Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance

"Back in January, worn out from having spent a year on tour and facing a new album's release and another year spent mostly on a bus, away from the comforts of home and family, I decided to try to write a book. The book was basically half-assed fictionalization of a very turbulent period of my life. I was 27, my band broke up, I got divorced and left my hometown to live in Memphis. My car got stolen, our band's truck got stripped and I fell in love. I fell out with my family (who I was very, very close to) and had my heart broken. I seriously pondered killing myself several times but instead wrote literally over 500 songs in a three-year period. A time when I reinvented myself artistically and experienced a sort of rebirth that led to a lot of the things I have done in the last two decades.

Most of this album comes from that short period of time between February and June of 2011. The songs begin in the period that the book was set in, but don't end there, as they really just were the impetus for writing about the life I am living now and contrasting it with the troubled times of two decades ago. I called it Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance and decided that spring to record it as a solo album. I could clearly hear in my head exactly how I wanted every song to sound and made a list of who I wanted to play on each one. It is in some ways the most personal album I've ever made. There has always been a lot of me in all of the albums I've done, but usually semi-disguised as character sketches and stories, but the first person narrative in this one is pretty firmly rooted in autobiography, albeit in two dramatically differing time periods."
- Patterson Hood