If you listen to the new "Decoration Day" album by Drive-By Truckers, and you're not hurting a little bit by album's end, then you probably weren't really paying attention. From a listener's perspective, this album is truly an example of no pain, no gain.

Because underneath its blanket of raw Southern rock - sans even a hint of that style's blissfully ignorant hedonism - these Truckers weigh down their song characters with oversized loads of emotional baggage. Along the way, brides-to-be get left at the altar, sons sadly follow in their father's weary footsteps, and life is never what you might term happy-go-lucky.

This group is blessed with an abundance of talent. Although lead singer Patterson Hood has contributed the lion's share of songs to the quintet's albums, both guitarists Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell also write extremely fine songs. For example, one of Isbell's pieces became the album's title cut, and his track "Outfit" may just be the best song of all, on an album already packed with memorable tunes.

It was Isbell who took time out from his daily life in rural Alabama to talk on the phone about the music of this talented, yet sometimes difficult to categorize, band. He may not be the group's primary songwriter, but this former college English major can certainly hold his own in the song writing department.

Egos are often the greatest barriers to holding talented groups together, but mutual respect keeps these three strong voices operating smoothly as one unit.

"I guess the way we do it is to pretty much let everybody do what they want to do," Isbell explains. "It's kind of a pretty democratic process, as far as the band's concerned. I think we have enough confidence in each other to know that if I bring in a song or if Cooley brings in a song for the band to record, then it's kind of taken as common knowledge that that song is going to be good enough to be put on one of our records. I, for one, am lucky in having a couple of guys writing songs where I don't ever feel like they're not great."

Bassist Earl Hicks and drummer Brad Morgan round out the group, but they don't write.

Both Hood and Cooley had been going through a particularly productive period during and after the making of the previous "Southern Rock Opera" release (The band released it themselves in 2001, and Lost Highway re-released it last year. The band split from the label for the new album, which is on New West) and already had a number of songs ready to go for "Decoration Day."

This fact helps explain why Isbell contributed only a couple of his own creations to this new one. But while his contributions are few in number, these two songs nevertheless pack a powerful punch.

"Outfit" is the better of the two, as it offers advice from a father to a son. Some of its lines are funny, such as one that says, "Don't sing with a fake British accent."

But it's also deadly serious in places, exemplified by the words, "Have fun but stay clear of the needle."

It comes off so honest and real because it was inspired by actual words of wisdom from Isbell's own father.

"In a whole lot of ways, that's the way my old man was," he says now. "That's pretty much all the stuff he told me growing up. Not all of it, but the stuff that rhymes, as they say. That's pretty much the way his general nature is. He tried not to put too much seriousness on me at one time, without also trying to break it up from time to time with a few laughs. There are a lot of things on there (in the song) that - as I got older - became more multi-layered, as far as advice goes. It started out as something that was really funny, and then when I got to be 17, 18, 19 years old, I started thinking, well, that also makes a whole lot of sense - besides just being something that he threw in there to make me laugh as a kid."

Isbell's dad digs the song, by the way, as well he should. "I wrote the song as a Father's Day present and took that to him," he recalls. "He's a big fan of the band and listens to the records pretty frequently. He likes the song a whole lot. He was flattered by it, I think."

Unlike Hood, whose father was a Muscle Shoals studio musician, Isbell's dad is not a professional musician.

"He and my mother, really, are the only two people in my family that aren't musicians or didn't play when I was growing up. It kind of skipped a generation because everybody else pretty much on both sides played - though not usually as a profession - pretty regularly. Almost on a daily basis."

Isbell received his education in traditional American music from these various family members.

"I grew up with a lot of country and gospel songs, coming from the older members of my family," he says. "At the same time, I inherited my dad's record collection. It was there that I picked up on a lot of the Queen, Zeppelin and Free, a lot of what has turned into the more admirable aspects of classic rock that aren't really overplayed on classic rock radio, but were really influential to me. The Derek & The Dominos record was, I think, probably the number one thing growing up that I listened to a whole lot of. And then when I got to be a teenager and started trying to write songs on my own, I listened to a lot of the old Jackson Browne records, Neil Young John Hiatt and those kinds of things."

