A shelter from the storm through story and song.
Patterson Hood brings Southern storytelling, communal catharsis, and layers of Americana to the Old Town School of Folk Music.
photo by Sha Frasier.
On April 1st, 2025, the night of a fateful state Supreme Court election in my home state of Wisconsin, the political winds blowing off Lake Michigan felt heavier than usual. Much of the Midwest, and much of the nation, had turned its eyes north as Elon Musk funneled $25 million into a last-ditch effort to overturn the court’s liberal majority. With major rulings on abortion, labor rights, and congressional redistricting expected in the coming year, the headlines were a mess of speculation, push alerts, and existential dread. And yet, amidst the noise, I found myself doing something much quieter: sitting in my car, parked just north of Montrose Beach, staring out at the grey-blue oblivion of Lake Michigan.
It was one of those especially windy Chicago days where the lake, sky, and horizon blurred into one endless sheet of steel. Waves stretched skyward in jagged, slate-colored ridges as gusts whipped across the shoreline. That great lake—connecting Illinois with Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and even Canada—seemed to echo the mood of the moment. A reminder that, much like the outcome of that election, the forces shaping our lives often feel uncontrollable and indifferent. But later that night, in the communal warmth of the Old Town School of Folk Music, Patterson Hood and his band, The Sensurrounders, offered a welcome shelter from the storm. For a few hours, stories of youth, home, and family quieted the wind outside.
It was my first time at the Old Town School, and from the moment I stepped inside, kind old volunteers were helping me get my press pass and guiding me to my seat. Students of all ages milled around in the lobby carrying guitar, banjo, and fiddle cases. Onstage, bright red curtains framed a busy assemblage of saxophones, guitars, and stacked keyboards while a gorgeous, lovingly painted mural loomed above it all. Everything about the space reminded me that this wasn’t just another venue—it was a community, a school, a place dedicated to keeping tradition alive. The host that night, clearly a longtime member of that community, mentioned he’d just driven down from northern Wisconsin, braving multiple ice storms and even property damage, to make it back in time for the show. By the end of the night, it was clear why.
The evening began with a solo set from Lydia Loveless, who took the stage with nothing but her sparkly teal electric guitar. Even without a full band behind her, her songs were propulsive, cutting straight to your core. She sang about loneliness, fleeting relationships, and, while tuning between songs, lamented America’s lack of walkable cities and real, meaningful jobs. Beneath the wry asides and sharp lyricism was a deeper longing: a desire for connection, for rootedness, for permanence. Lines like “nothing seems to stick around for longer than a month or two, except for me, I’m stuck like glue” plainly captured that ache and lingered well after she left the stage. It’s no surprise she and Hood share such a kinship—her performance felt like the perfect prologue to the stories that followed.
And Patterson Hood loves to tell a story. That much is obvious within seconds of seeing him live. Going to his show feels like coming inside from a biting cold day and sitting down at the kitchen table with your funniest, wisest uncle—the one who can’t help but walk you through all the strange, dark, and hilarious corners of his life.
The stories he tells are intimately specific, steeped in the arcana of Florence, Alabama, yet they still contain threads so universal you can’t help but see yourself in them. He talked about riding in the back of a wealthy old lady’s Oldsmobile as a child, fiddling with the stereo and hearing Pink Floyd’s “Money” and The Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” for the first time. That same old lady, he explained, had such severe mental illness that she couldn’t even drive—the car was purchased every few years by her brother, the executor of her estate, while she spent the bulk of her life smoking four packs a day in a house that smelled like emphysema. Hood’s grandma would kindly drive her wherever she needed to go.
There were plenty more stories like that: memories of driving past the ruins of a plantation that had exploded after a lightning strike (“The Forks of Cypress”), and in “Disappear” and “The Van Pelt Parties,”childhood nights spent sneaking sips of beer from under the couch while the adults partied—alongside the heavier stuff, like growing up in the South with teenage parents still figuring it all out. Each tale arrived with a mix of easygoing humor and hard-earned wisdom, delivered with the warmth of someone telling stories on the porch as the day winds down.
