Drive By Truckers - Go Go Boots

Artist - Drive By Truckers

Title - Go Go Boots

Format - Two 180-Gram Colored Vinyl LPs

Label - New West Records

Mastered by Greg Calbi

UPC - 880882172114

Drive-By Truckers bring you their eleventh record, GO-GO BOOTS, which was produced by their longtime producer David Barbe (Deerhunter, Betty LaVette, Sugar). GO-GO BOOTS builds on their roots with the old Muscle Shoals country-and-soul sound. 

 The craft of Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley's songwriting is as strong as ever, drawing believable characters and giving them lives that make dramatic sense, and Shonna Tucker just keeps getting better with the graceful and hard-edged "Dancin' Ricky." And if the music on Go-Go Boots is less physical than what the Drive-By Truckers typically deliver, it's emphatic and passionate, with an impressive sense of dynamics and as much soul as these folks have ever summoned in the studio -- they've rocked a lot harder, but they've never cut a more natural and telling groove.

There are moments where Go-Go Boots recalls Exile on Main Street,  another album that makes much out of feel and the way musicians play off one another, and if this isn't as likely to be regarded as a masterpiece, it's also less self-obsessive, and reveals some sides of the Drive-By Truckers the band hasn't captured in the studio before.   The band recorded two covers by fellow Muscle Shoals artist Eddie Hinton for the album. Bassist Shonna Tucker sings Hinton's "Where's Eddie", while Hood performs "Everybody Needs Love".

Eddie Hinton was an incredible artist, singer, songwriter, guitar player, producer and arranger from the old Muscle Shoals heyday. If you've ever seen our band, you've no doubt heard lots of his music playing on the PA system before and after our show. It should be mentioned that we've never included a cover song on a DBT album (not counting live or outtake releases) and we're including two of his songs on this new album. It's that big of a deal to us.  

Hood comments, "Mercy Buckets" is a song of mine. It's about as close to the Sweet Soul Music I've always loved as I'm capable of writing and I'm thrilled with the direction the band took it in the recording. The music and title both came from a song I wrote a long time ago. After recording the Eddie Hinton tracks, we decided to pull it out and write new lyrics to it and give it a go. Cooley and John Neff's guitar interplay has never been better than the crescendo of this track.

After ten years of hard work, the Truckers are still learning, still growing, and still feeling out new ideas, and on Go-Go Boots they show that even when they're relaxed, they're still one of America's best bands.