Word from the Hood- 11/3/2020 Election Day

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Tequila Cowboy
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Word from the Hood- 11/3/2020 Election Day

Post by Tequila Cowboy »

Y’all,
The day is upon us.
Finally.

It is my sincere hope that today will be a new beginning and the start of a time of rebuilding and healing.
It’ll probably be rough going for a while at best but I am trying desperately to be hopeful.
2020 has been a shit show and has taken its toll on everyone I know.
Here’s to a better 2021.

I write this from a place of not knowing what the fuck the next 24+ hours will bring.

I do want to say, regardless, we so appreciate everyone of you and all you have done to support us, our band and our families, through these trying times and especially through this horrendous year.
I spent the first several months of this pandemic in terror of losing our homes and everything we have worked so hard to build.
Y’all have enabled us to survive and move forward. I don’t know what next year will bring, but I know we couldn’t have survived this one without all of you and your support.

As a writer and artist, I have always been obsessed with politics and history and often have written songs from a political and or historical perspective.
When we began American Band, we made the conscious decision to write about this historical moment we were just then living through, as we realized that people would someday look back on 2015-16 as a time of great tumult and possibly change and we wanted to document it musically from the perspective of a band that spends most of every year traveling all over this USA (and beyond) and that we see more of America than most Americans.
That album came from that place.
We released American Band on Sept 30, 2016 thinking it would be a fall tour and then everyone would move on (the country and our band) to hopefully better brighter days.
As we all know, we then toured behind that album for the better part of 4 years.

The songs on The Unraveling were more personal to me. The politics of it were all still there, of course, but all from the perspective of dealing with all of this shit with our children and families.
"Thoughts and Prayers" was a very personal song inspired by the lockdown drills my kids dealt with as well as the resulting fear they carried from it all.
Likewise, those songs were all very personal to me and our band.
It’s a haunting and dark album and isn’t a place I would want to necessarily hang out all of the time, but it had to be said and we did what we felt was necessary as artists in putting it out there into the world.

The New OK was of course an unplanned pregnancy, but we love all our babies (and never put them in cages) and I’m as proud of that one as anything we’ve ever done.
Maybe more so than most due to how much its making aided me in dealing with a particularly wretched stretch of road emotionally and mentally.
I won’t say it saved my life, but some days it definitely helped to save what little sanity I have left.

I love that The New OK (album) has an uplift and some humor that was needed and it’s actually a pretty fun record.
Our live shows have always been more ‘fun’ than our records but this one has a greater sense of that than most.
Plus I think “Watching the Orange Clouds” is one of the best tracks we’ve ever recorded.
I was already proud of that song, but the band really killed it with their playing on that one.

We just made a video for the song “The New OK" that utilizes footage from this summer’s protests and federal occupation in my adopted hometown.
It’s brutal and sad, but also uplifting with a great ending.
Here’s hoping we can say the same for 2020.

Taken together, these three albums do sort of make an unintended trilogy.
(Please don’t name that after this current administration, because he’s not worthy of my shit, much less our art).
Let’s call it the 21st Century USA Trilogy or the “4 Years Grandpa went batshit crazy and voted for a Nazi Trilogy” or whatever.

I think taken together, as time passes (and hopefully it will) we have sketched out a pretty valid picture of what life in the USA looked like this past decade.
Only a handful of bands have bothered to document this horrendous time, and I don’t really blame them.
It’s not fun to look at and I’m sure it has tried our fans to the brink and beyond at times sticking with us through it all.
Believe me, I never really set out to be Jane Fonda and am definitely ready to move on to my Aerobics phase ASAP.
But, I am proud of the work. It is my hope that, regardless of what turns our country take these next few, these songs will hold up as a historical marker of this time we all lived through.

I hope everyone out there votes and I wish you all health and happiness.
I’m hoping for a better day soon when this plague lifts and we can all get back to doing what we really do best and can all go out and do the fuck out of it.
I’m ready to Rock and Roll. Live and in person. The sooner, the better.

Much love to all of you and your families.
Thanks again for all you have done foe me and my band and our families.
I literally can’t wait to “See you at The Rock Show!”

Sincerely,
Patterson Hood
DBT

PS: We are all taking this week off from our NoonChorus shows. Jay will be back to it this coming Saturday. Cooley will be back next Wednesday, and I will be back on the 18th.
Don’t miss the DBT Thanksgiving Filter Variety Show on the 25th.
We call him Scooby Do, but Scooby doesn’t do. Scooby, is not involved

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