When Patterson Hood was 8 years old, he started writing songs. Bullied at school and making bad grades anyway, he jotted down lyrics in his notebook during class, even dreamed up a few concept albums. Around that same time, he became obsessed with Disney’s Pinocchio, memorizing full scenes and acting them out by himself in the yard. The film’s dark tone piqued his imagination, in particular all the alarming transformations: boys into donkeys, wood into flesh, children into grown-ups. Perhaps the 8-year-old Patterson even wrote a song about it. Fifty years later, the adult Patterson penned “Pinocchio,” a quiet, bouncy ballad about what constitutes happiness later in life: “Heaven is a house with a modern kitchen/Heaven has the pace of a slow news day.” Buried in its cartoon imagery is a meditation on songwriting and Hood’s endless pursuit “for a line that can save my soul.”
“Pinocchio” closes out Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, the fourth official album under the Drive-By Truckers co-founder’s own name—his first solo release in nearly 13 years, his most adventurous and surprising, and his best. These new songs are almost self-consciously rooted in his love of film (“cinematic wet streets reflect the clouds,” he sings on “The Forks of Cypress”), but they have the weirdness of Pinocchio. One of the foremost chroniclers of the modern, deeply conflicted South, Hood shows a penchant for striking surrealism, for jarring juxtapositions that render otherwise mundane images strange and unsettling. Opener “Exploding Trees,” for example, documents a particularly violent ice storm that hit his north Alabama hometown in 1994. He describes waterlogged trees crashing under the weight of ice, “like fireworks in the ice storm.” That description alone is memorable, but the song concludes with yet another evocative image, of “the Beauty Queen/Crushed beneath the pines on the frozen street.”
It’s always tempting to think of albums like this as short-story collections, but Exploding Trees is more akin to a Criterion compilation of short films. Hood, who has penned songs about John Ford, Walt Disney, and other filmmakers, writes with visuals in mind, which means his lyrics tend toward the starkly descriptive. “A Werewolf and a Girl,” a duet with Lydia Loveless, describes two deeply broken people trying to get comfortable with each other as they watch An American Werewolf in London and have the most desultory sex imaginable. It’s a supremely bleak breakup song, but it’s a ray of light compared to “The Pool House,” which strings together a series of images that coalesce into a story about a man contemplating suicide. Hood sets it up as a movie scene, with the character taking one last skinnydip before hanging himself outside the pool house. In sharp contrast to the angry suicide song he wrote for Decoration Day and the grieving suicide song he wrote for Welcome 2 Club XIII, “The Pool House” is almost spookily matter-of-fact, as Hood struggles to understand such a self-annihilating act: “How could his head tell him something so wrong and make it feel so right?”
