Grand Canyon by Drive-By Truckers

Album: English Oceans (2014)

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Drive-By Truckers close their English Oceans album with this emotional elegy for Craig Lieske, a longtime member of the band's touring family. (He was credited as "assistant" on Go-Go Boots). Lieske died suddenly of a heart attack in January 2013 following the first night of the band's three-night homecoming stand in Athens. "I probably wrote it in 15 minutes," Patterson Hood said. "It wasn't any kind of a conscious thing. It's the most important song of mine on the record. I wrote new songs to go with it. It recalibrated something. It became a totally different record for me than the record I thought we were going to make."
Drive-By Truckers had to go on tour two days after Lieske's death with his empty bunk on the bus. Hood told Uncut magazine: "It was brutal and I wrote 'Grand Canyon' for him."

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