Jason Isbell

JASON ISBELL IS A MAN OF POWERFUL CHARACTER, AND ON HIS FOURTH ALBUM IN TANDEM WITH COLLABORATORS THE 400 UNIT, HE’S DIVING DEEPER INTO THAT CHARACTER THAN EVER BEFORE.

Few men turn heads as fast or as fervently as Jason Isbell. Whether it’s because he’s a devout progressive in the Southern US country scene (see: xenophobe heaven) or for his enrapturing fretwork, the Alabama-native strumlord (who now calls Nashville home – because of course he went from one country hotspot to another) knows how to get people talking.

His fourth album in collaboration with five-piece backing back The 400 Unit, Reunions is Isbell’s most introspective set of twangy tunes. It has him ruminate on the past and calculate his future by way of some truly stirring soundscapes, Isbell himself unquestionably in the best shape, musically at least, that he’s ever been.

Australian Guitar got a hold of Isbell to chat about how the record came together, and how it introduced the storied singer-songwriter to a new world of recording techniques.

What is it that you wanted to say with this record, and why would you say it’s the best reflection of who you are in 2020?

Well, it was before all this shit happened! Now it’s not a good reflection of anything – if I want people to know who I am today, I’ll just sit on my own and cry into my voice recorder about how sad the world is. But at the time, I thought I did a pretty good job of documenting my life. It felt like I was finally able to express to my tastes in a way that I haven’t been in the past – I wrote a record that sounded like I wanted it to sound.

I think that had as much to do with the production as it did with anything, so cheers to Dave Cobb for that! This is the fourth record we’ve made with him, and I went in before we started recording and talked to him about how I wanted something that sounded more interesting and more high-fidelity than anything we’d done in the past. So he put a lot of work into it – he bought a brand new console and a bunch of new gadgets and gear, and we got to work on trying to make something sound interesting, clean and powerful at the same time.

Were you recording live in the room?

Sometimes. We did a little bit of everything on this one. We didn’t do as much live recording as we have in the past, but there were a couple of songs – “Overseas” and “Letting You Go” were both cut live. Everything on “Overseas” was done live because we’d been playing that one on the road some before we went in to record. And then “Letting You Go” was recorded very simply – there’s not a lot of instrumentation on that song.

But for everything else, we got a drum track and built from there, just with the intention of making the record more sonically interesting than, y’know, just a bunch of guys sitting in a circle and playing music.

Did you find yourself heading very far outside your comfort zone this time around?

I try not to have a comfort zone, because I don’t think anybody’s really looking for me to express my comfort to ‘em. Y’know, it gets harder for me to write songs as I go, because I try to challenge myself more as I move along – I try to work harder on each individual song and each individual word, and try to get things exactly right. So there’s things that I would’ve tolerated on previous albums that I won’t tolerate on the new work, just because I’m consciously trying to move forward as a songwriter.

But as a guitar player, I’ve never really had to make any conscious effort to move myself forward, because any time I get the opportunity to play, that’s what I’m doing. I have a lot of really cool guitars now – I can sit down play a 1959 Les Paul for a couple of hours if I feel like it. And I feel like if you have that opportunity, then you shouldn’t have to force yourself to practise. So as a player, I just play, y’know? All the time. And it still feels like playing – it’s still working machines and having fun to me. But songwriting is not that – songwriting is definitely work.

What guitars were you playing on this record?

Well, let’s see… I have a ’53 Goldtop Les Paul that Larry Craig put a Bigsby on; Larry did Neil Young’s Old Black ’53, too. And then I had an April ’65 Telecaster that is really special. In the first few months of ’65, before they started shifting from the L Series serial numbers over to the CBS era, there’s a little bit more wood on the headstock where it joins the neck of the guitar, and it balances those guitars in a way that even blackguards didn’t have. I had a blackguard ’53, and I sold it because the ’65 just blows it out of the water. And then I have a 1960 Strat which is all stock, except I changed the pickup selector to the five position because I really like to sound like Mark Knopfler at any chance I get.

Do you like to switch up the arsenal with every record, or do you have your go-tos for recording?

Usually, I just buy so much new shit between each record that I’m excited to use all of it when I get into the studio. I do have some standards that I always go back to, but one thing I used on this album that I never had was a ’46 Gibson J-45 that I bought right before we went into the studio. Normally, I play

Martin dreadnoughts; I have a signature model Martin D-18 that came out a couple of years ago – that’s what I play live, and they’re great guitars, but the old Gibson had just a little bit of a different texture to it.

Another thing I did on this album, which I’m pretty proud of, is I wrote and recorded the entire thing without using a capo. I had to challenge myself as a singer, but I was determined not to use a capo. And I didn’t tell anybody about that until it was all finished – I said, “I don’t know if anybody noticed, but I just made a whole record without using a f***ing capo!”