New Letter From Patterson 1/18/2020
Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2020 8:17 pm
Y’all
Wanted to stick my head in and say Hi and Happy 2020.
Thanks are once again in order to the fine folks at Three Dimes Down for all that you do in providing a forum for the most loyal of DBT Heathens and of course all you do to help raising funds for Nuci’s Space. Looking forward to Homecoming, our 20th, I think (kinda hard to count as they were a little erratic in the first few years but by my count we started in 2000 and possibly skipped 2007).
As most of you know we are about to release our 12th studio album, The Unraveling on Jan 31st. It seems to have leaked already so I presume many have already heard it. The reviews so far have been over the top great. The internet has been angry and bitterly divided. As Linda Ellerby would say, “So it goes”.
It’d be beyond cliche’ for me to say how proud I am of this one, as if I would ever put one out otherwise (although I will admit to being somewhat apprehensive about A Blessing and a Curse, but that’s a story for another time and place). That shit is somewhat subjective I guess, but to each their own. Can’t do anything about how they’re received, I can only make the record that the voice inside my head (and of course my band brother’s internal voices) leads us to make and then it all happens as it happens.
That said, I am super proud of the record we made. It was a tough one to write for reasons I will go into in a bit, a joy to record, a long wait to release (for a long list of reasons) and now that’s its upon us, I’m ready to take this dark son of a bitch out on the road and find joy in the loud noise it makes.
Last two nights were our first shows of the decade (unless you’re a purist that says that’s next year, but to me the 80’s started in 1980 and so on) and the first shows of the Armageddon’s Back in Town World Tour 2020. If Boulder and Denver shows were any indication, it’s going to be a fantastic year of Rock and Roll. The Rockshow seems to be the only relief I can find from the day to day bullshit surrounding us all and playing these brutal nuggets of darkness provides (for me at least) a sort of exorcism from it all. Such is the joy I get from playing in this band and doing this wondrous thing I get to do for a living.
There’s some misinformation floating around, some of my own making I’m afraid, and since this is a forum for our closest kin out there I figured it would be a good place to figure out how to address before I take it further.
DoIng press for this album has been challenge and I’m just starting to wrap my head around how to talk about it. This album, as political as it comes off on the surface, is profoundly personal to me (us), probably the most since A Blessing and a Curse or possibly even Decoration Day. Writing it was a tremendous challenge that I erroneously referred to as a writer’s block, but that’s not quite the accurate story.
During the gap between American Band and The Unraveling, I did indeed take a year off from songwriting, followed by the 8 months I spent writing what became “The Perilous Night” but I also wrote about 150 pages of the book I’m working on. Upon resuming songwriting I have written a bunch of what I hope to someday record as a solo record and some other songs that may or may not one day be deemed worthy of completion.
My problem, song-wise, was not an inability to write but a lack of a clear direction of where I wanted to go for a followup to what ended up being a bit of a rebirth for the band. I knew, instinctively that I didn’t have what i wanted but wasn’t clear yet on what “it” was. Writing “21st Century USA” provided me with the answer to that quandary and soon songs began to flow in their wondrous way. In the end, we ended up in Memphis and recorded 18 songs, 15 of which were mine.
The past four years has also seen a lot of other things to occupy us. All of our kids are getting older and being present is of utmost importance, especially considering that we still average well over 100+ days gone a year. One of my kids required a major surgery. None of us are getting any younger and attaining some sort of balance seems to continue to be hard. Life is too short not to live.
Then there’s the climate in our country. The shit show that is US politics has been a daily barrage of hate and disgust. As an artist, we felt compelled to address the world around us, but none of us wanted to repeat ourselves or disrespect our last album by making it again. Our first instinct was to head in a different direction but alas, that felt dishonest and frankly cowardly.
In the end, it was our kids that lead me where I went. (I won’t speak for Cooley, but I suspect he’d agree). My son is precocious enough to be overly aware of the world around him and his questions inspired part of what I wrote. When your kids come home freaked out about the Lockdown Drill they had in fucking elementary school… the rage from those feelings and the frustration of seeing yet another asswipe in DC address dead school kids in the hall with “thoughts and prayers’ lead to that song. It’s not political, it’s personal. It’s not an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs (I applaud anything that brings anyone comfort and peace in this world) it’s a middle finger to using them for an excuse for inaction.
On that end, I’m not naive enough to think for a second that the gun issue will ever go away. I don’t know the answer on that one. I grew up in Alabama, surrounded by guns. I actually won a blue ribbon at redneck summer camp from being a pretty decent shot. However, some common sense things like background checks and tighter checks and balances would definitely prevent at least some of these attacks and our country is definitely long overdue for a mindset change in our country’s relationship and worshipping of guns. People with restraining orders from their ex-wives shouldn’t be able to easily attain an AR-15. A little common sense folks.
