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Patterson Hood - "Heavy And Hanging"
On April Fools' Day 1994, Patterson Hood moved to Athens, where he wrote an album's worth of songs called Murdering Oscar (and other love songs). He recorded them on a boombox in a friend's bedroom and gave out the results via self-dubbed cassettes, but if you weren't lucky enough to run into the Drive-By Trucker back then, no worries: 15 years later the collection's due 6/23 via his Ruth St. Records. Take a listen to "Heavy And Hanging." We asked Hood a couple questions about it.
What inspired the narrative for "Heavy And Hanging"? It starts out like an Everyman tale, but grows more sinister. It was actually written in the spring of '94, about a month after Kurt Cobain's suicide and around the time of the OJ Simpson murders and slightly after the River Phoenix OD. All of that figured into it. The first verse was from the POV of the guy who found Cobain's body. I think he was there to fix the alarm or the cable or something.
The sinister feel makes you want to read more into the title: hangdog, our heavy times, but also an actual hanging, etc. What's it referencing? All of the above. Sword of Damocles, swinging parties, all that shit. I had just moved to Athens and my life was turning around rapidly and positively but I was still working through a lot of shit from the previous few years too. I wrote a lot of this album at that exact time, then wrote the other half in late '04/early '05 right before my daughter was born. Two times of massive life change ten years apart. The two POV's point/counter point each other back and forth.
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