Drive-By Truckers have never been shy about politics. Their songs have long been about the small-town duality of the South: pride and shame, memory and myth, family history and the uneasy ghosts of history at large.
But American Band isn’t just a political record in the way their earlier albums circled around the edges of ideology. It’s a record that looks at the whole country straight on, post-Ferguson, post-Trayvon, post-Obama. This isn’t the DBT that gave us “The Southern Thing,” a complicated meditation on heritage off their third album Southern Rock Opera. This is a band that’s angry, unsettled, and determined to document America’s fracture in real time.
“Compelled but not defeated, surrender under protest if you must.”
That urgency is wired into the band’s DNA. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley didn’t emerge from some genteel singer-songwriter pipeline; they clawed their way through the sparse North Alabama punk scene of the ’80s as Adam’s House Cat, hammering away while smelling of weed and gasoline in indifferent smoke-stained clubs opening for Foghat cover bands.
It was a doomed venture that nearly capsized their friendship before it even set sail. Think of it as their Bleach era — raw, jagged, unsustainable. By the mid-’90s, they reemerged in Athens, a town where irony and twang peacefully coexisted, and suddenly their scrappy flavor of southern rock found oxygen. It was the right place, the right time: the Truckers became the band that could argue with post-Ronnie Lynyrd Skynyrd while still blasting them on the jukebox.
Athens, the town that birthed R.E.M. and the B-52’s and eventually let the Elephant 6 collective crash on the couch, gave the Truckers the space to fuse bar-band muscle with indie-rock skepticism. They also absorbed the ragged honesty of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, whose Rust Never Sleeps set the template for raging against the darkness without losing melody, and the scrappy vulnerability of The Replacements, whose sloppiness often hid startling tenderness. The result was a group that could reimagine Skynyrd through a Clash filter, translating southern pride into southern critique when warranted. That lineage matters on American Band, as the confrontational spirit of punk, leavened with Young’s blunt truth-telling and the’ Mats’ cracked-heart anthems, is what gives these songs their bite.
You can hear it most clearly in “What It Means,” Hood’s attempt to process the shooting of young Black men by police. The song is weary and conversational, its chorus repeating “what it means” like a resigned lament. This isn’t protest in the Woody Guthrie sense; it’s middle-aged southerners trying to grapple with systemic failure. On “Guns of Umpqua,” Hood takes aim at America’s numb acceptance of mass shootings. His matter-of-fact delivery makes the horror worse, like a small-town news anchor reading another tragic headline before cutting to the weather. And then there’s “Ramon Casiano,” which opens the album by tying the NRA’s rise to a killing on the Mexican border in 1931. Cooley doesn’t just critique the gun lobby; he calls out the very myths that allow it to thrive, implicating the way history gets rewritten into patriotism.
What makes these songs resonate is how un-showy they are. Hood and Cooley don’t write manifestos; they write barroom stories that suddenly tilt into the political. Cooley’s “Kinky Hypocrite,” for instance, plays more like a traditional DBT character sketch…until you realize it’s a sneer at the two-faced moralizing of American politicians, a reminder that hypocrisy is as foundational to our politics as freedom and opportunity.
The cover art says it all before you even press play: a black-and-white photo of an American flag at half-mast, stark against a white background. There’s no band logo, no southern iconography, no ironic wink. Unlike most of their catalog, the image wasn’t created by longtime collaborator the dearly departed Wes Freed, whose vivid, gothic cartoons help define albums like Decoration Day and The Dirty South and became synonymous with the DBT aesthetic.
That absence is telling: Freed’s artwork always rooted the band in southern mythology, but here the band deliberately steps outside of that frame. Instead, they opt for something stripped bare, as blunt as the music inside: this is the state of the union, lowered in mourning, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. The image does what the best album art does: it sets the tone, strips away nostalgia, and reminds you that these songs aren’t just about the South anymore. They’re about all of us.
American Band is road-trip music for a country that can’t decide where it’s headed. Listen when you are heading out of town to visit relatives for a holiday, perhaps in Alabama, and you aren’t overly pumped for the political discussions that await. Best heard with the windows cracked, the radio loud enough to compete with the wind, and the feeling that you’re both part of America and outside it, watching.
Every album we’ve reviewed at Common Chords (and arguably, every album ever created in the rock era) is rebelling against something. On the Beach rebelled against fame and the failed counterculture. Moisturizer, the male gaze. Last Splash, grunge conformity. American Water, cultural emptiness. Crooked Rain, the music industry’s machinery. Heck, even Boat Songs was rebelling against something — sincerity and adulthood. But none were as direct as the shots taken in American Band.
DBT boldly uses their platform as a rock band from the South to reject blind patriotism and Confederate revisionism, and to instead push for honesty and accountability. It’s an album about America in 2016 that, unfortunately, sounds just as necessary today. Hood and Cooley know the country’s story is messy, brutal, and unresolved — but they also know that silence is complicity. So they sing.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Surrender Under Protest.” What starts as a laid-back, wind-in-your-hair on a sunny day guitar riff quickly turns into a synchronized march to a military drum. As the lyrics begin to unfold, you start to think to yourself, “Damn, he is saying the quiet part out loud”, which is an odd thing to hear when it’s coated in a Southern accent. Cooley embarks on a chorus of stomach-belting battle cries as he urges his fellow Southerners to abandon the facade that the Confederate flag can resemble anything other than racism. He encourages them to be on the right side of history instead of trying to rewrite it.
The song was composed after a shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. A 21-year-old white supremacist, who had images of the Confederate flag posted on his website, attended a bible study before opening fire and killing nine people. Afterwards, Civil rights activists successfully campaigned to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse. The track sounds lighthearted enough that you’d think you may hear it at a Fourth of July cookout, but with Cooley’s hard truths, it would be anything but a celebration of American history — as if the grill got a little too hot and turned into a dumpster fire.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Ever South,” which plays like DBT’s mission statement distilled into six minutes: a roaring anthem that makes pride and guilt inseparable bedfellows. Hood, who had just relocated to Portland before American Band was released, sings “ever southern in my carriage, ever southern in my stance,” fully aware that this inheritance is a burden as much as it is a badge.
The band rides a muscular, mid-tempo groove that feels like a rewrite of Skynyrd’s “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” — but where that song sentimentalized the South through a mythic bluesman, Hood strips the romance away and replaces it with complicated memory. When he sighs, “always told a little slower, ever south,” it’s not just about cadence or accent — it’s about the cultural drag of a region that follows you everywhere, even when you think you’ve escaped.
Drive-By Truckers can be found on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and wherever records are sold. You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations Outlaw Country and Rockin’ Country BBQ. They appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk in 2016 during the promotion cycle for American Band. They played in Atlanta three times during the past year, including the Jimmy Carter 100th birthday bash at Fox Theatre, which Megan covered.
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