In “Babies in Cages” I’m not necessarily advocating for open borders, I’m saying that small children should not be ripped from their mother’s arms and put in holding pens. It is literally happening and it is evil and the conversation I had with my son where I had to calm his fears that someone was going to take him from me and his mother and put him in a cage was horrific. The questions that led to when I had to explain why he wasn’t in danger due to his pale white skin was also terrible. I didn’t write the song with flowery poetic language, I wrote it bluntly and to the point. As it should be. I can get as poetic as a motherfucker when I so choose, but these times call for blunt talk and I wrote much of this album accordingly. I stand by every line and word I wrote on this album. I’ve never spent as much time editing and second guessing myself in my life as I have on this album and every damned syllable has a purpose and a reason for its existence.
Writer’s block probably wasn’t exactly a fair description of Cooley’s situation either. He and I have always had a radically different work method. I write and write and write and write. I then edit and whittle it down to what comes out the other end. There was a time in my life when I was averaging over 200 songs a year. I have slowed way down in later years due to the necessities of my job, life and family but still write a pretty fair amount. I put way more care into each and every song (even the failures that end up on the roadside) than I used to but still try to keep my process open. I also try to seek to new ways of writing. New styles and forms. Sometimes a song may call for a structured or disciplined approach, other times a more open ended rambling approach. I always try to end up with what’s appropriate for the song and subject matter at hand.
Cooley’s approach is more like carving in stone. It is much more time consuming and exacting. He tends to edit himself before writing it down. I guess that works for him, as it enables a song like “Grievance Merchants” to exist. There may be only two songs from him on this album but they’re both incredible and that one in particular is one of my all time favorites he’s ever written. “Slow Ride Argument” is a song that no one on Earth cold ever have written except for Cooley. What a wild fun ride that one is.
I wrote “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun” about Memphis. It’s metaphors conjure up a lot of my experiences and history with the city on the bluff. My history with that town is long and sometimes very dark. Recording there provided me (at least) with a sort of wonderful epilogue to a long and sometimes sad story. I damned near didn’t survive my time living there in 1991 when I was 27. Our week there making this album was one of my favorite experiences of my life.
In the end, we came back from Memphis with way too much material for one album. For months I would listen to what we had and kinda revel in its sprawl as it meandered all over the map, but alas, I also didn’t want to put that kind of record out at this time. Lord knows, we’ve been known to do so, but this wasn’t the time for another Brighter Than Creation’s Dark type of album.
Last spring I produced Jerry Joseph’s next album in Water Valley Mississippi, then drove to Athens to mix The Unraveling. We wanted it to be sonically different from American Band. We had intentionally mixed AB with very little panning except for a a little guitar separation, opting for a nearly mono approach where it comes blaring out of your speakers like a freight train headed straight at you. (We had done the same with the live box set also). This time we opted for an opposite approach with wide pans and an almost cinematic soundscape. It’s lush and spacious. Matt Ross-Spang, who engineered, came over and mixed with Barbe and I am so proud of the way it all sounds. Wait til you hear it on vinyl. It’s our greatest sounding record by a long shot.
Months passed and we stayed busy touring and living our crazy lives.
The actual nine-song sequence that came out actually came to us rather suddenly after a long spell of second guessing everything. By then we had already mastered the 18-songs that we were still calling Memphis Hollywood Disco. Upon striping it down to the nine that are The Unraveling, it suddenly felt like an album. The album we wanted and needed to make. The album that speaks to what’s on our minds and in our hearts as we approach this election year, that no doubt will be fraught with turmoil and drama.
We all approved it and said we could get behind this and go out there and take it to the world. Damn the torpedoes as they say.
We put a lot of care into the album cover. Again, I was inspired by our children. The photo we used was by my dear friend Erik Golts of his son and mine taken at sunset on New Years Eve 2018, looking out onto the beautiful Pacific Ocean. To me it conjured the end of an old western movie as the sun is going down. It also could be a metaphor for this time we’re in, or perhaps a slight bit of optimism as we’re awaiting resurrection.
Any optimism I have is centered around the young people that I am around. The millennials that work in our crew, our children and their wonderful friends. Young people who are speaking their minds and using their heads in far better ways than we did when we were their age. There may be hope after all.
In the end, I’m excited to get this beast out there and back on the road. I hope you all will join us for some Rock Shows and continue to follow us on this journey as we move onward into the new decade ahead. Fight the Power and Resist the day to day assholery. Turn it up loud and Love each other, motherfuckers!
A life worth living is a life worth taking a stand for.
See you at the Rock and Roll Show.
