In the wake of seeing Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood play his entire 2025 album, Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams, at the Sellersville Theater in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, I wondered how many complete albums I’ve seen performed live during one concert. In more than 45 years of concert-going, I can only think of two; technically, I didn’t make it through one of them.
In March 1987 at Temple University in Philadelphia, I saw Hüsker Dü, touring behind their last studio album, Warehouse: Songs and Stories. I read that the show was one for the ages, but I was so sick that night that I did something I rarely do: left a show early. It was a missed opportunity.
Thirty-eight years later (and just two months ago), I met with fellow PopMatters writer Chris Ingalls in Boston, where we saw Pixies member Frank Black perform his second solo album, 1994’s Teenager of the Year, front to back, with the original musicians who recorded it. Black was far chattier-and honestly, more fun-than his Pixies persona, Black Francis, as he told funny stories explaining the autobiographical origins of several songs on Teenager of the Year. It was a masterful performance by Black and his band.
That brings us to a recent evening in Sellersville, where Patterson Hood and his band the Sensurrounders played a compelling and intimate show encompassing his new album, Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams. Unlike Frank Black, who was performing a much-loved 30-year-old album, Hood faced the challenge of devoting a huge chunk of his show to material that might have been unfamiliar to some fans.
Patterson Hood has described Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams as a memoir-in-song of the first 30 years of his life. After spinning the record just once, I was curious to hear how he would approach the songs in a live setting, since horns, strings, and keyboards surround his introspective lyrics. With each subsequent listen, I became more intrigued by the prospect.
As anyone who has seen Drive-By Truckers over the last 25-plus years knows, the band reliably delivers one of the best rock music shows you’ll likely see anywhere. I put Drive-By Truckers on the same level as Los Lobos, still an incendiary live band (and whose sax player, Steve Berlin, plays on Exploding Trees). However, Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams presents a more subtle, vulnerable, and idiosyncratic side of Patterson Hood, so it was natural to wonder how he would translate that to the stage.
The answer? Patterson Hood and the Sensurrounders (yes, named after the 1970s-era movie theatre chairs-shaking gimmick introduced in Mark Robson’s 1974 disaster film Earthquake), rose to the occasion with a show that included a shuffled but complete track list from Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams while incorporating other Hood solo tunes, a pair of Drive-By Truckers songs, and two covers that shed additional light on Hood’s childhood and early musical development.
The Sensurrounders include two Drive-By Truckers members: Jay Gonzalez (keyboards/guitars) and Brad Morgan (drums). Ben Hackett played keyboards and various horns, while Lydia Loveless played bass and sang. Loveless, a talented singer/songwriter, also opened the show, singing and playing electric guitar during a seven-song solo set highlighting four tunes from her stellar 2023 album, Nothing’s Gonna Stand in My Way Again.
As for Patterson Hood, he played piano and guitar, including a 1938 acoustic Gene Autry-branded model like the one my mom had when she was young. I have always assumed the Gene Autry guitar was more of a toy than a serious musician’s instrument, but Hood conjured some beautiful sounds from it.
Together as the Sensurrounders, these musicians brought Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams beautifully to life. The band proved to be equally capable of gentle ballads like “Miss Coldiron’s Oldsmobile” and “Pinocchio” with moodier, more orchestrated pieces like “The Pool House” and “Airplane Screams”. Sensurrounders was fully capable of rocking on “The Van Pelt Parties”, the most overtly Drive-By Truckers-like moment on the album.
Opening with the album’s first two tracks, “Exploding Trees” and the dark coming-of-age ballad, “A Werewolf and a Girl” (a duet with Lydia Loveless), Patterson Hood then reached back to his previous solo record, 2012’s Heat Light Rumbles in the Distance, to play “Disappear.” Explaining that “Disappear” relates to his memories of adult parties he witnessed as a child, Hood noted that it is the same story as “The Van Pelt Parties”, the song from Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams that he played next.
Like Frank Black, Patterson Hood prefaced several songs with entertaining tales that provided context for the songs. This also kept the proceedings from getting too heavy due to the serious nature of several of the songs. At a few points during the show, Hood spoke of early encounters with music (though he didn’t mention this, his father is Muscle Shoals studio band bassist and producer David Hood, who has played with him on classic sessions by dozens of artists, including, coincidentally, Frank Black).
Patterson Hood noted how Elton John was one of his first favorite rock stars and a very early songwriting influence (for evidence of current Elton influence on Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams, check out traces of 1971’s Madman Across the Water to compare orchestrator Paul Buckmaster‘s influence in the string arrangements on “The Pool Song” and “Airplane Screams”). A bit later, Hood returned to Elton, covering “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (which, he explained, Drive-By Truckers recently played at a wrestling event).
The Elton John vibes must have felt just right because when Jay Gonzalez teased the famous piano intro to “Bennie and the Jets”, Patterson Hood and the rest of the band went for it, playing a super, insanely fun version of the song about Bernie Taupin’s imaginary glam band that you can read about in a “mag-a-zay-eeeen”. Note: if your cover of “Bennie and the Jets” cannot be described as “super” and “insanely fun”, just don’t even bother.
Patterson Hood made time for two Drive-By Truckers songs. “Heathens” felt just right as the midway point for the show, but “A World of Hurt”, the show’s closing song (after the Elton John-fest), had a more powerful impact. While Hood sings repeatedly that “there’s gonna be a world of hurt”, the song is ultimately a message of hope: “Remember, it ain’t too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you got/ It’s great to be alive.”
Singing “A World of Hurt” sincerely and inviting the crowd to get out there and take a deep breath of that “Sellersville air” was the perfect way for Patterson Hood and the Sensurrounders to end a show that poignantly illustrated the beauty, and sometimes the necessity, of transforming one’s memories into art. I’m glad I didn’t miss this one.