Songfacts®:

• "A Werewolf And A Girl" is the lead single from Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, Patterson Hood's 2025 solo album. Hood, best known for fronting the Drive-By Truckers, has spent a lifetime writing sprawling rock-and-roll narratives about the South, but this time, he's looking inward, specifically at a high school romance and the inevitable heartbreak that followed. It's a song about first love and first loss, that strange and sorrowful moment when something that once felt limitless is suddenly over.
• Hood wrote the song in August 2021, taking inspiration from the 2010 American romantic drama movie Blue Valentine, which he told Uncut magazine is "an intensely moving film" for him.
• Hood envisioned a female voice for the choruses to represent the girl's perspective, and Lydia Loveless was his first choice. Hood had to work up his courage to ask her, but she said yes.
  
  "I wrote the song from both points of few, so I knew it needed a female voice. I was nervous sending it to Lydia because the song is a little... suggestive," Hood told Uncut. "But I trusted her to tell me if it was creepy. She recorded her part before she even answered my e-mail."
  
  This is what musicians call a vote of confidence.
• Musically, "A Werewolf And A Girl" is a step away from the jagged, hard-charging sound of Drive-By Truckers, dipping into a more expansive, lush Americana style. The musicians include Los Lobos' Steve Berlin on baritone saxophone, who adds a smoky, brooding undercurrent to the track.
• The Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams album spans 10 songs and marks Hood's first solo release since 2012's Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance. It was produced by his longtime friend, multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk of The Decemberists, and recorded in a series of locations scattered across Georgia and Oregon, including Athens' Chase Park Transduction, Jackpot Studio, and something called The Panther in Portland, which, given its name, could be a proper recording studio or an underground speakeasy. Either way, it seems to have worked.
• Patterson Hood met the album's producer Chris Funk immediately after moving to Portland from Athens.
  
  "The first night I was in Portland he took me out drinking," Hood recalled to Uncut. "Halfway through the first beer, it was like, OK, we've been friends for life. Every now and then you meet someone and it just clicks. This is one of those friendships. Later, I had a gig and got him to come out and play with me a little. The chemistry was profound – the kind of chemistry I have with the Truckers. I started thinking we needed to record together."