“Back then we felt like we were on top of the world for the first time in our lives, but Decoration Day is an acknowledgement of who all and what all we had lost along the way, whether it was the family farm that you gave up, or the guy who was supposed to be in your band, or the divorces. You lose a lot when you’re chasing your dreams. All of that is on this record.”
— Patterson Hood

Two decades of hindsight make it feel like Decoration Day was always fated to be a milestone for Drive-By Truckers.

The Athens, Georgia group’s 2003 release was their first to include guitarist-vocalist and future Grammy-winning solo artist Jason Isbell, who had joined up during their previous touring cycle. It featured the song “Heathens,” a moniker that the DBT’s fan community would enthusiastically embrace for themselves. And it was the moment the always-headstrong band, having just finally gotten signed, defied their new label (Lost Highway) and refused to compromise their vision for this expansive 15-track album.

Finally, it was a set of songs compelling enough to inspire co-founder-vocalist-guitarist Patterson Hood to declare it the band’s masterpiece, despite there being several albums potentially in contention for that title.

Regardless of what your personal favorite DBT release may be, there’s no question that Decoration Day is the sort of landmark album that deserves the deluxe edition treatment it receives here. In addition to featuring some of the finest work on record from Hood and DBT co-founder-guitarist-vocalist Mike Cooley—not to mention Jason Isbell’s first recorded songs—The Definitive Decoration Day offers fans a fresh mix of the entire album by the band’s longtime sound guru / sixth Trucker David Barbe, plus the two-disc bonus of an entire June 20, 2002 hometown, small-venue acoustic show that saw the band play almost all of the new record they were still in the process of making.

Decoration Day collects a very strong, at times exceptional set of songs, as usual mostly Hood’s (nine), but with essential contributions from Cooley (four) and Isbell (two). Again and again, the trio mine their own backstories and those of their friends and families to spin based-on-a-true-story myths and legends of the South they grew up in.

This collection’s excellent deep-dive essay by Stephen Deusner reveals, among other things, that Hood viewed “The Deeper In” as the new album’s opening track from the day he composed it. It’s a Gothic “ripped from the headlines” story about an incestuous brother-sister love affair that pushes every available emotional button right up to the final punchline, which invites you to check your biases about the South.

From there you’re thrown into the three-guitar maelstrom of “Sink Hole,” a gripping narrative about losing the family farm that was inspired by both the documentary The Accountant and Hood’s own family. Then Hood’s “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy”—written in the middle of a months-long tour that tested the entire band’s patience and endurance—offers an anthem to discontent, growling, ferocious, and foreboding.

Cooley takes the mic for “Marry Me,” a good ol’ boy rocker whose lead guitar intro nods at the Eagles’ “Already Gone.” It’s a song with some joy in it that’s ultimately tragic, since the Southern character it profiles met a sad end—Chris “Monster” Quillen, who was supposed to be a founding member of the DBT, but died in a one-car accident a couple of weeks before the band was set to record their first album. Later, Hood focuses on the circumstances of Quillen’s death in the hard-charging “Careless,” where he contemplates how a single poor choice can change everything.

In the middle third of the album, we find Isbell’s first recorded song “Outfit,” a character study of his father and the wisdom he liked to share. It’s a bit self-conscious, but beautifully crafted, the first of many portraits of troubled but striving Southern men. “Heathens”—originally slated to be the album’s title track—follows, an acoustic country-rock rambler with Hood portraying a sort of archetypal Southern rascal (how’s this for a classic opening couplet: “Something ’bout the wrinkle in your forehead / Tells me there's a fit ’bout to get thrown.”)

Cooley’s “Sounds Better In The Song” is the first of a trio where he and Hood confess their failures as husbands. It’s an intense acoustic workout with Cooley pleading guilty to putting his musical dreams first: “I might as well of slipped that ring on your finger from a window of a van as it drove away.” Hood answers with the steady-rocking yet sad “(Something’s Got To) Give Pretty Soon,” the quiet tension in the music echoed in a well-crafted lyric: “Throw it on a camel’s back / Something’s gotta give pretty soon / Living hard to chase the dream / Way beyond our ways and means.”

Next, the pair addresses the death by suicide of friend and former bandmate John Cahoon, bass player in Hood and Cooley’s pre-DBT band Adam’s House Cat. Cooley’s “When The Pin Hits The Shell” is a smartly-crafted lament that doesn’t mince words: “It’s enough to make a man / Not want to be nobody’s daddy / When all he thinks he’s got left to hand down / Is guilt and shame.” Hood’s big-boned “Do It Yourself” is even more charged and angry: “Sick, tired, pissed and wired / You never thought about anyone else / You tried in vain to find somethin’ to kill you / In the end, you had to do it yourself.”

Isbell earns the title track with a novelistic story-song fictionalizing an actual family feud his grandparents told him about. It’s an incendiary mixture of loyalty and fury, leading to an epic outro where all three guitarists trade lashing solos. The album closes more quietly but no less powerfully with Cooley’s “Loaded Gun In The Closet,” a story song full of portent that ultimately points out how viewing a relationship from the outside rarely reveals the whole truth of it.

Decoration Day’s thoughtful sequencing gives it the flow and arc of a novel or play, a sort of Southern Gothic Our Town told in songs that weave in and out of Americana, Southern Rock, country-folk and hints of punk and rhythm and blues.

The two-disc bonus included in this set chronicles a well-lubricated June 2002 run-through of most of the album—plus a few older favorites—at the Flicker Bar in Athens. The venue was too small for amplified electric guitars, so the three guitarist-vocalists up front play acoustics while drummer Brad Morgan uses a stripped down kit and bassist Earl Hicks plugs in but adjusts to match his bandmates’ volume.

What the resulting acoustic versions lack in dynamics and depth of field, they make up for with intimacy, immediacy and passion. These are songs that they’re still getting to know and you can feel them exploring as they play, which is exciting for both the band and its audience of hardcore hometown fans.

If we’re being strictly honest here, Hood’s gritty vocals can be an acquired taste, Cooley’s are only somewhat cleaner, and the livewire intensity of the acoustic versions on the bonus discs sometimes devolves into sloppiness. Thing is, none of that really matters. If you like Drive-By Truckers at all—and I doubt you’d still be reading if you didn’t—you need this album. It features one of the band’s most impressive and affecting collections of songs buffed to a 2025 shine, plus a legendary live show, and you absolutely should not miss it.

“Everybody was on the same page, and we knew it was good. We were finally getting to do what we’d wanted to do the way we wanted to do it. And there’s a joy in that.”

Rating: A-

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