When the Drive-By Truckers called their 1998 debut album Gangstabilly, it wasn’t just a cute portmanteau, even if their raucous country-rock shares little aesthetic affinity with hip-hop. There was a recognition that these once-subcultural genres had other things in common: a fixation on outlaw tales (whether lionizing or harrowing), and the kind of sustained character studies you don’t often hear in pop. “Birthday Boy,” from 2010’s The Big To-Do, made a businesslike stripper sound like one of the riders in a Western: “‘Which one’s the birthday boy?’ she said / I haven’t got all night / What your momma name you? You can call me what you like.”
The sheer number of songwriters rotating through the band, too, combined with its extraordinary consistency over ten albums, allowed for some subtle variations in approach—guitarist Patterson Hood (son of the prolific Muscle Shoals session player David H.) tends to contribute short stories about rough lives, while co-founder Mike Cooley prefers more allusive and abstracted lyrics.
