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The Song

“Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife” is the opening track of Drive-By Truckers’ acclaimed seventh album, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (2008). A low-key, up-tempo ballad, it seems almost out of place on a set of often high volume, at times incendiary, songs about the struggles of everyday people in the waning, post-9/11 days of the American Dream. Written by band co-leader Patterson Hood, “Daughters” sets the confused, wistful thoughts of a man who’s either just died or awakened from a dream to spare guitar, banjo, and brushed drum accompaniment, augmented by mournful pedal steel and delicate piano. Hood told me the song’s placement was predetermined: “I put great care into the pacing and sequencing of our albums [and] from the moment of its inception, it was always the first song for Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.” As a prelude to what follows, it resembles a prayer offered before a storm.

He saw them playing there before him
What were they doing there?
It felt like home, it must be all right
Or was it all a dream?
Was it all a crazy dream?

Inspired by the Harvey murders, “Daughters” never explicitly mentions them. Instead, its death-or-a-dream narrative device distracts us from the unclear source of the singer’s confusion and shifts our focus to the comforting image of an early morning family idyll. We don’t fully understand what’s happened, but are reassured by its vision of a playful sprawl of kids and parents in bedclothes and PJs.

Hallmark cards and feel good films, of course, trade in similar imagery and it’s a credit to the band’s artistry that neither this kinship nor the song’s use of the hoary voice-from-heaven motif (one of country music’s corniest clichés) sentimentalizes “Daughters” or muddles its melancholy tone. Partly it’s the music: the E Minor chord that completes each verse’s three-chord sequence is ominous, seeming to warn us that any reassurance the song offers will come at a price. But “Daughters” also throws down a gauntlet, I think, with its tender central image, asking us to make a choice between sincerity and snark, between loving sentiment and reflexive cynicism, before we move on.

Memories replay before him
All the tiny moments of his life
Laying round in bed on Saturday morning
Two daughters and a wife
Two daughters and a beautiful wife

Such unequivocal humanism is admirable. It also helps explain the song’s placement as the lead track on an album that chronicles the struggles of everyday people – not without satire, sarcasm, or biting humor, but always with compassion and a sense of their inherent worth. Embracing the honest sentiment of “Daughters” allows us to savor its bittersweet evocation of a man who realizes that paradise was his all along – not in any kingdom in the sky, but in those “tiny moments” of comfort and togetherness shared with his loved ones, before he left (or was forced to leave) this sweet old world.

Meanwhile on earth his friends came over
Shocked and horrified
Dolls and flowers by the storefront
And everybody cried
Everybody cried and cried

This is as close as the song gets to the terror and anguish it mostly obscures. When Hood and bassist Shonna Tucker sing “shocked and horrified” it jolts and nearly transports us where we, the singer, and Hood least want to go: to where a father watches helplessly as his wife and children die, and all the weeping in the world won’t bring them back or wipe from our minds how they were killed. Faced with such facts and the barely tolerable emotions they provoke, even the gentlest soul might feel the urge to strike out – at someone or something – with previously unimagined viciousness. In the days after the Harvey murders, many who knew them (and shared their liberal humanist values) admitted to an old school desire for blood revenge. Some surprised themselves by embracing the death penalty.

Is there vengeance up in heaven?
Or are those things left behind?
Maybe every day is Saturday morning
Two daughters and a wife
Two daughters and a beautiful wife
Two daughters and a beautiful wife

Hood still opposes an eye for an eye. He also says he’s “not at all religious.” But he is a father whose first child happened to be born shortly before the Harveys (whom he knew) were killed. “Bryan and Kathryn usually came to Drive-By Truckers shows and at least once brought the girls to an all ages show we played one afternoon. When I saw their pictures [on the news] my heart nearly stopped.” The crime so disturbed him that he sought peace and resolution in both his craft (songwriting) and the iconography of his cultural heritage (Christianity): “I just couldn’t make any sense or find any kind of closure to the horror of it all … the image of them frolicking leisurely in heaven was about as comforting an image as I could find.”

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