Even when he's exhausted, Patterson Hood can't relax. Between tours and album cycles for the last two Drive-By Truckers records, 2010's The Big To-Do and 2011's Go-Go Boots, Hood decided to spend his down time writing a novel. Conceived while he was on the road for To-Do, the book was supposed to be a semi-autobiographical novel about a deeply troubled period in his life back in the early 90s. "I was 27, my band broke up, I got divorced and left my hometown to live in Memphis," Hood writes in the promotional materials for Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance. "My car got stolen, our band's truck got stripped and I fell in love. I fell out with my family (who I was very, very close to) and had my heart broken. I seriously pondered killing myself several times but instead wrote literally over 500 songs in a three-year period."
Considering Hood's songwriting prolificacy, it shouldn't come as a surprise that his plans for a book eventually turned into an album. But the songs on Heat Lightning aren't otherwise typical for Hood, as they're drawn more directly from his own life than the character studies and southern noir tales of petty crime and drunken malfeasance that he's known for. Heat Lightning is also more hopeful than much of his work, including his previous solo record, 2009's Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs). The songs might be inspired by the bleakest part of Hood's personal history, but he's looking at it from a safe distance, with the perspective of a family man with a much improved station in life.
The album's titular metaphor is reminiscent of "Tornadoes" from 2004's The Dirty South, one of Hood's most unsettling and evocative songs about a twister literally tearing families apart. But the sense of foreboding that exists in the title track is an echo from a far-off past; it exists in a different reality from where the song's protagonist currently stands with his wife and their "babies at our feet" as "the warm summer wind blows" like a salve. And so it goes for many of the low-key rumblers on Heat Lightning: Hood's songs survey lives (or perhaps just "life") marked by alcoholism, loneliness, loss of loved ones, and lessons learned the hard way. But any sadness or desperation on this record is filtered through the reassuring knowledge that these hard times eventually passed.
Heat Lightning, then, is a life-affirming album disguised as a depressing song cycle, with the gut-level power of Hood's best work cut back significantly. It is very much a "home" record by a man who typically makes "road" records, with the noticeable lack of urgency that suggests. Even though Hood recruits several of his cohorts in Drive-By Truckers as backing musicians, and adds ringers like Kelly Hogan and Centro-matic's Will Johnson, there's no mistaking Heat Lightning for anything other than a solo album, and a relatively low-stakes one at that. Hood has assembled a loose narrative connecting the songs, but many of them still sound like unfinished demos, with their rough edges and occasionally under-developed arrangements. "Leaving Time" is a customary guitar strum and clomping drum beat hastily fastened together, which actually works fairly well considering the song is about shoving off from home for a tour. ("Hush little baby, have no fear/ I'm six more tours 'til the end of the year," Hood sings, like he's said it many times before.) The straight-ahead anti-love song "Better Off Without" is more of a throwaway, though it does feature the album's most memorably chunky guitar riff, while "Better Than the Truth" is a jaunty folk-country number that sounds like a mid-afternoon jam concocted over beers and barbecue.
Even the best songs on Heat Lightning-- the pained late-night soul ballad "After the Damage" and the cinematic "12:01", which has a wonderful line about "zombies" crossing county lines to buy liquor in the wee hours of the night-- don't quite measure up to the high standard that Hood established with the Truckers or even the underrated, often brilliant Oscar. It's a placeholder album from a man who has already written 20 songs that are better than the ones here.
