68. "The Purgatory Line" by Drive-By Truckers

Sometimes you get put off of a band by arguably incidental factors like the production of their debut record, the artwork of the first record you see by them (I am still haunted by the cover of Tripping Daisy's I Am an Electrical Firecracker or whatever the hell it's called) or, perhaps most deadly of all, their name. I wouldn't say that I hate the name "Drive-By Truckers"... it's more that upon hearing it I immediately filed it under "ignore all future occurrences of these words" as I would with names like "Bloodlegion" or "The Rockin' Good Time Boys". Something about the combination of the name of the band with the album title Southern Rock Opera suggested the sort of arch insincere goofing on country music for which I have increasingly less time as I get older. And it took a few years worth of slowly realizing that people whose musical opinions I respect actually like this band for me to give them a try.

It's been a while since I "Bragged" a song on 39-40 and this seemed like a pretty good candidate. The original has very little guitar and is even in a bit of an odd key for guitar; I went ahead and played it in that key just for fun, but I changed the tempo and added a sort of riff thing to it for fun. And then at the end I sorta tacked on a little piece of a Blake Babies song I didn't entirely remember, but which had a similar melodic figure in it. The guitar is unfortunately a little out of tune... it's one of those things that happen when I do live takes like this. It takes a while to warm up to a full-length performance with any kind of soul to 'em. I have to remember that by that time the guitar is likely to have imperceptibly drifted out of tune, and maybe, like, fix it.

Personnel: Rex

Additional lyrics from "Girl In a Box" by Blake Babies

"The Purgatory Line" performed by Drive-By Truckers

"The Purgatory Line" performed by Rex Broome