Patterson Hood – Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
Southern Ghosts and Fading Echoes: Patterson Hood’s Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
In case it’s not obvious from the title, Patterson Hood’s new solo album, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, is an unusual record. It’s also a remarkable one – moving, powerful, sad, uplifting, and more.
Best known as the co-founder of Drive-By Truckers, Hood has built a career on telling grand, messy, complicated Southern stories. But on his first solo album in over a decade—and fourth overall—he takes a different approach. This time, the stories are smaller, more personal, and set against a sonic backdrop that leans heavily on piano, strings, woodwinds, and vintage synthesizers instead of the raucous guitars that define his band’s sound.
“The band has been in such a good place that I hadn’t really thought in terms of doing anything outside of the Truckers anytime soon,” Hood says. “I decided if I ever was going to do another solo record, I wanted it to be pretty different than the band, as different as it can be.”
Mission accomplished. While Hood’s gravelly, lived-in voice is unmistakable, the songs on Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams feel deeply personal and intentionally different. Many of them were written on piano, which Hood used as a way to push himself outside of his comfort zone. The ten-track album moves in reverse chronological order, tracing his life from early childhood to leaving home.
The title track, “Exploding Trees,” opens the album with vivid imagery, inspired by a natural disaster that hit his North Alabama hometown when he was 30: “Exploding trees / Like fireworks in the ice storm / I still hear the sound.”
From there, Hood rewinds time, revisiting defining moments of his past. “Airplane Screams,” the album’s penultimate song, reaches back forty years to a painful love lost, with Hood singing: “My girl’s got a big black car / Reserved parking spaces / From the church to the cemetery / Through the lights she races / I don’t want to be pulled down / I don’t want you back in town.”
Not every song paints Hood’s past in such dark tones. “The Van Pelt Parties” is a wry, coming-of-age reflection on being a teenager at adult gatherings, figuring things out on the fly: “By fourteen I had figured out / That no one else would notice if I helped myself to Christmas punch / And quietly got loaded / That the jokes would all get funnier / Mistakes less duly noted.”
One of the album’s most intriguing tracks is “Forks of Cypress,” a fictional, Southern Gothic tale set in a real location, reminiscent of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”: “No one better ask me / And I would never tell / Something so forbidden / That I’ll carry it to hell.” The song is made all the more haunting by Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee), whose spectral harmonies add a ghostly quality.
The album closes with “Pinocchio,” which Hood calls “probably one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever done.” It’s a brutally honest reflection on childhood struggles, misunderstood emotions, and the long journey toward self-acceptance: “Trying to figure out like a sad detective / Pushing out thoughts when your brain’s defective / Pushing out words from my ill-formed mouth / Trying to see the light when the sun hides out.”
Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams was produced by Chris Funk (The Decemberists), and features contributions from Lydia Loveless, (who delivers a standout duet on “A Werewolf and a Girl”), Kevin Morby (whose guitar work on “Forks of Cypress” is a highlight), Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Brad Morgan and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), Daniel Hunt (Neko Case, M. Ward), and Stuart Bogie (The Hold Steady).
Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is a sonic departure that still feels unmistakably Patterson Hood—raw, unfiltered, and deeply human. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is not just a detour—it’s a powerful, deeply personal statement from one of Americana’s finest storytellers.
Hood will be on tour through the summer, first on a solo run, then rejoining Drive-By Truckers.
Enjoy our previous interview here: Interview: Key to the Highway: Patterson Hood
