"A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard

"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman

"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian

"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times

"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post

"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go

"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times

"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist

"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly

"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian

"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review

"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT

"A joy."
- Financial Times

"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman

"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald

"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust

"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM

"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times

"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ

"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List

"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age

"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph

"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out

"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters

"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post

"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun

"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail

"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner

"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian

"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist

"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald

"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald

"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading

"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner

"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times

"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser

Rock & Hard Places "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers

"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle

"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm

"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser

"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press

"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald

"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune

"Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus

"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut

"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK

The Wheel Thing

Drive-By Truckers' "Brighter Than Creation's Dark", reviewed
Uncut, January 2008

THOUGH it has always been hidden behind an endearing façade of self-deprecation, there is colossal ambition lurking at the heart of Drive-By Truckers. Based around the songwriting partnership of Alabama-born Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, Drive-By Truckers have sought to establish a synthesis of the authenticity and virtuosity of Lynyrd Skynyrd with the social conscience of Bruce Springsteen, the whiskey-sodden wit of prime Replacements with the righteous fury of Crazy Horse. Despite this habitual tempting of hubris, they have failed thus far to make an album that is less than sensational. Such hyperbole notwithstanding, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark”, the (now Georgia-based) band’s ninth album, represents a further upping of the ante, and an extraordinarily tough act for the rest of 2008 to follow.
Even by Drive-By Truckers’ formidable standards of internecine rancour, the gestation of “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark”, was turbulent. They endured the (apparently, by DBT standards, relatively amicable) departure of Jason Isbell, their long-serving guitarist and infrequent but inspirational songwriter (he wrote the sublime father-to-son ballad “Outfit”, from 2003’s “Decoration Day”). They wandered off on a semi-acoustic tour, and served as backing band on Bettye LaVette’s “Scene Of The Crime”. It could have been forgiven, all round, if “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” was uneven, uncertain, a stop-gap slung together in transition.
It is none of those things. The gap left by Isbell is filled by DBT bassplayer – and Isbell’s ex-wife – Shonna Tucker, who takes centre stage for the first time, contributing three fine songs and a gorgeous, throaty croon, and by legendary keyboardist Spooner Oldham (Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, almost everyone else ever) who haunts many of the album’s 19 tracks with characteristic soulful subtlety.
The influence of the semi-acoustic stint – the “Dirt Underneath” tour – is immediately apparent. The first sound is a flutter of acoustic guitar, heralding “Two Daughters And A Beautiful Wife”, a deceptively unassuming ballad that builds into a wracking, pedal-steel-lashed tale of a gothically dreadful domestic horror show. Something like normal service is resumed with the ensuing tracks, Mike Cooley’s raucous, Green On Red-hued “3 Dimes Down” and the swaggering, “The Righteous Path”. The latter is a bitterly hilarious sketch of small-town morality, suggesting Creedence Clearwater Revival updating Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” as a God-fearing, Fox-watching, Bush-voter (“I got a brand new car that drinks a bunch of gas/Got a house in a neighbourhood that’s fading fast/Got a dog and a cat that don’t fight too much/Got a few hundred channels to keep me in touch”). It’s a theme the album revisits on “Bob”, a gentle, wryly affectionate portrait of a simple but solid man (“Bob goes to church every Sunday/Every Sunday that the fish ain’t biting. . . he likes to drink a beer or two every now and again, he always had more dogs than he ever had friends”) evoking the deadpan doggerel of Shel Silverstein. Lest there be any doubt about this, this is no bad thing – indeed, a distinguishing feature of “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” is an amplifying of DBT’s always zestful lyrical playfulness, best demonstrated by Cooley’s “Self-Destructive Zones”, a beautifully and densely written romp that might have unfurled from the pen of Todd Snider.
Drive-By Truckers have, in the past, willingly submitted to the temptations of the Big Idea – their 2001 magnum opus, “Southern Rock Opera”, was exactly that, essentially a concept album chronicling the (literal, if you like) rise and fall of their obvious touchstones, Lynyrd Skynyrd. “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark”, if it sounds any one thing, mostly sounds like an album assembled according to a diametrically opposed creed of reductive modesty – little falls outside Harlan Howard’s imperishable definition of country music: “Three chords, and the truth”. These are songs extrapolated from the prosaic but telling details of frustrated lives – the struggling bar band of “Opening Act”, the domestic wreckage of “Lisa’s Birthday” (another mordantly droll Cooley masterclass), the hopeless soak of Oldham’s star turn “Daddy Needs A Drink” (this latter protagonist surely a deliberate echo of John Prine’s “Sam Stone”). These disparate figures coalesce, gradually and subtly, into an affecting portrait of a gloomy and disappointed nation: “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” begins to sound like a soundtrack for which Joe Bageant’s journalistic homage to America’s disregarded semi-rural blue-collar schlubs, “Deer Hunting With Jesus”, has already provided the libretto.
A couple of songs, “That Man I Shot” and “The Home Front” have roots in a foreign field – or, rather, foreign desert. They’re the most obvious demonstrations of the rage bubbling beneath even the more musically gentle songs of the album. Both are brutally lyrically direct, the former drenched in squalls of electric guitars recalling the exuberant furies of Neil Young’s “Eldorado”, the latter an exquisite addition to the DBTs’ already spectacular canon of rueful balladry.
This is a stunning album, bristling with astute and funny words, an embarassment of glorious tunes and delivered in performances all the more impressive for sounding so utterly effortless (the dazzling acoustic guitar solos of veteran collaborator and newly anointed full-time member John Neff on the sweet Guy Clark-ish trundle “Perfect Timing” merit especial kudos on this front). Drive-By Truckers have always been unabashed about where they came from, geographically and musically, and have always subscribed ardently to the American – specifically country – creed of acknowledging, implicitly and explicitly, one’s inspirations and influences. Fine as its predecessors have been, however, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” could well mark the point at which this consistently extraordinary band begin to bear the torch forward.

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