Patterson Hood Quotations

We were supposed to be taking it slowly this fall, with putting together the album,

I don't think people are going to be calling it 'Southern rock,'

I write a lot of songs (about the South) and will continue to, but we wanted to do a record that wasn't so specific in the geography. We're from the South, but that's not all we can do.

It in no way denies the horrible things that happened in the South during the civil rights struggle, ... The KKK and church bombings - all of those things did happen, but at the same time there were people like my father making Aretha Franklin records, these southern white boys who made their living playing on some of the best soul records ever made.

Most everything on it is real new. Lord knows I've got a backlog of songs, but when we went into the studio I pretty much ignored it. Everything else we've written since we started recording.

We're all big Big Star fans and fans of pop and power pop, and we wanted to experiment with those influences a little more than we have in the past.

We wanted to make a record that was strictly song-oriented and wasn't attached to a bigger narrative. We almost had more of a list of what we didn't want than what we did want.

The record's not without its dark moments, but hopefully there's a little bit of a happy ending too,

To me, it's an easy record to listen to. But it's not an easy-listening record,

Cooley and I have been together for 20 years now. It hasn't exactly been an overnight success, ... We're the poster children for stubborn persistence.

a pretty good description of the things we've been writing about, the dualities of the day-to-day.

I'm not having to come home from tours and wait tables for the next three weeks to make ends meet. We're paying our bills, ... Unfortunately, we haven't gotten to the point where we can take any real time off.

I'm more interested in writing about the personal stories of people. Sometimes I don't agree with them.

It's hard being part of a married couple in a band.

I never want to be that guy spouting off my political views. I mean, they're pretty well known, and it certainly comes out.

The road does not always bring out the best in people.

At any given time, there might be someone who's eight years old or 80 years old in the audience. Some nights there are a lot of girls in the audience, some nights not. It's so unpredictable, but I like that.

You can be for something and still be damaged by it.

If something's bugging my ass on any particular day, I'm probably going to say something about it, but I'm not going to go on a tirade.

I've always thought preaching to the converted is just kind of futile and silly.

I dislike Bush as much as probably anybody on earth could, but having said that... It's not like I'm going to change anybody's mind.

I feel like, as a people, we're sort of stumbling in the dark right now.

A lot of the music that I grew up loving has a really political bent to it.

This time, we're living in such a crazy moment in history. People still write and talk about Watergate, which was such a huge, looming backdrop when I was coming of age and when I was a kid growing up. I think we're living in one of those times right now where, in 20 years, people will be writing and talking about it.

The biggest thing this has in common with almost all of our records is the dualities are still there. We kind of stripped down the other things we were writing about, and that's what was left. A lot of good things have happened to us in the last couple of years both as a band and in our personal lives. But something as wonderful as having children also brings along these new fears and terrors and responsibilities.

I've always thought that a lot of really good writers go wrong by getting so into the craft and the technique and perfection. Perfection can be the enemy sometimes. Some songs don't need to be told perfectly. Life is messy and has loose ends, and sometimes I think the songs should reflect that.

Songwriting can be cathartic, but then you just keep it private. If you're going to play out and have other people listen to you, then you need to make sure there's some point to what you're saying.

I'm lucky enough that people tend to agree a lot with what I say. But really if anyone in the band has a really strong feeling, it carries a lot of weight.

Racism is a worldwide problem...

Paste may be the last great American music magazine left.

When Adam's House Cat broke up in 1991, which was Cooley and my band for six years, I put my entire life, heart, and soul into that thing. I mean everything. I ended up getting divorced over it, and then the band broke up and I was left with nothing. I had nothing to show for six years of my life except for a finished record that still hasn't come out. And I went through a pretty deep, dark, two-year depression after that, [which] probably resulted in some of the earlier songs that became Drive-By Trucker songs, for that matter.

The downside is that critics get their records for free,