Patterson Hood wasn't supposed to be here.
On stage at Toronto's jam-packed and rowdy Phoenix Concert Theatre on a Saturday night – that was the plan, sure. He and the rest of Drive-By Truckers storming through a two-hour set of southern-fried rock, swigging from the bottle of bourbon they passed around, promising not to insult their audience's intelligence with any "bullshit" – they were in their comfort zone as one of the best live acts out there.
Sitting in the atrium of CBC headquarters 36 hours later – plaid jacket over plaid shirt, brown trilby hat atop his head, Thermos of coffee in front of him – struggling to explain to a politics reporter what has happened to his country since its presidential election, before going on a national radio program to try to do likewise … that was not what Hood expected when this tour was planned many months ago.
"I'm as bewildered as anyone could possibly be about it all right now," he concedes, looking a little more of his 52 years than he does on stage. His country's embrace of a right-wing populist as its president has shaken his faith in his ability to speak for parts of it he thought he knew, just as he's being asked to provide such interpretation more than ever before.
If Drive-By Truckers' current role is one to which they're uniquely suited – there aren't many middle-aged white southerners with the guts and cred to play music in front of a Black Lives Matter sign, as they have on this tour – it also makes it trickier to keep serving as musical ambassadors for the Deep South.
Interviews like the one we're doing are the reward and the penance for releasing their 11th album, American Band, last September. After establishing themselves during their first two decades as rock 'n' roll's foremost chroniclers of history and culture south of the Mason-Dixon line, the Georgia-based band took a plunge from the past to the present by making an overtly political album – one that tackles everything from police brutality to school shootings to border militias, very much putting their liberalism on their sleeves.
The U.S.’s embrace of Trump has shaken Patterson Hood’s faith in his ability to speak for the South.
J.P. MOCZULSKI/J.P. MOCZULSKI
The album came together organically. Hood and Mike Cooley, the fellow Alabama native with whom he co-fronts the Truckers and splits songwriting duties, each independently wrote a song inspired by current events (Hood's was What It Means, a frustrated search for answers after the fatal shootings of African-American teenagers Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown ), and when they compared notes, they realized that was the direction they wanted to go with the album. They worried that once it was finished last year, it would become a time capsule, expecting that Donald Trump would go down to defeat in November and everything would cool off a little. Instead, they now find themselves as part of what Hood describes, with a hint of bemusement, as a resistance movement.
"It really didn't dawn on us until after the election that the shelf life on our record has been greatly extended," he says. "That wasn't really the plan, and I would trade it tomorrow to have our country back."
As Hood implies, Trump's win has not been without its upside for them. Well-reviewed upon its release – both for the messaging and for the lean, hard-driving urgency of the music – American Band appears on its way to being their most successful album, commercially. Ahead of an inevitable avalanche of protest music coming from various corners of the music industry, it is providing a ready-made rebuttal to the new president; something for which there appears to be a big market, as evidenced by the fired-up, sell-out crowds at their shows.
The Truckers are hardly shrinking from that demand. They opened their Toronto show on Feb. 4 with Surrender Under Protest, an American Band anthem penned and sung by Cooley that takes aim at Southerners clinging to the Confederate flag, then worked through most of the album with older crowd favourites spliced in. After the election, they added Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World as their set closer. As Hood says, "It seemed like it put a centrepiece on the whole thing." (Also: "It rocks.")
They hesitated with what exactly they were supposed to do with their material as they watched the results come in on election night, but then they went on stage in Philadelphia the next night and played one of their best shows of the year. "My feeling, kind of from that point on, is I guess we're part of a catharsis for people who are angry and have all this pent-up emotion they don't quite know how to get out," Hood says. "It's better than getting in a fight."
After independently writing songs inspired by current events, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley realized that was the direction they wanted to go with the album.
J.P. MOCZULSKI for The Globe and Mail
Embracing timeliness is something new for them because, as Hood puts it, they've spent most of their career aiming for something timeless. With a trio of gloriously, absurdly ambitious albums released between 2001 and 2004 – Southern Rock Opera, Decoration Day and The Dirty South – the Truckers established a particular gift as songwriters. They have the ability to puncture stereotypes about the heart of Dixie by celebrating its complexities and contradictions with stories of political and musical icons, outlaws and family lore, traditions and resentments passed between generations.
They hit a lull after those three records, amid turnover that included several messy departures (among them Jason Isbell, once a third singer-guitarist in the band and now a much-celebrated solo artist), before seeming to find their groove again with 2014's English Oceans – the collaborative sprawl of earlier work giving way to a leaner, more Stones-influenced sound. But through highs and lows there remained an obvious romanticism, a fondness for red-state America's eccentricities alongside condemnation of the darker chapters in its history.
That romanticism very much remains a part of their live show, particularly when it comes to their reverence for southern rock heroes past; Lynyrd Skynyrd factored into two of the most reliable crowd-pleasers at their Toronto show, Ronnie and Neil and Let There Be Rock. But it seems to be a struggle to maintain it off stage, at the moment.
Hood says writing his contributions to American Band was therapeutic as his mood about the country darkened. But he's been trying to write recently and for the first time he can remember, the songs are not coming naturally to him.
Is it because he's too angry? "I'm angry and … it's like I'm shooting for something, but I'm not necessarily hitting what I'm shooting for, I guess. I don't even know what I'm shooting for.
Touring Canada, Patterson Hood finds himself playing translator for a country, rather than just a region.
J.P. MOCZULSKI for The Globe and Mail
"I've never had a particularly hard time articulating what I'm thinking, at least when I'm writing. I might when I'm doing an interview or talking or something, but as far as to write, that's never really failed me. But it's been a little weird."
Somehow, he'd like to help those who are politically like-minded figure out how to better connect in places like Alabama and Georgia, the two states where he's lived most of his life. (A registered Democrat, he's fed up with that party "writing off large swaths of the country," which "is coming back to haunt us in a horrific way.") Maybe that kind of bridge-building, he says, is "what I'm still looking for and trying to articulate that I haven't been able to in a song yet."
It's disorienting, being in a different town every night touring a political album during the most tumultuous political period in modern American history, and audience reactions confuse things further. The most unpleasant show of the Truckers' tour was in San Luis Obispo, on the California coast, of all places, where audience members held up "Blue Lives Matter" signs and a good chunk of the crowd walked out during What It Means. Meanwhile, the band has been getting nothing but good vibes at many of their shows in the South. "There's just no figurin' it," Hood says.
In a way, he may be realizing that the world they've been trying to capture is less geographically defined than he might have once thought. He recently moved his family to Portland, Ore., and loves the famously liberal city so far. But when he drives five minutes out of town and sees Trump signs, he could be back home. "You could just as well be in rural Alabama or Oklahoma or anywhere if you're in rural Oregon."
And so he finds himself north of the border, trying to play translator for a country rather than just a region. "I sometimes wonder what y'all must think," he says with a laugh. "As a Southerner I'm used to other people looking at us with bewilderment, cause of all the crazy stuff that happens in the part of the country I grew up, but I mean it's so national right now."
So what advice does he offer people here trying to make sense of it all? What complexities are we missing that might explain why so many Americans have rallied behind a president so offensive to so many others?
Drive-By Truckers have rarely been at a loss to tell us what we don't know about the land they call home, about their people, but Hood pauses for a long moment. "I don't know if y'all are missing anything," he finally says.