Jason Isbell
A conversation with Jason Isbell in These Times starts out pretty much like a conversation with anyone else: with a heavier-than-normal “How are you?”
He thinks his wife — fiddler, singer-songwriter and member of The Highwomen Amanda Shires — might’ve had a run-in with COVID-19 a couple months ago. She came down with something, anyway, after the two returned from a trip to Hawaii and Japan earlier this year. But now things in his orbit are mostly fine.
“I’m not terribly worried about the folks in our house,” says Isbell. “But yeah, as soon as you start looking outside your own driveway it gets pretty bleak.”
Long after Isbell is gone, a significant part of his legacy as a songwriter will be his ability and willingness to write with honesty and insight — in songs that are memoir, short fiction or who the hell cares? — about both sides of that borderline. The knowledge that one might be able to make things some semblance of all right by locking the front door and shutting out the smoke from a world on fire provides the tension for the opening song of his new record, Reunions. The nearly-seven-minute slow-burner “What’ve I Done to Help,” which features backing vocals from David Crosby, is a meditation on apathy and inaction with the title serving as a mantra. If the vocal hook sounds familiar, it did to Isbell, too. He told Rolling Stone last month that, after trying to rearrange the song in the studio to make it sound less like Michael Kiwanuka’s “One More Night,” he gave up. He got in touch with Kiwanuka and credited him on the song.
Isbell has been trying to help where he can. His new record comes out on Friday, but you might already have it. He offered Reunions one week early to fans who preordered it through independent record stores, which are fighting to survive the pandemic. If you did that, then you already know that it represents a turning of the page from the triptych of records — 2013’s Southeastern, 2015’s Something More Than Free and 2017’s The Nashville Sound — that helped him build a fan base that can pack out the Ryman for a seven-night stand.
Much ado has already been made about the ghosts on the record, and it has an ethereal sound to match that recurring lyrical theme. If Southeastern often sounded like a man playing guitar in the corner of his home, Reunions sounds like a band playing at dusk in a big open barn — something like the inner jacket photo on Neil Young’s Harvest, maybe.
“The music that I listened to growing up, and especially the stuff that was on the radio in the ’80s when I was a kid, it transported you to a place,” Isbell says. “We weren’t necessarily trying to re-create any of the sounds or any of the methods that they were using then, but the thing that we did want to re-create was that sort of transportation.”
The first song Isbell wrote for the album is one he didn’t initially think would make the cut. “Only Children” is a haunting and beautiful dream-like rendering of young artists who still believe that dreams are only plans that haven’t yet come to fruition. Largely based on a recently departed friend from Isbell’s formative years, the song was written while Isbell and Shires were on vacation with friends in Greece, doing something similar to the characters in the song — exchanging notes on creative projects still in progress. But the sound of the record started to come together in Isbell’s mind later.
“I think the one that really, for me, sort of signified a direction was ‘Overseas,’ and that was the next one that I wrote,” he says. “I wrote that when I got back home. I felt like it sort of led me on a path, at least sonically.”
Written from the perspective of someone who is separated from their spouse amid political turmoil, “Overseas” is one of the record’s standout tracks, a midtempo rocker that features Isbell wielding his words and his guitar like freshly sharpened knives. The song starts with one of the best quatrains he’s ever written, a glimpse of a novel I am now desperate to read: “This used to be a ghost town / But even the ghosts got out / And the sound of the highway died / There’s ashes in the swimming pool.” In place of a vocal hook, the song is anchored by a guitar riff as good as any Isbell’s ever created, a throwback that would not sound out of place were it being played by Tom Petty.
“It took me a couple of days of just tweaking it a little bit at a time, and I know that everybody in the house could hear me working on it in the bedroom,” he says. “Then when we started playing it live, our daughter Mercy noticed that riff. She was like, ‘I’ve heard that song before!’ ”
The album represents a new sound for Isbell and his band — he says they spent a lot more time on production this time around and that his longtime collaborator, producer Dave Cobb, drove himself crazy poring over every bar of the record while mixing it. Even so, fans will recognize the touching of certain familiar bases. “Running With Our Eyes Closed” views a longtime romantic relationship through precise metaphors, while “It Gets Easier” addresses sobriety, albeit more explicitly than Isbell has before. Like The Nashville Sound, Reunions ends with a song dedicated to Mercy, and if wedding receptions are able to happen this fall, then the new tune “Letting You Go” is sure to be played at some.
Isbell’s signature gift is conjuring scenes of happiness and beauty that are shrouded in sadness and grief. If you go to one of his concerts, it’s true, you will likely see some people crying. But if you think it’s just because he writes “sad songs,” you’re not listening closely enough. Even “Elephant,” the Southeastern track that is as utterly devastating as any song released this century, contains life-giving images like this: “But I’d sing her classic country songs / And she’d get high and sing along.”
These moments appear on Reunions too, reverberating like good memories surrounded by more painful ones. In “Dreamsicle,” a youngster is living through their parents’ divorce. As the adolescent narrator is enjoying “a Dreamsicle on a summer night in a folding lawn chair,” a storm of strife swirls around them.
The warmth of the happy moments, rather than the surrounding sadness, offers a way into this story. The way Isbell can gently navigate this territory is what compels us to listen to his songs again and again, likely as not while weeping during a morning commute or in a pew at the Mother Church.
“You choose to go back to the Dreamsicle and the beauty of the summer night,” Isbell says, “and then once you’re there, then you can look around and remember the things that weren’t great.”
Seeing Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit in the flesh is essential to understanding the relationship between Isbell and his dedicated fan base. A reunion of that sort, where the new songs will be inducted properly into the canon, is on hold until it’s safe to do so. But while we have to stay home, we can listen closely to the stories on the album and let them take us somewhere else.
