Drive-by Truckers to play at Bluebird

Southern rock is coming to the Bluebird Nightclub tonight in the form of Drive-By Truckers, who are set to start at 8 p.m., with doors opening at 7 p.m.

Tickets for the show can be bought online or at the door for $20.

Drive-By Truckers consists of band members Jay Gonzalez, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Brad Morgan and Matt Patton.

Hood and Cooley have been with the band since its conception in the mid-1990s.

Together, the group has released nine albums from “Gangstabilly” in 1998 to its most recent album, “Go Go Boots” in 2011.

In a review on the band’s website, Rick Bass describes the band’s most recent album as both a transition for them as well as a culmination of all of their styles.

“Here in ‘Go-Go Boots,’ the Truckers are country, and here, too, the Truckers are soul and rhythm and blues,” Bass said in the review.

“It looks funny, on paper — the words country/soul mashed up like that — but maybe in the end it comes down to this one shared ethos: the harder life gets, the more clamantly it calls for art, for music, for beauty, for the slow celebration of loss or pain that is mournfully, beautifully defiant.”

Bluebird Owner Dave Kubiak said the band comes to Bloomington about every year and a half, and over the years, it has acquired a Bloomington following, far from its Athens, Ga., roots.

“Ticket sales have been good,” Kubiak said. “We’re expecting a few hundred people to show up. It should be a good show.”

— Janica Kaneshiro