did back then. It had a lot to do with who we ended up becoming."

While Drive-By Truckers never shy away from illuminating the many shades of grief that come with getting older, Welcome 2 Club XIII ultimately embodies a certain world-weary joie de vivre - an element beautifully encapsulated in one of its final lyrics, from the softly stunning "Wilder Days": "As the sun gets dizzy watching us as we go spinning around/I find it best to laugh at the absurdity of life above the ground/There's no comfort in survival, but it's still the best option that I've found."