Elsewhere, I was in a discussion about writing, and this came out. You folks might find it interesting. Of course, every bore says that, but still:
Now, I recently went to five Drive-By Truckers acoustic shows over three weekends. (Yes, the sort of behavior I mock Deadheads for.) Patterson Hood loves to tell stories. His best songs are mostly story songs. Mike Cooley is more...um, is epigrammatic a word? He is to the aphorism what Dylan is to the image, with songs that are one brilliant saying after another and not much more.
So watching them both tell stories about songs was fascinating, and there were two which illustrated their varying approach to songwriting and craft: Patterson's
The Sands of Iwo Jima and Cooley's
Cottonseed.
Both those songs were played at all five shows I saw, and they were prefaced with stories.
Patterson told the same story every time, of the last time he saw his Uncle George A. He tweaked it every time, though, changing details and making it slightly different. He was tuning that story with great care, testing it out on us, seeing what he liked in our responses and, I bet, in how it felt to tell the story each time. One great detail disappeared, I think for that reason.
Cooley, on the other hand, said something totally different every time he played Cottonseed. One night it was a straight-up narrative about how he came to see what he describes in the song. Another night it was a brief mention of this being the only time he got anything useful out of going to church. The stories weren't inconsistent, just different views.
I know enough about the band to be pretty sure generally Patterson writes like the wind and Cooley crafts those songs with tweezers and a jeweler's loop, so it was and yet it wasn't surprising to me that Patterson was tuning his pre-song stories carefully while Cooley was saying pretty much what came into his mind fresh every time.