Drive-By Truckers: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

In music, we can escape the cruelties of the world or face them. There’s no wrong way about it, but recently the members of Drive-By Truckers, a band that’s long toed the line between a good time and a hard look at life, found they could no longer work purely in metaphor. American Band holds a direct mirror to a set of realities in this country with the same grace and rough-hewn wisdom that’s guided the band all along. But in this compulsion to speak to the right now, there is an anger behind these songs never heard before. In an emotional performance at the NPR offices, Patterson Hood’s gravelly voice — capable of the quietest coos and the loudest hellraising — finds a new space, one that’s shaken and vulnerable. He sings both “Guns Of Umpqua“ and “What It Means,“ songs not just about gun violence, but about the persons it affects: The former is about the horrific shooting at Umpqua Community College in rural Oregon last year, and the latter about the killing of young black men like Michael Brown and Trayvo