Drive-By Truckers Details

Mike Cooley has a gift for aphorism. “Paranoia’s like pulled pork,” he says, in his deep Alabama baritone. “It’s on menus all over the world, but in the American south it’s special.” That one is the final line of a riff on guns and why southerners like weapons, one of the subjects that crops up on Drive-By Truckers’ 12th album, The Unraveling.

Cooley and Patterson Hood, his fellow guitarist-singer-songwriter in the Truckers, are eating lamb meatballs on a chilly afternoon in New York, on the day The Unraveling is released. The title seems apt. A few hundred miles south, in Washington DC, Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is stalling in the Senate; across the Atlantic, as we speak, the UK is leaving the EU. “Unfortunately, we kinda saw it coming,” Hood says of the release date. “Things are so crazy right now, you never know what’s gonna happen next. You just know it’s gonna be ridiculous and shitty.”

The Unraveling is an album for such times. Musically, it’s business as usual: euphoric classic rock with layered guitars, interspersed with country-tinged ballads. It’s a blend that has seen country star Jason Isbell pass through their ranks, and brought Grammy nominations as well as big venues. But, lyrically, the album is filled with rage: about school shootings (Thoughts and Prayers), immigrant children (Babies in Cages), the opioid epidemic (Heroin Again), the manufacturing of anger for political ends (Grievance Merchants), and “working hard for not enough” (21st Century USA) .