Patterson Hood Looks Inward on Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams

Patterson Hood has long demonstrated a knack in his songs for finely wrought character studies, from everyman working-class folks to Southern rock icons to abusive preachers whose kinks get them killed. This time, Hood applies his powers of observation to his own life. To be sure, the singer, guitarist and songwriter has written about his (misspent?) youth before. In fact, it’s the subject of “Let There Be Rock,” one of the best songs by his band the Drive-By Truckers. Hood’s scope is fairly narrow on that track, which focuses mostly on the bands he saw, and the substances he consumed, as an adolescent growing up in Alabama in the early ’80s. Also, the three-guitar solo that closes the song still cooks like a bolt of lightning nearly 25 years later.

Hood takes a different approach on Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, his first solo album since 2012 (and fourth overall). For one thing, there’s much less screaming guitar on these 10 songs. In fact, Hood plays piano on many of the tracks here, marking his recorded debut on keyboards. In addition, there’s an introspective cast to Hood’s songwriting as he looks back at his past selves, from childhood all the way up to when he moved from Alabama to Athens, Georgia, around the time he turned 30.

The result is an expansive but subtle collection of songs that include strings, woodwinds and analog synthesizers—sounds you don’t really hear on Drive-By Truckers albums. There are also a lot of guest contributions, from musicians including Chris Funk of the Decemberists (who produced), Kevin Morby and Steve Berlin of Los Lobos. That’s Lydia Loveless duetting with Hood on “A Werewolf and a Girl,” a somber meditation on the uncertainty and tentative fumbling of a first love, underpinned by moaning saxophone. A track later, on “The Forks of Cypress,” Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield adds earthy harmonies to an earthy song full of naturalistic imagery, accompanied by the sharp whisper of a brushed snare drum, whirring keyboards and a rhythmic sound that evokers drops of water falling into a drain in an echoing space.

One of the few songs with blaring guitars here, “The Van Pelt Parties,” features North Carolina band Wednesday letting loose with Hood. Over dense, intertwining electric guitars cranked up all the way, Hood sings about an annual holiday party from his childhood, where he felt out of his element at eight years old among the dirty jokes and grown-up insinuations before realizing at 14 that no one would notice if he helped himself to a cup or two of Christmas punch.

Because “The Van Pelt Parties” has a familiar sound, it feels at first like a stand-out track on Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, and in a way it is. Dig a little deeper, though, and the songs that provide the title of the album prove to be among the more intriguing efforts in Patterson Hood’s extensive catalog, largely for his willingness to try something new. “Exploding Trees” opens the album with bright piano chords and Hood’s effects-treated vocals as he sings about a natural disaster in his hometown in the mid-’90s, accompanied by guitar noise and keyboards and, midway through the track, crackly drums.

Later, on “Airplane Screams,” the buzzing of a distant, overdriven electric guitar hovers at the edge of the song as Hood picks out an acoustic guitar part that provides a foundation for piano, moody strings and, occasionally, goth-y swells of synthesizers. He wrote the song nearly 40 years ago, when he was 20, and though it resurfaced once or twice over the years, he could never make the track work in a band setting. Its inclusion here suggests that sometimes a singer simply isn’t ready for a song, until suddenly they are. Patterson Hood’s patience is his listeners’ reward, on an album demonstrating that a musician who has spent decades honing a distinctive sound hasn’t run out of surprises.

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.