In their documentary, The Secret to a Happy Ending, Patterson speaks of the South’s “duality thing.” Visually, the documentary shows a symbolism of this duality nicely: the fecund green clamor of summer (play it loud), insects shrilling high in the canopy as if giving voice to a fever in the land that may or may not be a madness; and in winter, the bare raw limbs, the signature of a thing—things—going away. Similarly, the Truckers, while walking on the dark side of the street in their songs, seem, despite it all, unable to avoid stumbling into cathedrals and columns of light, as in “Mercy Buckets.”

A little about Go-Go Boots: it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to wax long about what you’re going to hear,. The incantatory, almost child-like refrain of clamant happiness, “I do believe/I do believe,” with its big-band rock-chord super-anthem kicking in, then—a song about family, and the memory of being loved—a rock song about one’s grandmother!—sets the tone for all that is to follow, fireplace poker bludgeoning be damned.

You hear the bona fide country in Cooley’s “Cartoon Gold,” complete with rambling banjo run, and the undefinable ache and wonder at life, in the vocals—and you hear the I’ve-been-done-wrong-by-life-bit-am-still-here, still-hurting, hurting-so-good slowing- down soul sound.

So many of the songs on this album will end up being favorite’s, and anyway, it’s not fair to say one song’s better than any other—but damn, the first Eddie Hinton song on this album—“Everybody Needs Love”—is awfully fine. The Truckers hardly ever cover anyone else’s songs, but here they’ve chosen two by their late friend, Hinton. This is a big deal and when you hear the two songs you’ll understand what a good idea it is. You’ll also see how directly their country-soul sound resonates with his.

What is country-soul? The glib description, “You can’t pin it down but you know it when you hear it,” isn’t very satisfying. It’s not enough to say it’s funky, or has “that slow steady soul beat, that drive.” It’s not enough, technically, to say it places John Neff’s pedal steel with Jay Gonzalez’ B-3 and piano, or, on other songs, his Wurlitzer—but that’s true enough, too. Maybe the best way to understand what country-soul is is to listen to Everybody Needs Love again. It’s got a great vocal reach—a beautiful, no-holds-barred straining greatness—mixed with the Memphis backside style of drumming—compliments of Brad Morgan—that Al Jackson made famous on Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour.” Here, it’s perfectly in sync with the story, and the mood, the message. It’s got the great back-up chorus coming in, the piano and Hammond B-3 assuming greater authority, the farther into the song you go. We could be talking about genetic strands being inlaid, so deeply and intensely does this sound take over a listener. After only a couple of playings, it seems like the song inhabits you, has always been in you. This is what constitutes a classic. The DBTs are getting to that age where, battered and scarred, they have deeper wonder for the fact that they’ve survived. They’re not any wiser—they were born wise, have always been wise, possessing the instincts (a gift of their landscape) that Flannery O’ Connor (who almost surely would have been a DBT fan) called “wise blood.” But with their old wisdom, they have the compassion of the survivors, now.

Sweet, you say? How can a song about a preacher bludgeoning his wife with a fireplace poker be sweet? Well, they are still the DBTs, after all. Maybe that one’s not the sweetest of the bunch. But even it has something intangible in the sound—something less dark, less desperate: something that is somehow fuller.

There’s something else in these songs—happiness. Not joy, but the rare, more sustainable and enduring thing, a happiness earned by exploring the darkness, and surviving.

Something undefinable has changed within the Truckers. They’re still rocking on, but a few more strands of lightness of being, and happiness, have infiltrated their being. They’re happier. Do not hold this against them, nor worry that it will corrupt their blues and rock, their snarl and anguish. Instead, the happiness will continue to whet these things—the things for which their old fans love them. Theirs is an earned happiness, and therefore does not temper or weaken their sound. Indeed, this new light forges the sound— the rock. You can hear it in every chord. It’s their finest yet.

Rick Bass

Missoula, Montana

November 2010

Publicity: Traci Thomas / 615-664-1167 / traci@thirtytigers.com

ABOUT NIKKI LANE

One glorious day some years back, a teenage high school dropout Nikki Lane (née Nicole Lane Frady) packed a trailer with her worldly possessions. With one hand firmly gripping a steering wheel and the other flipping the bird, she said so long to her home, Greenville, South Carolina, The South and any sort of life it had suggested she should live. Western bound, she was headed to Los Angeles for no other reason than just because.

