Drive-By Truckers to release The Definitive Decoration Day

Drive-By Truckers have announced details of The Definitive Decoration Day, which is due on November 14 from New West Records.

The 4-LP box set features the 15-track album remixed by its original producer David Barbe and remastered by Greg Calbi.

The new collection includes the previously unreleased double album Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA – June 20, 2002, as well as a 40-page, full-colour book featuring never-before-seen photos and artwork. It also features well a new essay written by Uncut contributor Stephen Deusner, author of Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers.

You can hear the newly remixed and remastered album version of “Sink Hole” below.

And below you can hear the audio for “Sinkhole”, taken from Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA – June 20, 2002.

A stripped-down, acoustic performance from the band’s hometown, recorded a year before Decoration Day’s release, the Heathens Live… album features the band performing several of these songs for the first time ever.

Says Patterson Hood, “We decided that it would be fun to go play an acoustic late-night show at the tiny Flicker Bar, less than a block away from our beloved 40 Watt Club. We ended up playing a set that included all but one song off of our new, but still unfinished album. I didn’t even know until recently that there was an existing tape of the show. This is a beautiful document of our band at a very crucial and joyous moment in time. I’m so happy that it exists.”

Originally released in 2003, Decoration Day was also the band’s first album with Jason Isbell.

“The legacy of the band has definitely grown,” says Isbell, “and there’s a new appreciation for the Truckers and especially for that era of Decoration Day. Without them you wouldn’t have the kind of work being done by MJ Lenderman and Wednesday and Waxahatchee and a bunch of other acts. I can hear the Truckers in all that music.”

Of the album’s influence, Wednesday’s Karly Hartzmann says, “Decoration Day reminds me that a song can be a piece of advice, a grudge, a suicide note, a bargaining for mercy, or a veneer over the rot. It’s music that delivers the bad news but kisses the bruises it leaves.” 

Adds The Hold Steady‘s Craig Finn, “Decoration Day was the Drive-By Truckers’ three songwriters firing on all cylinders — alternately thoughtful, pissed off, charming, surly and often hilarious. I marvel at this record. It’s a true American classic.”

The Definitive Decoration Day follows the band’s deluxe edition of their album Southern Rock Opera, originally released in 2001, as well as The Complete Dirty South, originally released in 2004.

It will be available across digital platforms, standard black vinyl and as a 3-CD set. A limited olive colour vinyl edition will be available at independent retailers, and a limited-to-150 blue-and-burgundy-swirl colour vinyl edition will be available at Seasick Records in Birmingham, Alabama.

In addition, a special, limited-to-300 HeAthens red-and-black vinyl edition will be available at local participating retailers in Athens, Georgia and for pickup at the New West Records’ Athens office. A limited-to-1,000 burgundy colour vinyl edition is available for pre-order NOW via New West Records.

You can pre-order here.

You can also watch an unboxing video of the box set here.