Few groups are more emblematic of the Southern spirit than the Drive-By Truckers. The five-piece rock band–led by Alabama-bred original members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley–has maintained its fierce independence over the course of a nearly 20 year career, churning out nine studio albums and bringing their marathon live shows to cities and towns around the world.

Hood, Cooley and co. will return to New Orleans this Saturday, October 17 for a show at the Joy Theater, just a a few weeks before they release their forthcoming, career-spanning live album, It’s Great To Be Alive! Hopefully the show is harbinger of better things than their legendary 2005 performance at Tipitina’s, which took place one day before an approaching Hurricane Katrina forced a mandatory evacuation of the region.

I spoke with Hood about It’s Great To Be Alive!, the unhingedness of a DBT live show, why the South should get over its Confederate flag fixation and more.

You guys are about to put out a massive, three-disc live album from last year’s run at The Fillmore in San Francisco. Why  do something like that now?

We’ve been talking about wanting to do another live record for a long time. We did one way back in the early days of the band. It was kind of punk rock record called Alabama Ass Whoopin’ in 2000. But we’ve played, oh you know, over 1500 shows since that came out and put out another nine albums. So we were wanting to do something that was comprehensive and spanned our whole nineteen year history. We were going to end out last year of touring with a three-night stand at The Fillmore, which is one of the landmark places we get to play. It was the first time we had ever done three nights there, so we thought that would be perfect. We set up to record those three nights to do this live record and then the recording turned out so good that it grow into “well, we always wanted to do a big one so let’s do the big one.” So we have this box set that spans the whole nineteen years. There’s even a song on there that dates back to the Cooley and I’s band from the 80s. So it’s 35 songs. We are really happy how it turned out and so far people have been really liking it too, so that’s always good. I think it captures a lot of the things from our live show that’s hard to put on a record.

What do you think really sets a Drive-By Truckers live show apart from the studio albums?

Well there is a fun factor. I mean it’s not that the records aren’t fun, I hope our records are fun. But there’s a certain amount of fun that happens live that you can’t really reproduce in the studio. The studio records are all about the song, which is fine.  We are really proud of our songs and we consider ourselves to be, first and foremost, \a songwriting band. But live, there is kind of a wild abandon and unhindgedness. There’s also maybe a sense of humor that comes through live that might not always be evident in the record, although I hope it’s there in the records.

We got really good recordings for this one. The band was really on, so it’s kind of like the best of all possible worlds kind of situation to do this record. It gave us a chance to look back right before we move forward to our next phase, because we’re gonna start working on our next studio record. It gave us a chance to do this thing that spans our history and can brings up somebody who might be newly turned on to the band up to speed.

You’ll be here in to New Orleans this Saturday. What’s your history with this city?

We have a lot of history with New Orleans. Everybody is excited to come to New Orleans unless they’re an idiot. I love it. We do have a lot of history. We were the last band to play at Tipitina’s right before Katrina. We played the night before the evacuation. We had a sold-out show. I don’t think anybody that night really had any idea of how bad this was going to be. My memories of that night are of it being a joyful, drunken party. And the next day all hell broke loose. Then not long after Tip’s opened back up, we came down and did some kind of benefit for the Tipitina’s Foundation. So we’ve always had a pretty deep love and history for the town and of course the music history there is so phenomenal. Past and present, it continues to be phenomenal. The food ain’t bad either. We do like to eat. We’re actually going score a couple of days off in the area during this tour. It’s a rare but beautiful occurrence.

A couple of months ago, you penned an excellent op-ed for the New York Times in which you sort of called on your fellow Southerners to abandon the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride. What was the reaction to that? Was there any backlash?

There was a huge positive response and a surprisingly small negative response. You know, there’s always a few hateful comments. On Facebook or whatever, there’s probably a few people that are like, “Fuck you, I’m going to burn your record, or sell them to the nearest hipster.” [Laughs]. And that’s fine, but just don’t ruin the fun for other people. I think there are certainly reasonable people that have different opinions than me, and that’s fine too, but when people want to get out and be hateful and nasty and negative about it, I don’t really have time for that.

I was actually kind of surprised, because I wrote something a year ago about Ferguson and it didn’t get nearly the coverage that the flag thing did. It was just this thing that I put out on my Facebook that got this huge negative, almost threatening backlash. So when I got asked to do the piece for the New York Times, I was expecting a lot of nastiness. So I was very pleasantly surprised.

I think a lot of people feel the same way. I grew up in Alabama, I’m a lifelong Southerner. All but the last few months of my life, I’ve spent in either Georgia or Alabama, except for being on the road for about 2000 days. There are so many things the South has done and can do that are positive and good. I don’t think we have to keep reliving this war that we lost 150 years ago. It’s time to move on. America in general has a long way to go on the issue of race, and the South particularly. The issues of race in our history are so widely known, we should be bending over backwards to fix that. We’ve come a long way, but every time some yahoo is waiving that god damn flag in people’s face, it’s just continuing something that should have been put away a long time ago.

You mentioned earlier that you guys were getting ready to go back to the studio to record your next album. What do you have planned for that?

We’re going to work with [David] Barbe again. I think we’re going to look at some different studios. We’re going to try some new things. We’ve got a bunch songs, we’re in really good shape. I’m very excited about what we’re working on. We’re all in a good place to start something like that.

I’m just hoping we can get it done kind of quickly. I think it’s better that way. It just takes so long to get records manufactured these days. You have to plan it pretty well in advance because it takes a minimum of 6 months to get your records pressed. It’s kind of a new crappy development. We sell so much vinyl now, which is a blessing. But you don’t want to release the album without the vinyl coming out at the same time. Some people can do it differently. They can just record it and then a week later it’s out. Particularly hip-hop artists, people who primarily have their records downloaded, streamed or whatever. We’re blessed that people buy our records. I’m certainly not complaining, but it’s just one of those downsides that we have to take into consideration.

Drive-By Truckers will perform at the Joy Theater on Saturday, October 17. Their new live album, It’s Great To Be Alive!, will be released on October 30.