On the Drive-By Truckers' landmark 2002 album 'Southern Rock Opera,' Patterson Hood sang of the "duality of the southern thing." It's a duality that allowed him to appreciate both Neil Young's 'Southern Man' and Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Sweet Home Alabama,' and write about how both songs came together in 'Ronnie and Neil.'

On the new Drive-By Truckers album, 'The Fine Print (A Collection of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008)', the DBTs cover the coda to that Young/Skynyrd story with Warren Zevon's 'Play It All Night Long,' the chorus of which is, "Sweet home Alabama/play that dead band's song/Turn the music up real loud/Play it all night long." Zevon wrote about every inbred hillbilly stereotype in 'Play,' blasting the people who shout requests for the song.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of thing Hood is attracted to. "To me, it sort of has a lot of the spirit, the kind of simultaneously saluting and thumbing nose kind of spirit that that record has," he says.

Hood says he couldn't be a bigger Zevon fan, and the song had a special resonance for him, since his grandfather died of the same kind of cancer Zevon did. He's always loved the song, despite its harsh references to southern caricatures.

"It never offended me, no," he says. "I grew up hearing 'Sweet Home Alabama' way too many times. One of the verses of that song is in my home town, Muscle Shoals. But at the same time, I grew up a little snotty-nosed punk rocker. Cooley and I had our own band back in the '80s, Adam's House Cat, and we'd be playing shows and some redneck in the audience would be yelling 'Sweet Home Alabama' and 'Freebird' at us and we'd be telling them to f--- themselves then getting in a fight in the parking lot afterward. That was a big part of my upbringing, and a big part of what inspired 'Southern Rock Opera.'"

"You know, I love dualities," Hood says. "I'm fiercely southern because I come from here, and I've had a lifelong love affair with southern music and southern literature and all of that. But at the same time, I hate hot weather, and I hate humidity, and I hate, you know, right wing politics. And I hate racism, and I hate a lot of the things that generally people think of [when they think of the south]."