Sincerely,
Patterson
Wanted to stick my head in and say Hi and Happy 2020.
Thanks are once again in order to the fine folks at Three Dimes Down for all that you do in providing a forum for the most loyal of DBT Heathens and of course all you do to help raising funds for Nuci’s Space. Looking forward to Homecoming, our 20th, I think (kinda hard to count as they were a little erratic in the first few years but by my count we started in 2000 and possibly skipped 2007).
As most of you know we are about to release our 12th studio album, The Unraveling on Jan 31st. It seems to have leaked already so I presume many have already heard it. The reviews so far have been over the top great. The internet has been angry and bitterly divided. As Linda Ellerby would say, “So it goes”.
It’d be beyond cliche’ for me to say how proud I am of this one, as if I would ever put one out otherwise (although I will admit to being somewhat apprehensive about A Blessing and a Curse, but that’s a story for another time and place). That shit is somewhat subjective I guess, but to each their own. Can’t do anything about how they’re received, I can only make the record that the voice inside my head (and of course my band brother’s internal voices) leads us to make and then it all happens as it happens.
That said, I am super proud of the record we made. It was a tough one to write for reasons I will go into in a bit, a joy to record, a long wait to release (for a long list of reasons) and now that’s its upon us, I’m ready to take this dark son of a bitch out on the road and find joy in the loud noise it makes.
Last two nights were our first shows of the decade (unless you’re a purist that says that’s next year, but to me the 80’s started in 1980 and so on) and the first shows of the Armageddon’s Back in Town World Tour 2020. If Boulder and Denver shows were any indication, it’s going to be a fantastic year of Rock and Roll. The Rockshow seems to be the only relief I can find from the day to day bullshit surrounding us all and playing these brutal nuggets of darkness provides (for me at least) a sort of exorcism from it all. Such is the joy I get from playing in this band and doing this wondrous thing I get to do for a living.
There’s some misinformation floating around, some of my own making I’m afraid, and since this is a forum for our closest kin out there I figured it would be a good place to figure out how to address before I take it further.
DoIng press for this album has been challenge and I’m just starting to wrap my head around how to talk about it. This album, as political as it comes off on the surface, is profoundly personal to me (us), probably the most since A Blessing and a Curse or possibly even Decoration Day. Writing it was a tremendous challenge that I erroneously referred to as a writer’s block, but that’s not quite the accurate story.
During the gap between American Band and The Unraveling, I did indeed take a year off from songwriting, followed by the 8 months I spent writing what became “The Perilous Night” but I also wrote about 150 pages of the book I’m working on. Upon resuming songwriting I have written a bunch of what I hope to someday record as a solo record and some other songs that may or may not one day be deemed worthy of completion.
My problem, song-wise, was not an inability to write but a lack of a clear direction of where I wanted to go for a followup to what ended up being a bit of a rebirth for the band. I knew, instinctively that I didn’t have what i wanted but wasn’t clear yet on what “it” was. Writing “21st Century USA” provided me with the answer to that quandary and soon songs began to flow in their wondrous way. In the end, we ended up in Memphis and recorded 18 songs, 15 of which were mine.
The past four years has also seen a lot of other things to occupy us. All of our kids are getting older and being present is of utmost importance, especially considering that we still average well over 100+ days gone a year. One of my kids required a major surgery. None of us are getting any younger and attaining some sort of balance seems to continue to be hard. Life is too short not to live.
Then there’s the climate in our country. The shit show that is US politics has been a daily barrage of hate and disgust. As an artist, we felt compelled to address the world around us, but none of us wanted to repeat ourselves or disrespect our last album by making it again. Our first instinct was to head in a different direction but alas, that felt dishonest and frankly cowardly.
In the end, it was our kids that lead me where I went. (I won’t speak for Cooley, but I suspect he’d agree). My son is precocious enough to be overly aware of the world around him and his questions inspired part of what I wrote. When your kids come home freaked out about the Lockdown Drill they had in fucking elementary school… the rage from those feelings and the frustration of seeing yet another asswipe in DC address dead school kids in the hall with “thoughts and prayers’ lead to that song. It’s not political, it’s personal. It’s not an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs (I applaud anything that brings anyone comfort and peace in this world) it’s a middle finger to using them for an excuse for inaction.
On that end, I’m not naive enough to think for a second that the gun issue will ever go away. I don’t know the answer on that one. I grew up in Alabama, surrounded by guns. I actually won a blue ribbon at redneck summer camp from being a pretty decent shot. However, some common sense things like background checks and tighter checks and balances would definitely prevent at least some of these attacks and our country is definitely long overdue for a mindset change in our country’s relationship and worshipping of guns. People with restraining orders from their ex-wives shouldn’t be able to easily attain an AR-15. A little common sense folks.
