Isbell keeps momentum going with latest album
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Two widely respected American singer-songwriters — Alabama-reared Jason Isbell and Louisiana-bred Mary Gauthier — get on a plane and, coincidentally, are seated next to each other.
Their in-flight conversation? How artists survive in a shifting digital-first landscape.
“We were talking ... about the changes in the way people buy music and listen to music,” Isbell said backstage recently at the fabled Ryman Auditorium, the so-called Mother Church of Country Music and winter home of the Grand Ole Opry.
“She said, ‘What if this is all just a blip, and humanity looks back one day and says, ‘Remember when people used to record music, and then you’d pay to listen to it — wasn’t that weird?’ “
Put that way, Isbell said, music does seem an odd commodity to pay for.
“But I’m not going to give it away for free until I absolutely have to.” Lately, Isbell hasn’t had to. The former Drive-ByTruckers vocalist has been enjoying runaway success with his 2013 commercial breakthrough, “Southeastern,” and its 2015 successor, “Something More Than Free,” both of which earned him album-of-the-year honors from the Americana Music Association.
The Recording Academy also bestowed two Grammy Awards on him last year: Americana album (for “Something More Than Free”) and Americana roots song (for “24 Frames”).
Now the musician — who grew up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama — is eyeing a solo “hat trick” with “The Nashville Sound,” recorded with his band, the 400 Unit, and released this month.
The impressively literate
collection, like its predecessors, is stoked with the kind of insightful songs that have made him one of the bright lights of roots music during the past decade. (In addition to the new album, Isbell is touring and will perform Aug. 27 at the Ohio Theatre.)
With the band’s backing, “The Nashville Sound” rocks harder than his solo efforts. It features songs that explore themes of alienation, isolation, mortality, the joys and burdens of parenthood, family, home and hearth — relying on Isbell’s arsenal of wit, compassion and his keen understanding of human experience.
Isbell’s songs often touch on aspects of life in rural America but don’t settle for superficial nostalgia. That perspective sets him above the crowd, but also apart — something he ruminates on in the album’s opening track, “The Last of My Kind.”
“Nobody here can dance like me,” he sings, “everybody clapping on the one and three” — a line that’s sure to draw smiles from musically savvy listeners.
“A lot of people have mentioned that line,” Isbell said. “My drummer laughed out loud the first time I played him that song. But, of course, he would.”
That’s one of the lighter manifestations of the ways Isbell ponders where he fits in, and by extension, how — or whether — the disparate strands of American life can still fit together.
In “White Man’s World,” he questions his cultural legacy: “I’m a white man looking in a black man’s eyes / Wishing I’d never been one of the guys / Who pretended not to hear another white man’s joke / Old times ain’t forgotten.”
The final line quotes the Confederate anthem “Dixie” and, like many of Isbell’s other new songs, resonates at a moment in which a country
and its people are wrestling with issues of race relations, political polarization and basic human kindness.
That song, Isbell said, “was inspired by the presidential election. I feel like a lot of people are confusing falling a couple of rungs with falling off the ladder. I think as a society we’re still making a lot of progress.”
The album also contains intensely personal songs, including a reflection on mortality titled “If We Were Vampires,” in which he observes, “If we were vampires and death was a joke / We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke / And laugh at all the lovers and their plans / I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand.”
As Isbell sees it, “The Nashville Sound” emerged to be more directly autobiographical than “Something More Than Free” — which “had some character sketches (and) a lot of untrustworthy narrators.”
“There are a lot of things that were sometimes difficult to write about and reveal
and let out of the cage,” he said, “but I went ahead and did that on this album out of a sense of responsibility. So, in a lot of ways, that points back to ‘Southeastern’ because that’s really the first time that I had done that in such an open and elaborate way.”
Although he had been praised for his songwriting in three solo albums preceding “Southeastern” — as well as for songs he contributed to the Truckers, which he left in 2007 — the biggest change in his life and career, he says, was getting sober in 2012.
“It made all the difference,” he said. “I had so much time and so much focus that I didn’t have before. That was really the story. It gave me a story to tell, and it gave people a reason to root for me.
“And it gave me time, which is really the most valuable thing in the world to a writer of any type — to have the time and the focus without being pulled away by darkness or addiction or anything else.”