Come the end of the year, when we’re compiling lists and discussing the best albums of 2025, many people will still be talking about “Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams” by the great Patterson Hood. Released later this week, on 21st February, it’s the first solo album in 12 years from the Drive By Truckers co-founder. With support from the likes of Waxahatchee, Lydia Loveless and members of The Decemberists, it’s a fine collection that expands Hoods’ musical horizons, blending genres and delivering songs full of musical textures and carefully-crafted arrangements. Lyrically, Hood explores themes of youth and young adulthood, partly inspired by his own short story “The Exploding Trees”, which was about a natural disaster in his North Alabama hometown just as he moved away to Athens, GA when he turned 30.
The second single released from the album was “The Pool House”, which begins with moody strings and builds up a beautifully brooding atmosphere with subtle pauses in the instrumentation and Hood’s vulnerable vocal. Steve Berlin’s flute adds another layer, eerily timeless, twisting notes rising up. The musical feel is reinforced by a really effective stop-motion animation, which evokes ideas and feelings of decline and decay over the passage of time.
Hood says of the song: “‘The Pool House’ was originally inspired by a night I spent at a creepy rental. A literal pool house for an apartment complex that I rented cheap for the night during a solo tour. It was off-season and the pool was dark green and filled with algae. The whole thing was creepy and as I’d had a couple of drinks, my mind was definitely wandering, conjuring up some macabre shit. I wrote most of it during lockdown and demoed it then on my home rig. I later recorded it with Nate Query (The Decemberists) playing upright bass and Dan Hunt (Neko Case) on drums. I played piano, guitar, vocals, and a trashcan as percussion on the bridge. Then I had Kyleen King do her magic adding viola and layers of strings (from her own arrangement) to it and the great Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) played flute, which he knocked out of the park. He had come by the studio to put some sax parts on some songs and I mentioned wanting a flute for this song. He asked me what kind of flute part I was thinking of and I said, ‘something like what Chris Wood would play in Traffic.’ He just smiled and said he’d see what he could do. It’s one of the weirdest and most twisted tracks I have ever recorded and I’m really thrilled with how it all turned out. Frances Thrasher (Heaven4TheYoung), who painted the album cover, also does incredible and creepy stop-motion animation, and has made me a super cool video for the release using a vintage dollhouse and her own amazing skills and talents.”
Check out the album but absorb this first – outstanding songwriting from one of the finest.
