As we’ve reported earlier the Drive-By Truckers are set to release their eighth studio album (ninth if you count last year’s compilation of rare and unreleased material The Fine Print) The Big To-Do on March 16 through ATO Records. The album will contain thirteen tracks (fourteen with the vinyl only bonus track “Girls Who Smoke”) and the first track to be made available for the public is “This Fucking Job”, which premiered on Stereogum yesterday.
MP3: Drive-By Truckers – “This Fucking Job”
Stereogum also posted Patterson Hood’s, DBT frontman and writer of this song, write-up about the song from the album’s liner notes:
“I wrote this one in my office shortly before the economic collapse of last 2008. I came out of a several year drought of songwriting and wrote about three albums worth of songs for this project but I always knew that this one would be for The Big To-Do.
I never forget how lucky I am to get to do what I love so much as a job and career. I also never forget that it almost never happened and happened only after a lot of sacrifice and some gut wrenching decisions that at the time seemed very foolish to anyone looking for tangible evidence of our reasons. Cooley and I were in our 30’s when we started this band. We hit the road with a vengeance that went way beyond obsession and at a pace of much younger bands. At the same time, coming home meant working shitty jobs to pay off the debt that touring at that level incurred (plus some of us were married and everyone had to eat). I can still remember a soul-searching decision where we just decided to go for broke and try to make all of this happen. We didn’t really have much chance of making all of this work out to a point of actually making a living at it but decided to do it anyway.
We worked really hard, made some right moves but inevitably we also got lucky and I still go to bed knowing that my shitty old day job is still nipping at my heels and with children in the picture we certainly couldn’t be so cavalier in waging it all on some pipe dream.“