In “Babies in Cages” I’m not necessarily advocating for open borders, I’m saying that small children should not be ripped from their mother’s arms and put in holding pens. It is literally happening and it is evil and the conversation I had with my son where I had to calm his fears that someone was going to take him from me and his mother and put him in a cage was horrific. The questions that led to when I had to explain why he wasn’t in danger due to his pale white skin was also terrible. I didn’t write the song with flowery poetic language, I wrote it bluntly and to the point. As it should be. I can get as poetic as a motherfucker when I so choose, but these times call for blunt talk and I wrote much of this album accordingly. I stand by every line and word I wrote on this album. I’ve never spent as much time editing and second guessing myself in my life as I have on this album and every damned syllable has a purpose and a reason for its existence.
Writer’s block probably wasn’t exactly a fair description of Cooley’s situation either. He and I have always had a radically different work method. I write and write and write and write. I then edit and whittle it down to what comes out the other end. There was a time in my life when I was averaging over 200 songs a year. I have slowed way down in later years due to the necessities of my job, life and family but still write a pretty fair amount. I put way more care into each and every song (even the failures that end up on the roadside) than I used to but still try to keep my process open. I also try to seek to new ways of writing. New styles and forms. Sometimes a song may call for a structured or disciplined approach, other times a more open ended rambling approach. I always try to end up with what’s appropriate for the song and subject matter at hand.
Cooley’s approach is more like carving in stone. It is much more time consuming and exacting. He tends to edit himself before writing it down. I guess that works for him, as it enables a song like “Grievance Merchants” to exist. There may be only two songs from him on this album but they’re both incredible and that one in particular is one of my all time favorites he’s ever written. “Slow Ride Argument” is a song that no one on Earth cold ever have written except for Cooley. What a wild fun ride that one is.
I wrote “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun” about Memphis. It’s metaphors conjure up a lot of my experiences and history with the city on the bluff. My history with that town is long and sometimes very dark. Recording there provided me (at least) with a sort of wonderful epilogue to a long and sometimes sad story. I damned near didn’t survive my time living there in 1991 when I was 27. Our week there making this album was one of my favorite experiences of my life.
In the end, we came back from Memphis with way too much material for one album. For months I would listen to what we had and kinda revel in its sprawl as it meandered all over the map, but alas, I also didn’t want to put that kind of record out at this time. Lord knows, we’ve been known to do so, but this wasn’t the time for another Brighter Than Creation’s Dark type of album.
Last spring I produced Jerry Joseph’s next album in Water Valley Mississippi, then drove to Athens to mix The Unraveling. We wanted it to be sonically different from American Band. We had intentionally mixed AB with very little panning except for a a little guitar separation, opting for a nearly mono approach where it comes blaring out of your speakers like a freight train headed straight at you. (We had done the same with the live box set also). This time we opted for an opposite approach with wide pans and an almost cinematic soundscape. It’s lush and spacious. Matt Ross-Spang, who engineered, came over and mixed with Barbe and I am so proud of the way it all sounds. Wait til you hear it on vinyl. It’s our greatest sounding record by a long shot.
Months passed and we stayed busy touring and living our crazy lives.
The actual nine-song sequence that came out actually came to us rather suddenly after a long spell of second guessing everything. By then we had already mastered the 18-songs that we were still calling Memphis Hollywood Disco. Upon striping it down to the nine that are The Unraveling, it suddenly felt like an album. The album we wanted and needed to make. The album that speaks to what’s on our minds and in our hearts as we approach this election year, that no doubt will be fraught with turmoil and drama.
We all approved it and said we could get behind this and go out there and take it to the world. Damn the torpedoes as they say.
We put a lot of care into the album cover. Again, I was inspired by our children. The photo we used was by my dear friend Erik Golts of his son and mine taken at sunset on New Years Eve 2018, looking out onto the beautiful Pacific Ocean. To me it conjured the end of an old western movie as the sun is going down. It also could be a metaphor for this time we’re in, or perhaps a slight bit of optimism as we’re awaiting resurrection.
Any optimism I have is centered around the young people that I am around. The millennials that work in our crew, our children and their wonderful friends. Young people who are speaking their minds and using their heads in far better ways than we did when we were their age. There may be hope after all.
In the end, I’m excited to get this beast out there and back on the road. I hope you all will join us for some Rock Shows and continue to follow us on this journey as we move onward into the new decade ahead. Fight the Power and Resist the day to day assholery. Turn it up loud and Love each other, motherfuckers!
A life worth living is a life worth taking a stand for.
See you at the Rock and Roll Show.
Sincerely,
Patterson
