Patterson Hood's solo album Murdering Oscar is a striking blast from the past

Perhaps the biggest difference between Drive-By Truckers front man Patterson Hood and Axl Rose—though there are many—can be found in the ways they each handled albums that were long in coming. Rose obsessively retooled Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy in 14 studios over 13 years, all the while stringing along the public with empty promises of a finished album. Hood was considerably more low-key about his solo project Murdering Oscar. He wrote half the songs back in '94, recorded the album in 2005, and pretty much let it lie until he had the opportunity to release it this year. The only major change he made was adding a song.

"The thing about this record is, for the most part I left it alone," Hood says. "I wrote 'Pride of the Yankees' later, which I think that alone probably made it worth the four-year wait.... There's always the legendary missing record, the records that just don't seem to ever come out, whether it was [Brian Wilson's] Smile or Big Star's Third. They're usually these really experimental or dark records or whatever. To me, this is possibly the most accessible record I've ever made. So it was always kind of funny to me that I had so much trouble finding it a home."

Given how many years have passed since Hood wrote the first of these songs (15) and since he recorded them (four), the album is a time capsule for his personal and creative life. "I mean, sitting here right now it all obviously worked out for the best and I'm thrilled with it," he says. "But I would've given anything to have had the opportunity to make a record in '94.... At that time, a day of studio time might as well have cost a million dollars for how broke I was and how far I was away from being able to afford it."

The early-'90s, pre-Truckers songs in the bunch are darkened by grunge's self-destructive angst and a young man's vehement rejection of domesticity. "Heavy and Hanging" is sung from the point-of-view of the electrician who discovered Kurt Cobain's dead body, with a leaden, rubbed-raw melody and guitar riffs sinking into a caustic sludge. "Belvedere" is a lascivious fantasy involving a high school girl. "It almost didn't even make the record," Hood says. "Even though I liked the song a lot, I wasn't really comfortable with what it said and how it said it." The disturbingly benign-sounding "Screwtopia" invites a woman to surrender herself to a lifelong suburban prison.

No doubt, singing these songs now feels a little different than it did then. "Of course, the irony of that was not lost on me when I made this record in '05," Hood says. "It was two weeks before my daughter was born, and I would come home and my house was full of baby shit everywhere, strollers and assembling cribs and stuff like that, my wife in full nesting mode painting the baby's room. And I'm recording 'Screwtopia.' "

The newer songs, on the other hand, sound as though they're coming from someone who can actually imagine being happy and contented in family life. "I Understand Now" puts a fine point on the change in perspectives. "Grandaddy" is nostalgic for the future joys of grandparenting. "I meant ['Screwtopia'] just as much when I wrote it as I meant 'Grandaddy' when I wrote it," Hood says. (The two tracks fall back-to-back on the album.) Together, the older and newer songs make for a singular and jarring sort of symmetry.

Hood came by his grunge sensibilities honestly. "Nirvana broke wide open and became huge pretty much the exact same week that my '80s band Adam's Housecat broke up, and doing a kind of music and opening the door for a kind of music selling records that I'd spent pretty much the '80s doing," he says.

But there's a reason why it's not a sound that people generally associate with Hood's musical ventures, while loose, muscular Southern rock is. "I was running like hell from it by the time the Truckers started," he says. "Because I had seen what happened in the wake of all of that. There were so many bad bands that came along in the wake of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. After that, all the sudden it was Bush and Nickelback."

Murdering Oscar is an occasion for contemplating why musical styles, songs or life perspectives end up falling by the wayside. "It gets to a point where you're too old to take your shirt off anymore," Hood says. "Grunge was bound to have a limited shelf life because once the flannel shirt came off... There's a real short shelf life with men without shirts on. About 22 or 23. It's like, 'Dude, put a shirt on, and for God's sake wear some shoes.' "

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