Pitchfork

Patterson Hood laid out his music-making motivation in "Do It Yourself", the accusatory suicide anthem from the Drive-By Truckers' most recent album, Decoration Day: When "the dead-end life just drags you down/ [You] turn those demons into walls of goddamned noise and sound." For more than a decade, Hood has been transforming all that preys on him into songs that are loud, rowdy, and angry, but also humorous, intelligent, and compassionate. His demons are both personal and regional: He's been scarred by the racial, cultural and economic double standards that pervade the South and outsiders' perceptions of it, as well as by the tragedies of his own life, which include divorce, deaths, desertions, and Drive-By Truckers.

On Killers and Stars, his first solo album, these same demons inform songs that are quieter, but no less haunted or intense. Originally not intended for commercial release, the album was recorded Nebraska-style in Hood's living room and in various locations-- Auburn and Florence, Alabama; Athens, Georgia-- following his divorce, and then pressed in small runs and sold exclusively at shows. In the liner notes, Hood writes that the album was "therapy" and insists he left it purposefully unfinished. While these assertions may sound like expectations-lowering disclaimers-- that the sound and the songs will be rough, that the tone will be achingly confessional-- Hood is too extroverted a songwriter to be wholly defensive or self-absorbed. Alone or with the band, he comes to himself through other people, whether musical influences like Ronnie Van Zant, cultural figures like George Wallace, or just friends and family.

As the album and song titles suggest, there's a crowd of people on Killers and Stars-- including Walt Disney, Belinda Carlisle, Georgia native Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), Frances Farmer, even people you don't know, like Phil and Alice-- and these songs are more about them and how Hood sees them than they are about him solely. He foresees Walt rising from his deep-freeze and wrecking havoc on the Eisner-ized company for "forty years of decisions made"; chastises Carlisle for shedding her punk roots for "cocaine and milkshakes, milkshakes cocaine"; and gently criticizes Cat Power for her precarious stage persona, although he could be directing that last line at himself: "If you're really so shy why are you standing in the light?"

The most interesting people on Killers and Stars, however, are the unnamed non-celebrities: the rising son, the assassin, the hobo, the old timer. Songs like "Rising Son" (a cover of which might have fit nicely into Johnny Cash's American Recordings repertoire), "The Assassin" and "Hobo" are not literally autobiographical or genealogical; they tell their truths figuratively, almost literarily. But as always, Hood's family supplies him with his richest subject matter. His then-recent divorce produced "Miss Me Gone", a break-up song every bit as conflicted and complex as Decoration Day's "(Something's Got to) Give Pretty Soon". "Old Timer's Disease" begins with Hood's grandfather being drafted at 42 and describes his hard life after World War II, then discloses his illness: "He spends his days just looking around/ But he's forgotten what he's looking for." Hood understands the importance of character and story, so the first two verses build to those quietly devastating last lines, which form the album's climax.

That "Cat Power" instead of "Old Timer's Disease" ends Killers and Stars belies its unfinished state, and reveals a paradox almost endemic to projects like this: The songs can stand by themselves, never requiring the Truckers' larger sound to liven them up, but as spare as they are and given the circumstances of their recording, they're somewhat limited in their scope and sound. While its ultimate fate will likely be as a footnote to his full-time band's long haul, Killers and Stars is strong enough to stand as a separate entity, a personal statement from Hood, sovereign from the interlocked identities of the Drive-By Truckers.