Billboard.com - First things first: the Drive-By Truckers’ seventh record, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” due Jan. 22 on New West, is extremely long. Nineteen tracks long, can’t- burn- two- seconds- more- on- the- CD long, long enough that Patterson Hood says it would have probably been a double album if the record company had been remotely OK with it.
“It seems like it’s telling a story,” said Hood, “It’s really not. It’s more like it’s implying one.”
This won’t be surprising to anyone who’s been behind the Truckers, one of rock’s most unapologetically ambitious outfits, over the past decade or so - long records are their thing, have been ever since they began scoring big points with 2001’s line-in-the-sand “Southern Rock Opera.” What’s surprising is that there’s no overriding theme to “Dark” - the Truckers do concept records like they do, um, long records - to makes it feel as lean as it does, and that it was built as smoothly as it was, given the band’s slightly nuts 2007. “We had more fun making this record than we ever had,” Hood said, “And generally making records has been fun.”
An interview with Patterson Hood.
• Drive-By Truckers - Self-Destructive Zones.mp3
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