Drive By Truckers at Irving Plaza

Drive-By Truckers just announced that they’re headed on a very special North American tour this year. The Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tou will see the band play its 2001 double album in its full length at all shows across the country this year. The tour begins with a series of shows in June and July before returning back on the road in the fall.

The band’s frontman Patterson Hood explained in an interview for Garden & Sun the reason why they decided to hit the road with this album, saying: “It’s almost like a perfect storm of different stuff,” he said. “We’re not ready to make a new record yet, because we’ve all been doing some other things. People have been asking for years, and [guitarist Mike] Cooley has always said, ‘We’ll do it when we can do it on ice’ [laughs]. That was a great line in the sand. But we haven’t figured out how to do it on ice, though I’m still hanging on to the dream. We talked about it for five years until we just had to follow through or else we were going to look like assholes. So, it just seemed like a good time to do it this year.”

“We’ll be playing songs from the original release, plus a small handful of songs that pertain to its themes and points of view, plus a short encore set that will be different each night. It’ll be a different and very special show, and very likely the last time we’ll ever do it so DON’T MISS IT!” Hood said in the tour announcement’s official statement.

The band released Southern Rock Opera in 2001 through their own tiny Soul Dump label. At the time, they pressed 5000 copies of their third studio album with a tiny budget raised by crowdsourcing. The band ended up selling 10,000 copies independently when they hit the road the following year.

And the rest is history. Drive-By Truckers is one of the most popular bands in the United States and they've only grown better ever since.