Songs speak of frustration, joy

CONCERT REVIEW

“Are you living the life you chose,” sang Jason Isbell to a full-house in the Ohio Theatre last night. “Are you living the life that chose you?”

The verses of “The Life You Chose” told the story of a past romance, one torn by everyday choices foisted on everyday people. In fact, Isbell’s songs don’t take sides but they are about folks caught between worlds, pawns in the game of change that is contemporary life. Their delivery by the crack 400 Unit band in styles that ranged from roots rock to classic country made the set deeply satisfying, the characters rich and memorable.

That they reached into the belly of today’s America, not unlike J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” added resonance.

Isbell’s songs rarely come to conclusions, though, preferring to pose familiar questions and vent common frustrations. So, “Anxiety” opened the show with loud musical drama before it began to describe a character always nervous, despite evidence that his life is going along just fine.

Like so many of Isbell’s songs, it pitted the personal against the larger social narrative, reality versus expectation. “Last Of My Kind,” delivered midway in the set was plain as it laid out evidence of one guy’s feelings of loneliness and frustration with change.

The evening was memorable, though, not because it accidentally seemed topical — at no time did the songwriter appear to pander to issues or even philosophical debates — but because it did what the best country music has always done. In songs that alternately rocked like crazy, weeped like the best honky-tonk, or were slyly comical, they offered comfort and a platform to party.

But the stories were prime, often connecting with metaphors and clever twists not unlike John Prine’s songs.

Sometimes, too, they were obviously born of Isbell’s personal experience. Late in the set, he opened “Cover Me Up” on acoustic guitar with his wife Amanda Shires on fiddle. The song was both a love song to her and a recounting of his getting sober. Delicate at first, it was deeply inspirational; when guitarist Sadler Vaden joined on slide, it became more baldly emotional: when the entire band joined in, it verged on the bombastic.