Patterson Hood
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
Patterson Hood is a prolific writer and performer whose character-driven stories are packed with political subtext. He is best known as a frontman, singer, songwriter, and guitar player for the critically acclaimed rock and roll band Drive-By Truckers. He is also a writer of essays, columns, and short stories and a solo performer and producer. In the past few years, he has written an op-ed on the ongoing controversies surrounding the confederate flag for The New York Times Magazine, a piece on Vic Chesnutt for TheOxford American's annual music issue, and retrospectives on David Bowie for AmericanSongwriter and Merle Haggard for NPR. Most recently in October of 2016, Pattersonpublished his first short story featured in "The Highway Kind," a car-themed crime fictionanthology. Drive-By Truckers has released 14 studio albums and played over 2,500 shows in the past twenty-eight years. They also released a 35-song, career-spanning box set in 2015, recorded live at The Fillmore in San Francisco. They released a trilogy of studio albums, American Band (ATO Records, 2016), The Unraveling (ATO Records, 2020) and The New OK(ATO Records, 2020), which have seen the band move into a more directly political and topical sphere of writing garnering praise from critics and fans around the globe. In 2022 they released Welcome 2 Club XIII (ATO), which reflected on their formative years, juxtaposing the wild follies of youth with the joys and hardships of raising kids who are now the ages he and partner Mike Cooley were when they began playing together in 1985. In addition to the rave reviews from NPR, Rolling Stone, The Independent, UNCUT, MOJO, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune and The Guardian, Hood and Cooley appeared on CNN'sReliable Sources where they were interviewed by John Avion. The Unraveling entered thecharts as the #1 Americana Album in the UK. In the US it was the #1 album on theIndependent Chart, #1 Americana / Folk, #2 Rock, #2 Vinyl and #10 on Billboard's TopAlbums chart and #65 on the Billboard 200. They are about to release a deluxe reissue oftheir breakthrough album Southern Rock Opera and embark on a massive US tour playing itin its entirety for the first time in 22 years.