Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood has announced his landmark new solo album, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, arriving via ATO Records on Friday, February 21, 2025. You can also listen to the first single off the album, “A Werewolf and A Girl” HERE. Hood will be coming to the HI-FI on March 30, 2025, and you can buy tickets HERE.
Produced by Chris Funk (The Decemberists, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks) at various studios in Hood’s current hometown of Portland, OR, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams marks the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s most expansive and ambitious extracurricular effort to date, supported by a stellar cast of friends and fellow musicians including Waxahatchee, Brad and Phil Cook (Megafaun), Kevin Morby, Wednesday, Brad Morgan and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, The Blasters), David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland), Nate Query (The Decemberists), Steve Drizos (Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormons), Daniel Hunt (Neko Case, M Ward), and Stuart Bogie (The Hold Steady, Goose). The 10-track collection was heralded by premiere of the first single, “A Werewolf and a Girl,” featuring additional vocals from Lydia Loveless, and is available everywhere now. A lyric video directed by Jason Shevchuk is streaming now on YouTube.
Hood’s fourth solo album and first in over 12 years, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams sees the veteran singer, guitarist, and songwriter exploring his youth and young manhood in a collection unlike anything in his ever-evolving catalogue. It is inspired in part by his own short story, “The Exploding Trees,” in which Hood tells the tale of a natural disaster that occurred in his North Alabama hometown just as he turned 30 and relocated to Athens, GA where Drive-By Truckers were co-founded in 1996. The album gathers songs that have amassed over the remarkably prolific songwriter’s career, many of which provided him with distraction and creative sustenance during lockdown, others which have resided among his notebooks for years, including the string-driven “Airplane Screams,” written over four decades ago but never successfully recorded until now.
Currently traveling the US with Drive-By Truckers on their hugely successful Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour, Hood will celebrate the arrival of Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams with a run of US headline dates. The Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams 2025 Tour – which will feature backing from his band, The Sensurrounders, with support from special guest Lydia Loveless – gets underway March 19 at Brooklyn, NY’s Brooklyn Made, with stops in DC, Atlanta and Nashville, while finishing up at The Whirling Tiger on April 5. Local and Venue Presales began Thursday, November 21 at 10:00 am (local). All remaining tickets were released to the general public on Friday, November 22 at 10:00 am (local). Additional dates will be announced soon.
“I’m putting together a kind of stripped-down band so we can go do this record right,” Hood says. “Now the challenge to see if I can pull off a few of the songs on piano live. There’s nothing but good to come from it. I think good has come from each of my solo records, they each made me better at what I do in various different ways.”
In the meantime, Hood will wrap up his busy year with an already announced series of upcoming solo dates beginning December 3 at Deerfield, MA’s Tree House Brewing Company and then continuing through a very special three-night holiday stand at Portland, OR’s Show Bar set for December 18-20. Click HERE for complete details.