Old Enough to Know Better

I started listening to Drive-By Truckers in 2003 after purchasing Decoration Day on CD, which means the first song I ever heard was “The Deeper In.”

I remember standing in front of my kitchen boombox and thinking, damn, bold choice for a first track. Opening your album with a song about incest — inspired by a real-life tragedy and delivered with deep empathy — feels like the musical equivalent of organic chemistry. It’s designed to be challenging and weed out the weak.

“The Deeper In” is not the gateway DBT song you’d put on a mixtape. In the 47 Drive-By Truckers shows I’ve attended, I have seen them play it live only once, and I was so shocked, I immediately texted my mom. It’s one of the least-appreciated songs on a truly great album. And since it was the first Drive-By Truckers song I ever heard, it feels fitting to revisit it for the launch of my newsletter. Welcome to Mundane Mayhem.

I’ve been a DBT fan for more than 20 years, and I still wish I’d discovered them sooner. The year Decoration Day came out, I was two years out of college, one year into my first real journalism job, and in a toxic relationship that ended shortly after I attended my first Drive-By Truckers show (Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, February 15, 2004).

As an occasional music writer and music fan about town, I’d heard about the band and especially about Southern Rock Opera. But at that moment in my life, I’d moved to San Francisco from Chicago and felt eager to escape my Southern accent and my Florida panhandle upbringing, so I resisted.

I eventually came to my senses and bought Decoration Day on a whim, after trading a bunch of CDs at Amoeba Music. Listening to it felt like discovering my favorite band in real time. It didn't hurt that I discovered one of DBT's darker albums at this confusing point in my life. (BTW, you can pre-order the Definitive Decoration Day, which comes out Nov. 12.)

Until I heard Drive-By Truckers, I had not realized how much where I came from defined who I was. In their songs, I heard my own heartbreaks, my family’s stories, and the off-kilter guilt of being a Southern liberal. The lyrics felt visceral, managing to coax out the emotions of my youth like the smell of cigarettes on a swampy summer day.

And then there is “The Deeper In.”

Everything about this song makes me a little uncomfortable. It opens with a gravelly a cappella from Patterson Hood, singing in the second person:

"By the time you were born, there were four other siblings
your momma awaiting your daddy in jail
Your oldest brother was away at a home
and you didn’t meet him ‘til you were 19 years old."

Right about the time you realize this is a song about incest, the guitars groan awake to provide the score to this woeful short story.

In the liner notes, we learn that “The Deeper In” is inspired by an article Patterson read, about “the only two people currently serving time in America for consensual brother / sister incest.” We Southerners have heard plenty of jokes about how we all fuck our cousins, so the fact that this story is set in Wisconsin feels like an opportunity to remind people that sad, bleak shit happens everywhere. (While there has been no cousin-marrying in my Mississippi family, come to find out, my grandparents who immigrated from Sicily were first cousins.)

The fact that this story is set in Wisconsin feels like an opportunity to remind people that sad, bleak shit happens everywhere.

Even the title makes a point, apparently referencing a tasteless joke about incest: “the closer the kin, the deeper in.” By reclaiming this punchline for something so poignant, DBT remind us that this isn’t a comedy but a tragedy.

In just three minutes, “The Deeper In” evokes teenage longing, rebellion, and the romance of a road trip (“the dew on the bike seat and you all a-glow”). An entire life on the run is captured in one graceful piece of wordplay:

“you move to a small town, and then to another, and then to another with another on its way.”

The song treats these siblings as victims, not villains, acknowledging “you had lots of reasons to turn out this way.” The story ends tragically, with both parents in prison, leaving us listeners contemplating the cruelty of family separation. 

The song doesn’t end so much as trail off. The closing line — “seven years in Michigan” — yearns for a resolution but doesn’t find one. The effect is destabilizing and unsettling, reminding us that no cycles are being broken here.

Do you remember your knee-jerk response to “The Deeper In”? I suspect it’s a polarizing song so I’m interested in hearing what y’all think about it.

OK, that was a heavy song to start with, but let's move along.

Here's more about Mundane Mayhem and me:

You are enjoying a 30-day free trial of Mundane Mayhem. If you find my writing compelling, I hope you will become a paid subscriber. (If not, you'll still have access to occasional free posts.) If you do choose to pay $4 a month, you'll get every new post, plus access to the full archive. In addition, you can interact with a community of DBT fans, who we all know are excellent hangs.

Like the music of DBT, this newsletter will explore themes of joy, humor, anger, loss, and bad decisions, interwoven with my own family’s fucked-up Southern gothic tales. Once a month, I'll interview a fellow fan, so please holler at me if you’re interested in being featured:

I have been a DBT fan for more than 20 years and a journalist for even longer. I was born in Alabama and raised in Pensacola, FL, and I got my start in journalism at age 18, writing obituaries for the Pensacola News Journal. Over the years, I’ve worked as a music writer, an editor at a business magazine, and the head of content for a major lifestyle publisher. I live in Brooklyn with my husband and our rescue dog, Mabel, and I enjoy summertime, vinyl, and dive bars. While I love music, I am not a musician. (The French horn, no matter what anyone says, is a terrible first instrument to learn.)

I’ve never been to HeAthens Homecoming (next year🤞🏻), but I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne. You can often find me at DBT shows with my mom, standing on the Cooley side. It’s fucking great to be alive.

See you at the rock show,

Nancy