Patterson Hood

Hood’s fourth solo album and first in over 12 years, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams sees the veteran singer, guitarist, and songwriter exploring his youth and young manhood in a collection unlike anything in his ever-evolving catalogue. It is inspired in part by his own short story, “The Exploding Trees,” in which Hood tells the tale of a natural disaster that occurred in his North Alabama hometown just as he turned 30 and relocated to Athens, GA where Drive-By Truckers were co-founded in 1996. The album gathers songs that have amassed over the remarkably prolific songwriter’s career, many of which provided him with distraction and creative sustenance during lockdown, others which have resided among his notebooks for years, including the string-driven “Airplane Screams,” written over four decades ago but never successfully recorded until now. 

The album was further driven by his friendship with producer/musician Chris Funk, a “profound chemistry” forged upon Hood’s 2013 move to Portland, OR. Having long discussed a collaboration, in 2023 the stars finally aligned, and they set to work on recording this new album which Hood intended to be “a bigger departure” from Drive-By Truckers and his previous solo efforts than ever before.

Working together at a number of Portland studios, Hood accomplished his goal, in part by writing much of the album on piano in a vigorous attempt to expand his parameters in new, heretofore uncharted, directions. While he planned to bring in a professional pianist for the recording sessions, Funk, eager to push his friend from his comfort zone, encouraged Hood to play the parts himself. Hood further took the opportunity to explore sounds outside the boundaries and obligations of his day job, deviating from his traditionally guitar-driven palette to create richly textured arrangements marked by the inclusion of strings, woodwinds, and vintage analog synthesizers.

The result is an ingeniously baroque Americana song cycle, fueled by Hood’s finely drawn character studies and gift for clear-eyed self-examination. Songs like “Pinocchio” and “Miss Coldiron’s Oldsmobile” are nakedly autobiographical and remarkably unflinching, steeped in the past but very much informed by who Hood is in the here and now. With its powerful textural clarity and Hood’s literary strengths at the fore, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams coalesces as a staggering investigation into how time can shed light on the recesses of memory, revealing an exceptionally gifted songwriter’s resolute inclination to look back through the golden haze in order to grapple with the darkness and secret truths that perhaps weren’t understood or reckoned with at the time. 

“You remember it one way, but when you really dip into it, when you really look back, the world was a different place,” Patterson Hood says. “Things were accepted that wouldn’t be accepted now and things you didn’t understand then make sense now.

“This record has all these kind of unintended themes. I don’t know if that was anything I set out to do as much as it just kind of worked out that way. You know, there are a lot a lot of happy accidents in this record.”

The cover art for Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is by Frances Thrasher, an artist from Athens, GA. “She recently put up a show called Heaven4TheYoung that really blew me away,” says Hood. “I was especially moved by one painting in the series, and she was kind enough to let me use it for the cover. I honestly didn’t have a second choice.”

Currently traveling the US with Drive-By Truckers on their hugely successful Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour, Hood will celebrate the arrival of Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams with a run of US headline dates. The Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams 2025 Tour – which will feature backing from his band, The Sensurrounders, with support from special guest Lydia Loveless – gets underway March 19 at Brooklyn, NY’s Brooklyn Made, with stops in DC, Atlanta and Nashville, while finishing up at The Whirling Tiger in Louisville, KY on April 5. Local and Venue Presales begin Thursday, November 21 at 10:00 am (local). All remaining tickets will be released to the general public on Friday, November 22 at 10:00 am (local). Additional dates will be announced soon.

“I’m putting together a kind of stripped-down band so we can go do this record right,” Hood says. “Now the challenge to see if I can pull off a few of the songs on piano live. There’s nothing but good to come from it. I think good has come from each of my solo records, they each made me better at what I do in various different ways.”