Songfacts®:

• Club XIII refers to a real honky-tonk in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Drive-By Truckers founding members Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood began their music careers as part of the now-defunct band Adam's House Cat. "'Welcome 2 Club XIII' is about a dive bar in my hometown when I was coming of age," Hood told Uncut magazine. "It was the place where Adam's House Cat, the band that Cooley and I used to have back in the '80s, would occasionally play. It's probably the most fun rock song with ever recorded, like 'Let There Be Rock' times 10, with a real Mott the Hoople vibe."
• According to Hood, back in the '80s there weren't any cool bars in Muscle Shoals and Club XIII was the best they had. Unfortunately, Adam's House Cat wasn't a popular band. "From time to time the owner would throw us a Wednesday night or let us open for a hair-metal band we were a terrible fit for, and everyone would hang out outside until we were done playing," Hood recalled. "It wasn't very funny at the time, but it's funny to us now."
• "Welcome 2 Club XIII" is the title track of Drive-By Truckers 14th album. The Truckers pepper lyrical references to their early days across the record. "A lot of the songs are about the things you do when you're young that make you feel so alive, how they can kill you if you're not careful," Hood told Uncut. "And juxtaposing it with being older and having kids and living through a pandemic."
• The Truckers recorded Welcome 2 Club XIII at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens with longtime producer David Barbe. It features much different lyrical content than their 2016 album American Band and 2020 records, The Unraveling and The New OK. "We did three records in a row that were basically political as hell," said Hood, "so this is a very personal record."
• Patterson Hood originally wrote "Welcome 2 Club XIII" for his own entertainment. "I didn't really think of it as a song that anyone outside of our little hometown would 'get' or think was funny," he told Uncut magazine. "I played it for the first time at a solo show there and it got a crazy response. Then I kept playing it at other solo shows in various other places and people still loved it. When the band worked it up and it had such a Replacements vibe, so of course I loved that. It is far more universal than I had realized at the time."