Next Tuesday when, Murdering Oscar and Other Love Songs is released on Rush St. Records, Patterson Hood will see one of his earliest projects come to fruition some 15 years after its inception.
On his MySpace, Hood explains:
I moved to Athens, GA on Aprils Fools Day, 1994. Perhaps I thought I was kidding myself, just stopping in on my way to the bigger city an hour to the Southwest. I moved into a little house on Ruth St. with my new friend, Brandon. We had panhandlers in our driveway and had a crack head that frequently banged on our door at four thirty in the morning. I had a shitty job and only knew two other people in town. I was alive with the fresh opportunities posed by moving to a town with an actual music scene and clubs to conquer. I wrote an album’s worth of songs and called it Murdering Oscar (and other love songs).
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any money for studio time, much less financing or support to actually release it. I also didn’t have a band and didn’t know any of the hundreds of musicians residing in my new hometown. Instead, I recorded all of the songs on a boom box in Brandon’s bedroom (it had better acoustics than my room) and began dubbing cassette copies to give to anyone I met. I probably gave away about 500 of those suckers that year.
Hood moved on from his solo material, and Drive-By Truckers born. ten years later, in 2004, while DBT was taking some time off, Hood found one of the old cassettes, dusted off the old material and wrote some new songs as counterpoints to his former mood. In 2005, he took the songs into the David Barbe’s Chase Park Transduction Studios and recorded the majority of this album.
MP3 Offering: “Pollyanna” by Patterson Hood