My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

oneweekoneband:

“TVA” never made it on an official Drive By Truckers studio record, and I wonder why. The song certainly would have fit well on “The Dirty South,” but maybe it would have fit too well.  Maybe on a record that so consciously deals with its own mythology (“Danko/Manuel” and “Carl Perkin’s Cadillac” are both on this record), a song like “TVA” was just a bit much, a bit too “lets rub it in the face of the consumers that we’re retelling the story of the Modern South on this one.”  

Or maybe, the Drive By Truckers brought the album to the record label, with “TVA” included, and some record label executive said: “Really Patterson?  Another song about the TVA?  I thought you already covered that in “Uncle Frank?”  And Patterson might have said: “But Sir, there’s another side to that story.”

I always wondered if “TVA” missed the cut on proper DBT albums for strictly musical reasons. Isbell’s two contributions on Decoration Day were, like “TVA,” country waltzes. “Outfit” and “Decoration Day” are vastly different in tone, so the groove doesn’t register as repetitive, but Isbell was probably conscious of it.  It seemed deliberate that all of his Dirty South tunes were in 4/4, as if he’d realized he’d been leaning too heavily on the strummy 6/8 feel in his early songwriting and didn’t want fans to think that’s all he could do*.  Not a bad move, considering it yielded “The Day John Henry Died,” “Danko/Manuel,” and “Goddamn Lonely Love,” which are three of the band’s best songs overall (along with his two earlier contributions), and the almost-as-good “Never Gonna Change,” which is more in line with the heavy vibes of The Dirty South than “TVA” is. 

Not sure why it didn’t end up on A Blessing and a Curse, though, other than the fact that the band set out to make a shorter, tighter album with more of a rock/pop feel. Isbell’s “Daylight” and “Easy on Yourself” fit that bill better, despite being weaker songs than “TVA.”

* When the coast was clear, he went back to the style on “Dress Blues,” with pretty phenomenal results, although the recorded version on Isbell’s first album pales in comparison to the solo version he was playing on tour with DBT.