The Drive-By Truckers have set an April 25 release for their sixth studio album, “A Blessing and a Curse.” As previously reported, the 11-track set is largely made up of freshly written tunes, as opposed to including songs from the group’s hefty back catalog of unreleased material.
“Most everything on it is real new,” group member Patterson Hood told Billboard.com in October. “Lord knows I’ve got a backlog of songs, but when we went into the studio I pretty much ignored it. Everything else we’ve written since we started recording.”
“Blessing” gets off to a rocking start with the Replacements-inspired “Feb. 14,” and is further highlighted by the rootsy, emotional “Daylight,” the Rolling Stones homage “Aftermath USA” and the reflective, six-minute-plus “Goodbye.”
Closer “A World of Hurt,” which features spoken lyrics from Hood, was inspired by the early 2005 birth of his daughter. “It’s about figuring out a way to turn the demons that can threaten to destroy you when you’re an angry young man into something that you live with and maybe even do well with, and I think certainly that’s been the case with me,” he said.
The Truckers will preview the new material during a Jan. 19-21 stand at the 40-Watt Club in their Athens, Ga., homebase, and have a handful of other shows on tap through mid-April. Hood has solo gigs on tap for Jan. 25 and Feb. 6 at Athens’ Flicker.
“A Blessing and a Curse” is the follow-up to 2004’s acclaimed “The Dirty South,” which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart.
Here is the track list for “A Blessing and a Curse”:
“Feb. 14”
“Gravity’s Gone”
“Easy on Yourself”
“Aftermath USA”
“Goodbye”
“Daylight”
“Wednesday”
“Little Bonnie”
“Space City”
“A Blessing and a Curse”
“A World of Hurt”
Source billboard.com.
