Every Single Storied Flameout

Album: Welcome 2 Club XIII (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • Drive-By Truckers guitarist Mike Cooley wrote this rocker when his 16-year-old son hit a bit of a rough patch. Gleaned from a period of enforced retirement from the road during lockdown, we hear Cooley internally wrestle with his right to guide his teenage child through his wayward years after his own decades making bad decisions.
  • When he heard Cooley's demo, Truckers frontman Patterson Hood was knocked out but doubted Cooley would rehearse it. "It was way too revealing," Hood told Mojo magazine. "I didn't think he'd ever let us expose him like that."
  • For Cooley, the question never arose. As his son turned 16 and experienced a teenage wobble, the guitarist looked back at his own youth and its many mistakes and misadventures. "Even as I was trying to write it, I was looking out the window at him in the driveway, thinking, 'Oh gosh, what are you up to now?'" Cooley recalled to Mojo. "But I've made so many mistakes, done so many things that could have gone so bad, why should he listen to any advice I had, or take notice of any rules I laid down?"
  • "Every Single Storied Flameout" is the first Drive-By Truckers track to feature a horn section. The three guest musicians are Randall Bramblett on tenor sax, Tom Ryan on baritone sax and J.R. Beckwith on trumpet. "The three-part horns! Oh my gosh," Hood commented. "Cooley even had the horn arrangement in his head before we started recording."
  • Drive-By Truckers released "Every Single Storied Flameout" as the second single from Welcome 2 Club XIII. The album's title references Club XIII, a real bar in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where the band first played. The autobiographical nature of the album's lyrics contrasts with the band's previous couple of exceptionally political records.
  • This is one of two tracks Cooley penned for Welcome 2 Club XIII, along with "Maria's Awful Disclosures."

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