Sure, not all of us had such a southern gothic childhood, but we all remember the first time we heard a song that stuck with us in the backseat of a car, or the feeling of discovering some new part of ourselves in a place we weren’t supposed to be. That’s part of the magic in Hood’s storytelling: not just how vividly it brings the past to life, but how it holds it in place for a while, reflecting it back to us in pieces both strange and familiar. Later in the set, he mentioned that his earliest music memory was his dad bringing home Magical Mystery Tour from the record store when he was three. He’d flip through the booklet, marvel at the psychedelic costumes, and immerse himself in “Strawberry Fields Forever.” He was sold. That hit me hard—my own earliest memory is hearing the Beatles, too: “Help!” blaring from my dad’s computer speakers, changing my life chord by chord. It’s easy to think of those kinds of memories as uniquely personal, but in a room full of strangers all quietly nodding along, you’re reminded how often our stories overlap.
At one point, Hood reflected on his new album, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, released in February 2025 on ATO Records. His first solo album in over a decade, it’s a sprawling, coming-of-age song cycle that spans from when he was seven years old to just before his 30th birthday—a full half of his life ago. He admitted he didn’t even realize it told that story until the very end, when he and producer Chris Funk of The Decemberists were mixing and sequencing the record. Some of the songs had been sitting in his notebooks for decades; one track, “Airplane Screams,” was written over 40 years ago but had never come together in the studio until now.
That sense of long, winding memory—how the past only makes sense when we look back at it sideways—hovered over all the stories Hood was telling, but it also rippled through the music itself. The band took the stage to a 1966 garage rock deep cut about Little Red Riding Hood, then settled into a set defined by layers upon layers of Americana. Guitars played off of each other in that signature Southern rock style, recalling the Allman Brothers’ interwoven leads–equal parts loose and locked-in. A saxophone would occasionally wind its way through the arrangements, while stacks of synthesizers added a shimmer around the edges. Hood spent part of the night on piano, a skill he took up more seriously during the pandemic, and one he brought into this new record after Funk encouraged him to play the parts himself rather than hire a pro. The arrangements were rooted in American tradition: Southern rock, soul, country, and folk all working in tandem with Hood’s stories. It echoed the work he’s done for over two decades with new Southern rock mainstays Drive-By Truckers—songs that root themselves in history and place, where the instrumentation carries just as much narrative weight as the lyrics. Every instrument had space to speak, and together they wove stories as vividly as any line Hood could sing.
The night closed with a few cozy covers—the crowd singing along to Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets”—before landing on one final, life-affirming moment. Hood ended the set with the Drive-By Truckers’ “A World of Hurt,” a song far more uplifting than its title suggests. As the outro unfolded, the song transformed from a raw personal reckoning into something closer to a benediction. Hood recited well-worn bits of wisdom—“To love is to feel pain,” “The secret to a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits”—before launching into the song’s central refrain: “It’s gonna be a world of hurt.” He repeated it again and again, each time with more force, release, and joy until it filled the room like a mantra. The moment carried the same cathartic, drawn-out power of songs like “Hey Jude,” where a single phrase stretches out into a chorus of resilience. As that refrain surged for the last time, Hood shouted into the mic, “It’s never too late to take a breath of the fresh Chicago air—and it’s great to be alive!” The crowd erupted.
After the show, I stepped into the cool night as the news came through: Susan Crawford, the liberal justice, had won. Musk’s millions hadn’t swayed the court after all. The winds off Lake Michigan had calmed. The storm, at least for a little while, had passed.
I walked away feeling a sort of Thanksgiving fullness, not in the bloated, post-stuffing sense, but in the way a round of family stories can often leave you feeling: surrounded, understood, held. Hood’s songs reminded us that even the most personal memories—riding in the backseat of an old car with your chin barely clearing the window, feeling a song hit you so hard it rewired your sense of the world, crouching behind furniture just to see what the adults were up to, or sitting through tough dinner-table conversations about money, health, or staying together—aren’t ever fully ours alone. His storytelling, like Loveless’s just before him, gave shape to something we’re all looking for: connection, continuity, a sense that the weight we carry might be shared by the person sitting next to us. Stories like these won’t ever stop the storm completely, but as we gather in their shelter, they remind us we’re not weathering it alone.
edited by Jake Harvey.
photo by Sha Frasier.
