Patterson Hood, one of the principal songwriters of raucous rockers Drive-By Truckers, is slated to return with his third solo album, Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, due out in September 2012. The songs on the album began in the form of a novel Hood was working on, a fictional but semi-autobiographical account of a dark time in the singer's late twenties. The book remained unfinished, but the characters and events he began chronicling in written form translated well into song.