Flash forward to today and we find Lane an empowered artist, having escaped any sweet and sour small town trappings for some serious see-my-name-in-lights grandeur and artistic fulfillment. Signed recently to the flourishing Los Angeles-based indie label, IAMSOUND Records, Lane's bold vocal chops and wildly infectious personality have been making a stir in circles spanning across country to rock to indie and back again. Working with producers David Cobb (Shooter Jennings, The Secret Sisters) and Lewis Pesacov of Fool's Gold, the first release of these efforts was the four-song EP, Gone, Gone, Gone, released July 19th and will be followed by the 11-track full length Walk of Shameout September 27th.

Throughout Walk of Shame, Lane weaves in and out of ballads of heartache, one-night stands, leaving, lust and longing. She plays the rambler and sometimes drunkard with such an ardent aptitude she'd fit right in alongside classic country icons like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. On the title track she swears never again will she wake in a stranger's bed, "with a bass drum thumping in her head" as the music drives us out of that alien apartment and down the street into the break of dawn. In "Gone, Gone, Gone," while a blistering slide guitar cries on, she croons on the chorus her tale of leaving The South, promising, "And if I leave this town I'll be gone, gone, gone and I won't be back for far too long." Meanwhile, hitting a more delicate note, Lane shows off softer sentiments and solid song-writing skills on "Save You," crooning helplessly, "Well your bad habits they're all stacking up and it's plain to see you just can't get enough. And I'm trying to break through but I'm losing sight. Oh what can I do to make it all right? How can I save you from yourself?"

Sometimes the victim, sometimes the aggressor, always the Southern sweetheart, Lane rolls through song after song, belting out her earnest poetics with such warmth and tenderness to become entirely absorbed in this music is only natural. "They're all stories," she says. "That's the only way I know how to write. All my songs have a beginning middle and an end. I want to tell you what happened to this person and what the result was."

"You grow up in The South, you grow up in a small town, your expectations are a little bit limited," she continues. "People expect you to go to a four-year college, get married and follow that Southern way of life. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do but I knew it wasn't being offered to me."

And so we return to her story: Lane settled in L.A. and without clear direction she worked various day-to-day jobs and dabbled in fashion, getting shoes manufactured in China and painting them to sell under the Nikki Lane moniker. Five years passed and she started writing music but forsook that path after just two promising shows for a corporate job offer across the country in New York City.

"I'd always wanted to live in New York and somehow ended up talking my way into a really well paying job," she says. "That was an opportunity I couldn't say no to. And so I moved and for a year didn't even touch music. It was like something I'd just tried once. I'd written a couple songs and that was the end of it."

But like any good country singer, heartbreak brought her back to music when her boyfriend left her to record an album in Atlanta. "I was like, fuck that," she says, "Why does he get to make a record in Atlanta while I'm sitting in New York crying? So I just sat down with a guitar, I didn't have anything going on, I didn't have many friends in the city that weren't his friends, it's freezing in New York and I'd quit my job, so basically for three months I holed up in this apartment and I just wrote."

She started learning Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, John Prine and Merle Haggard tunes, the sort of classic country songs that have steeped her own writing now, trying her best to strum along and building her confidence along the way. "And all of a sudden it hit me and I started writing like crazy," she says, "I wrote a whole album in a month's time and just decided I was going to make a record in Nashville. It was like my revenge record."

Empowered, in February, 2009, Nikki went to Nashville, recorded an album she self-released titled No Room for Cowboys, and returned to New York a musician. That's essentially where IAMSOUND found her and signed her and set to build the material that would become Walk of Shame. The album serves as a forceful farewell to The South, says Lane. "We sat down and wanted to write something about leaving a place and being like, you'll be fine, I'm not coming back."

And as if Lane's history wasn't enough evidence of her well-proven knack for leaving, on her arm rests a tattoo that reads, "Wanderlust calls again." "I feel like everyday I might be better off if I could get up and go," she says. "I've had a really hard time staying put because the different scenery is what's inspiring."

Lane now lives in Nashville where she also owns and operates a vintage boutique called High Class Hillbilly, selling pieces she has collected while touring the country.

Nikki Lane's Walk of Shame will be released on IAMSOUND September 27th, 2011.

"classic in the making" - NME

"There's a shortage of bad-ass female country singers today who can outdrink you and write a gorgeous melody afterwards. And given the strength of Lane's material, look for her luck to be changing very soon." -MTV Buzzworthy Blog

"Her voice lands just on the sweeter side of Wanda Jackson, but her appealingly youthful songs sparkle with independent attitude that's very of-the-moment." - Nashville Scene

"Lane's album is really a throwback to two different versions of the past: analog Nashville and nuggets-era L.A." - American Songwriter

"Nikki can fit right in with any of Nashville's current best and brightest, all the while embracing the sound of Nashville vibrant past." - FILTER