Drive-By Truckers Discuss Their Varied Songwriting Methods

As a rule, Patterson Hood has been the Drive-By Truckers' chief songwriter, simply because he's the most prolific. Lately, though, Mike Cooley is catching up. Cooley turns in three strong new songs on the Truckers' forthcoming album, 'The Big To-Do,' and he wrote seven on the band's sprawling 2008 release 'Brighter Than Creation's Dark.'

"Half a dozen songs is a big year for me," Cooley tells Spinner, noting he doesn't usually set out to write about specific topics so much as to find a good starting point. "What I'm usually looking for is that opening line, and a lot of the time, I'll have the second half of a song written and not even know it yet. That happens to me a lot. I'll have this piece that's really cool, that's really good, but that's not the beginning. That's somewhere else. I'm looking for that first thing."

"I have a lot of that, too," Hood says. "Sometimes there'll be something that happens and I think, I'd like to write about that, that's interesting to me."

Where Hood writes down or records his ideas, Cooley is a little more selective -- "Superstitious," he calls it -- about the process.

"If I don't remember it in my head, it sucks," he says. "I have a rule: It's got to get to a certain point before I write it down or commit it to a tape or anything. It's got to get to that point, and then I'll start writing it down. But if it's not clicking in there [points to head], then nobody else is going to remember it, either."

He's also learned from experience not to jump too quickly into writing down ideas.

"It happens every time: If I start writing it down too quick, I jinx it and I never finish it. It'll never happen," he says. "It might get used later, but most of the time, I've ruined it."

'The Big To-Do' comes out March 16 on ATO Records.