They've been called America's greatest rock band by more than one critic, and they're certainly one of the busiest. Drive-By Truckers' "The Big To-Do" is due on March 16, a follow-up album is already in the can, and a documentary on the band -- "The Secret to a Happy Ending," whose title is taken from the DBT song "World Of Hurt" -- premieres Feb. 5 at the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C.

Billboard spoke with DBT co-founder and principle songwriter Patterson Hood as the band tees up yet another year of heavy touring in support of the fiercely rocking "The Big To-Do," and the always candid Hood weighed in on the Southern rock label, the new rock-doc, and 
getting shot with a B.B. gun.

Billboard: When I listened to "The Big To-Do" I thought, "The guitars are back!"  

Patterson Hood: This is a rock record.  When we were writing, I was thinking, "This is gonna be a good one," and when we all convened to record about this time last year, it was pretty magical. I think we ended up with 31 songs as the final tally. It ended up becoming a couple different albums; they kind of separated themselves. The big rock songs are on the "Big To-Do," and the stuff that goes off in other directions will end up on the other record that we're probably going to call "Go Go Boots," which will probably come by the end of the year or the beginning of next year.

Is half the process for this band whittling down songs to include on an album?  

That's been the hardest thing. It would have been the hardest thing abut making (2007's) "Brighter than Creation's Dark" if we had bothered to do it. That was a different situation, a different time, and those songs all kind of fit together. And we also knew it was the end of the record deal, so we didn't know what would happen with the songs we didn't use. So it was like, "Fuck it, this is the record, it will have 19 songs on it." Two years later I'm still as happy as I can be with that record, but at the same time I'm really happy to put out a record that just rocks balls. It's gonna be fun to go out and play this one live.

The people in your bands' songs are always struggling, whether there's a national recession or not.  

God, where we're from has struggled. The Clinton '90s sucked in Northwest Alabama. They were still feeling the effects of losing the Ford plant and everything that fell in its path in the early to mid -80s, and they still haven't recovered from all that. They're hurtin' pretty bad right now over there. It's hard not to have that affect what you're writing when that's the reality of where you're from and where a lot of our people still live.

Do you have trouble with DBT being labeled as a Southern rock band, even though you often write from a southern perspective?  

Oh, yeah. I've always kind of winced at the term. At least in America, it carries a certain baggage with it that I'm not all that comfortable with, and I've never felt like that term defined us, even though it's used to define us a lot. We did the record that was about that ["Southern Rock Opera"], and I'm really proud that the record came off as authentic enough to where people assumed that's what we do. But that record's almost 10 years old. Since then, our music has moved in all kinds of different directions. We did an R&B record with Bettye Lavette, we did the instrumental R&B record with Booker, and "Brighter than Creations Dark" was all over the map.

I love the term "rock 'n roll" because it's so open-ended. I don't really like all the segregation of styles, and music writers particularly love that because it's a shortcut or an easy way out. If you can tack a label on it, you're through writing that article. But it's always made me cringe, because I think there are a lot of people who think they're not going to like us because of that label, but they might if they heard us. I might be prejudiced about it, and a lot of that is due to the right-wing politics that so many of the old Southern rock bands took on after the plane crash -- "We're gonna rise again, don't mess with our flag," all that kind of stuff. Our music is kind of the opposite of that.

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