Songfacts®:

• "Miss Coldiron's Oldsmobile" is a track from Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, Patterson Hood's fourth solo album. The tune is an acoustic, richly melancholic piece centered around his godmother, Anne Coldiron - Miss Coldiron to young Patterson - who lived across the street from Hood's grandmother. Hood describes her as a solitary figure, never having married and having lost power of attorney due to mental health issues.
  
  "She wasn't in good health, because she sat in that house by herself and smoked several packs of cigarettes a day," Hood told Uncut magazine. "My grandmother helped her out. She took groceries to her. I would go along with her, because my grandmother basically raised me."
• Somewhere amid this southern gothic tableau, young Patterson found magic: the back seat of Miss Coldiron's Oldsmobile Delta 88, which to a child was less a car and more a transdimensional time cruiser.
  
  "It was gigantic, like the Queen Mary to a little kid," he recalled. "The backseat was scattered with toys, and the radio was always playing. That was the first time I heard 'Home Sweet Home' and 'I'll Take You There.'"
• The song took years to write. Hood worked on "Miss Coldiron's Oldsmobile for many hours during the COVID-19 lockdowns but couldn't get it to click until he sat down at a piano, even though it's an instrument he can't really play. "My intention was always to have someone come in who could actually play piano," he said. "But Funk wasn't having it." That would be the song's producer, Chris Funk of The Decemberists.
  
  So Hood played the piano himself. "It forced me to grow," he said. "It also forced me to learn that it's never too late to grow."
• For Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, Hood took inspiration from memories of his early years, including his fascination with Pinocchio and a teenage romance.