Drive-By Truckers make music that is too rock for country, yet probably a little too country for straight-ahead rock fans. This is why the group is so dependent upon its loyal fan base for consistent support.

"They (the fans) seem to be really supportive of the directions we want to go in."

And lately, these Drive-By Truckers have been heading toward dark waters. Much of "Decoration Day" is pretty tough going, since its mood gets fairly depressing in points and rarely ever lets up. Yet it's also essential to realize that these are writers and observers, more than anything else, rather than chroniclers of their own sorry lives in song. Folks like Flannery O'Connor and Randy Newman did much the same thing before them, and they now merely carry on this great tradition of creating art out of the everyday life they see.

"People say 'write what you know,' and it really is the truth. Randy Newman was able to write a lot of those songs and a lot of his records from the third person point of view. He also did it from a first person point of view, but from a totally different character in a lot of situations. He could take on the persona of a redneck or whoever he wanted to be at that moment and write those songs from that point of view and still make it really believable. And still make it something he really knew about. In a lot of ways, a lot of songs I write personally for the band - and the songs I write in general or just sitting around the house - have a lot to do with superimposing my personal experience with emotions onto things that might have happened to other people. But all these things still happen. They still go on. I can give you examples of just about every situation on the record within about a quarter mile radius of my house."

Surprisingly, many of these same sorts of - for lack of a better term - plain country people, are also some of the group's biggest fans.

"A lot of the people who are really the most over-the-top and into what we're doing - the people I see really more than anybody else on a daily basis - are simple people. I guess a lot of folks would call them simple, but they're really as complicated as just about anybody else. They just have a little more time to sit around and think about it, so they work it out a bit better in their minds. The songs we do are definitely accessible to people here at home - people that live on a farm, people that cut meat in a grocery store and people who do all those kinds of things. It's very accessible to them, I think."

Isbell may play all the big cities in a rock & roll band, but in between recording and touring, he calls rural Alabama home.

"I just left a few minutes ago to go to the store across the street to get a pack of cigarettes, and when I left, my whole backyard was full of horses. Somebody's horses had gotten out because there was a big storm this morning that knocked his fence over. So the law had to come out and help round up all the horses and put 'em back. It's definitely a rural area."

Isbell enjoys this double life, if you will. "I like to disappear when I'm home in a lot of ways and keep my circle of friends - and the people I work with and see on a daily basis - pretty close. And then keep the rest of the world a little bit at an arm's length. I really do enjoy spending time in the big cities. I find that the most of the people, wherever you go, are the same kind of people. It's nice to be away from people, in general, for a little while. Just to be out in the country, where you can sit and not really worry about much of anything."

The members of Drive-By Truckers are not comfortable with being labeled a country band, since the music they make is so wide-ranging, multifaceted and just plain rocking at times.

"As far as the country thing goes," Isbell explains, "it's kind of like the difference between rap and hip-hop. You hear people call artists rap artists or hip-hop artists, but hip-hop is a way of life to the people who are involved in it. Hip-hop goes from whatever clothes you wear to the way you walk to the way you drive your car to the way that you listen to music to the way that you do everything. And to me, with all the different sorts of music that you have out there, country isn't so much a style of music as it is to just going back to the original way of country living. What they call country music in Nashville is not - by any stretch of the imagination - country music, 9 times out of 10. It's suburban music. It's bad music, but that's beside the point. We're a rock and roll band, but we do in a lot of ways have a country lifestyle. Just as a rap artist may have more of a hip-hop lifestyle. There are so many different styles of music and so many different forms of music that you can't help but be influenced by a little of everything as a musician. But the lifestyle that I personally have is probably a country lifestyle. Let's put it that way."

Drive-By Truckers is sometimes called a Southern rock revival band these days and lumped in with acts such as Kings Of Leon. But if this music is Southern rock, it's certainly not your father's Southern rock.

"It's rock, and we are Southern people. It is a Southern band," Isbell admits. "And definitely, the last record was a Southern rock opera. But when you listen to 'Decoration Day,' it probably doesn't remind you of The Outlaws too much. It's not drinkin' whiskey and raising hell music; it's drinkin' whiskey and trying not to break down and cry music."