Drive-By Truckers – Pizza Deliverance

Alabama-reared Patterson Hood and the rest of Drive By Truckers are Southerners, and I’m a Northerner, so the connection I feel to the best songs on the band’s sophomore release, Pizza Deliverance, is not geographical. It’s more of a small-town America thing: We may have grown up 900 miles apart, but somehow we biked on the same gravel roads and trick-or-treated in the same trailer parks.

My Upstate New York hometown didn’t have a traffic light, but it did have a Baptist preacher who took off with a woman and left behind a homemade ransom note to make it look like he was kidnapped by Satanists. That fallen reverend was just the kind of guy Hood and fellow songwriters Mike Cooley and Rob Malone could build a song around. The songs on Pizza Deliverance focus on neighborhood characters tragic (Vietnam vet “Uncle Frank”, whose way of life is destroyed by the TVA dam project), eccentric (Hood’s funeral-loving great-grandmother in “Box Of Spiders”), wasted (the subjects of “Margo And Harold”) and rehabilitated (the hard-laboring hero of “Bulldozers And Dirt”).

Of course, the music also has something to do with maintaining this connection, as turned-up guitars scrape elbows with mandolin and pedal steel throughout proving that the band is comfortable with both ends of the roots-rock label. (And Hood’s drawling growl is a pretty effective rootsy weapon in its own right.) It’s wallop-packing country-rock that recalls fellow Athen-ites the late Dashboard Saviors and, when it’s peaking, even channels some of the passion and ferocious pride of those exemplary blue-collar warriors Creedence Clearwater Revival.