Drive-By Truckers – The Big To-Do

It’s difficult not to read the Drive-By Truckers’ latest effort, The Big To-Do, as a eulogy of sorts. A eulogy of exactly what is left to the listener’s discretion; the subject(s) is/are never made explicit. The song titles themselves hint as much: ‘This Fucking Job,’ ‘After the Scene Dies,’ ‘(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So,’ ‘Daddy Learned to Fly.’ The quasi-despondent pedal steel in ‘Sante Fe’ and ‘The Fourth Night of My Drinking’ argue this point just as strongly. To wit: That To-Do finds the Georgia collective at its most mournful is a jolting statement. The Truckers have damn near completely steered clear of upbeat tunes, to be sure, but To-Do has an element of finality to it where previous releases were gloomy but still contained a sense of potential. Indeed, there was still a future, the fog thinning out as you traverse forward. Here, it’s as if the road suddenly vanishes without warning.Sure, the band still has its story songs. The boogie-shuffle track ‘The Wig He Made Her Wear’ is To-Do’s (token) murder ballad. This time, the tale is that of a wife killing her preacher husband because the preacher made her do certain things in the bedroom she wasn’t comfortable with. The aforementioned ‘Drinking,’ soon to be a barroom staple, is a simple account of a bender to end all benders wherein singer/guitarist/de facto band leader Patterson Hood admits at the end, “This will be through with me before I’m through with it.” Then there’s the single ‘Birthday Boy,’ which details the life of daddy’s little girl doing”¦certain things for money while battling a level of self-esteem that’s practically nonexistent.Beyond that, though, is the mood of making peace with what has transpired in the past, and the (assumed) subsequent process of moving on. Yes, on the surface ‘Daddy’ is a first-person account of one’s father leaving. Yet, deeper than that the song can be seen as the band dealing with Jason Isbell leaving. He left amicably before the band’s previous album, certainly, but perhaps the collective is finally ready to accept the loss. And ‘This Fucking Job’ is a discussion of hating one’s job: “Working this job, I thought it sucked when I had it,” but then having to admit just as quickly that you need a job no matter how shitty because there are bills to pay. Thus, you’re trying to “hang on to the worst of places” but, paradoxically, a family can’t “live on fast-food wages.” Yet, below that cursory interpretation is a bitterly acerbic image of the current U.S. economy. The song’s basically stating that sometimes ya gotta swallow your pride and work an awful job in order to avoid starvation.There has been no indication that the Drive-By Truckers are leaving the spotlight anytime soon. Still, all the evidence contained with The Big To-Do suggests that at one point during these sessions it might have been considered. Even the title itself reads like a synonym for “bucket list.” But perhaps that’s the meaning behind it: This album is the culmination of everything that the Truckers ever wanted to accomplish. The band wrote its fantastic songs (this set included), made a rock opera, toured the country (and became known as one of the best, most hard working live acts in the world), and consistently received critical praise throughout its career, all while battling to stay afloat in the lonely indie-southern-rock circuit. Not bad for a bunch of supposed rednecks.