With the Drive-By Truckers, Patterson Hood puts a modern twist on loud, hard Southern rock. (Although, as he said, “If you think the Truckers are loud, you should’ve heard Adam’s House Cat,” the punk rock band he had with fellow Trucker Mike Cooley.) As hard as they rock, they write great songs that tackle love, life, politics and more with an unpretentious literary quality and a sharp wit. The raucous, rowdy nature of those performances can sometimes hide just how good the songs really are. With just an acoustic guitar, Hood showed off another side of his artistry in his recent performance at The Birchmere (and again later at Rams Head on Stage), allowing his brilliant lyrics to shine through and telling some amazing stories.
In addition to the Trucker’s extensive catalog, Hood has also released four albums of solo material. Most recently, he put out Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams last year. The songs deal with the first 30 years of his life, before he left his hometown of Florence, Alabama for Athens, Georgia.
Florence is part of the Muscle Shoals area, which Patterson described as something of a small, backwards Southern where a “musical miracle” took place at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. His father, bassist David Hood, played in the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, who were also known as the Swampers. The Swampers recorded with too many artists to list, but Patterson specifically mentioned the Rolling Stones, who recorded three songs there before going to play the tragic, ill-fated festival at Altamonte captured in the documentary Gimme Shelter. (Patterson also mentioned that his father played at The Birchmere with the Waterboys in 2015, and that he got to see some photos from their performance.)
In that documentary, Hood explained, you can see a young woman, Lucy Van Pelt, waiting outside a hotel to meet the Stones. Lucy was his babysitter, and their parents were good friends. Every year, on Christmas Eve, the Van Pelts would host a rager of a party, where he’d watch adults get absolutely smashed and drive home in a condition they shouldn’t have in, experiences he captures in “The Van Pelt Parties,” which Patterson performed at The Birchmere on March 12. With trademark humor, Patterson recalled how he thought, as he opened his gifts on Christmas morning, that his parents had the flu — which I suppose is true in the sense that Michael Jordan did in his famous flu game.
Watch Patterson Hood perform “The Van Pelt Parties” live for The Tomboy Sessions on YouTube:
“A Werewolf and a Girl,” another song on the latest album, is about his relationship with his high school sweetheart. On the album, he recorded it as a duet with Lydia Loveless. “Pinocchio” deals with his obsession with the classic animated Disney film, which he saw over and over until he memorized it and would do scenes for his peers — which they didn’t appreciate. “One of the joys of raising kids in the twenty-first century,” he said, is “every time they get diagnosed with something,” he learns something about himself and his childhood. When he was a kid, in the ’70s, no one was talking about ADHD, and they definitely weren’t talking about Autism Spectrum Disorder. Even in the ’80s and ’90s, it was still pretty unknown. I didn’t get diagnosed with autism until my twenties, despite going around, when I was in grade school, listing the presidents, whether people wanted to hear it or not, or inflicting my other obsessions on people. My mom thought all this was just “cute.” My mom talks to herself and my father thought it was funny to joke about sneaking into our bedrooms, peeling off the covers, and watching us shiver; the preponderance of strange behavior in my family and relatives obscured that something was off about me.
Speaking of kids, Hood described “Uncle Disney” as “my first attempt at writing a children’s song,” something that “doesn’t come naturally to me.” He wrote it long before he had kids of his own “and it shows.” Nonetheless, he claimed, “Kids love it.”
When he was growing up, one of Hood’s favorite relatives was his great uncle, George A, a truck driver who never married and who was a like a father to him. On the weekends, George would take him to the movies, and they’d go out to the family farm. George was also a WWII veteran who served in the South Pacific, inspiring “Sands of Iwo Jima.” “Nowadays,” Patterson said, “we’d call them Antifa, but they used to just call them veterans.”
Hood opened with “Forks of Cypress,” and the set also included a number of Truckers songs: “Grand Canyon,” “Lookout Mountain,” “Heathens,” “Puttin’ People on the Moon” (with some updated lyrics to address current events), and “The Righteous Path.” He played a new song that’s been recorded for an upcoming Drive-By Truckers album, and he finished his set with “Bulldozers and Dirt.”
Even playing solo acoustic, there’s a certain energy to a Patterson Hood show that’s markedly different from most singer-songwriters. The crowd was enthusiastic, even a bit rowdy, but in a fun way. It’s good to see people enthusiastic for one of the best songwriters and storytellers in the world today.
Steve Satzberg photographed the show at Rams Head on Stage on March 15! Here are some photos of Patterson Hood and John Moreland performing live at Rams Head on Stage on March 15, 2026. All pictures copyright and courtesy of Steve Satzberg.
Patterson Hood
John Moreland
