August found Cooley and I fielding endless hours of interviews to promote the new album. I flew with my son to Atlanta for him to visit his grandparents and close friends while I did a week or so of solo dates in the South. I was heartened by the sheer number of press requests we were getting and because the early reviews of our album were all stellar. At the same time, each new article or review brought with it a slew of hate mail from disgruntled, self-proclaimed “lifelong fans.” Clearly, they had not really listened to “Puttin’ People on the Moon” or any of at least 20 or so songs we had released that were as politically leftist as anything on “American Band.”

To read the Facebook comments, one would think we had just alienated half of our fan base and were committing career suicide. The reality of that was certainly not lost on me. I am in my 50s and have two small children to raise, a mortgage, and a company that several dozen hard-working people depend upon to support their families. I take our commitment to our fans seriously.

At the same time, I didn’t choose to do this for a living to not speak my mind. We built our entire fan base by speaking out about the things that moved us. Fifteen years earlier, we were told that our new album would ruin everything we had built up to that point. That album was “Southern Rock Opera,” which ended up being our breakthrough.

We didn’t write our songs to piss anyone off; we wrote them to make sense of things that struck us as fundamentally wrong. To that end, I knew “American Band” was an album we were exceptionally proud to put our names on.

If I had to start driving for Lyft or tending bar to support my family, so be it.

Our record company, ATO, announced the album would come out on September 30. September 2016 was one of the most grueling times I had experienced in two decades of touring in this band. We zig-zagged back and forth between Washington DC and New York City, doing interviews and performances for NPR, SiriusXM, The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens more.

The reviews for “American Band” were unanimously great. Four stars from Rolling Stone and an A from Robert Christgau, recognized by true music nerds as the “dean” of all rock critics. By year’s end, we found ourselves on more year-end lists than we’d seen in nearly a decade. Ticket sales were great for the tour.

Then, came a show in San Luis Obispo, California.

It was in an old theatre that strongly favored the Shoals Theatre in my hometown, but it was not as well maintained. The show had originally been booked as an outdoors show, but for reasons I can’t recall, it was moved indoors. Earlier that day, Jay Gonzalez was cornered and questioned by a couple of guys about my song, “What It Means.” Jay is one of the sweetest and least confrontational people I know. He was a little flustered by the encounter.

During the show, I looked out to see a couple of guys in the front row. They held up small signs that said, “Blue Lives Matter.” I tried not to let this throw me off, but every time I would glance their way, they would hold their little signs up.

I take such things seriously. In my own dealings with cops (and I’ve had many), I’ve met and known fine ones and some ordinary joes who were well-meaning even if they sometimes fell short of their ideals. I’ve known only a small handful who terrified me. I wrote a song, “Used To Be a Cop,” about one of those in particular.

“What It Means” is not an anti-cop song. It questions how all of us look at people we view as “the other.” Too many Americans share a visceral fear of people who look or pray or fuck differently than they do. This fear has too often led to unarmed black people being shot in the street. Most of our police officers do their utmost to perform an often horrific job with fairness and compassion, but it only takes a few bad apples to screw things up.

There have been times in my years on the road when I have felt disrespected on stage and hit back hard, but that night in San Luis Obispo, I was trying to be as inclusive as I could be. When the time came around to perform “What It Means,” I paused to acknowledge the viewpoint of the guys in front with the sign. I tried to calmly explain where I was coming from, how I felt, the things that had inspired my song. Then, we played an especially good version of the song.

As we played it, I watched nearly half of our audience get up and head for the door. Holy shit! If this is how the new album was being received in blue-state California, what was going to happen the following night when we played in red-state Phoenix? Or the following month, when we took our show back home to the deep South?

DBT doesn’t have a lot of history with Phoenix. We had played there a few times, but only in recent years had we gotten any enthusiastic response. Our regular venue in Phoenix had been among the smallest rooms we played on tour. But this time, we were playing a much bigger theater, in a state known for opposition to the kinds of stances we took on “American Band.”

We arrived at the venue — it seemed way too shiny and upscale — in 100-degree temperatures and relentless sunlight. Soundcheck was uneventful, but it did nothing to assuage my bad feeling about the impending show, particularly with the bad aftertaste lingering from the night before.

Our walk-on music that night in Phoenix was the Clash’s defiant “Know Your Rights.” Showtime came and we hit the stage, and there we found a packed house who greeted our every gesture like conquering heroes. It was absolutely one of my favorite shows of the year, right there in the home state of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

There’s no predicting these things.