Jason Isbell
In certain corners of the music industry, Nashville has always been a mainstay of sorts — a place for those looking to begin careers, revive them, or simply elevate them to new heights. It worked for Bob Dylan; it worked for the Byrds; it worked for R.E.M. In 2011, Jason Isbell came to the city in search of the same magic. He found himself at a precipice: Following Isbell’s six-year stint with the Drive-By Truckers, the singer-songwriter’s drinking problem reached a new peak, and he had released a string of underperforming solo records.
In February 2012, Isbell holed up in rehab for two weeks, exiting 40 pounds lighter and ready to go on tour with Ryan Adams. On returning home, Isbell began writing songs reflecting on his struggle and recovery, and he planned to record a project with Adams producing — a venture that never came to fruition. The two reportedly split because of “scheduling conflicts,” but Isbell offers an alternative reason in an interview with the Scene.
“Once Ryan heard the songs, he backed out,” says Isbell. “At first, I thought it might have been because the songs weren’t good enough. But later on, I started to think it was because they were too good, and he felt kind of threatened by that.”
Isbell turned to producer Dave Cobb, who in the years since has become renowned for his work in country and Americana, and the two quickly began recording. These sessions would become Southeastern, whose 10th anniversary was recently celebrated with a deluxe reissue. The album marked the beginning of a new chapter for Isbell, and its songs still resonate strongly with the artist and his audience; if you’re seeing Isbell and his band The 400 Unit at the Ryman during his upcoming eight-night residency, you’re going to hear lots of songs from Southeastern. It’s a record full of genuine reflection, written between Isbell getting sober and getting married to fiddler, songsmith and occasional bandmate Amanda Shires.
“I don’t remember stressing at all about it, because we were just so damn excited,” says Cobb. “There’s so much innocence in that recording.”
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at Eastside Bowl, 6/9/2023
The recordings began in Cobb’s home studio with three acoustic tracks and a plan to add in the whole band later. After sitting cramped in a downstairs control booth, Cobb and Isbell decided to move the recording upstairs to the kitchen, which captured a natural, intimate reverb.
“You can tell how human that record is, because you hear the kind of ambience of the room,” Cobb says. “Like, it was my kitchen! That’s where I had dinner every night, captured in that moment in time.”
At first, Isbell planned the album as a solo endeavor, featuring only his voice and acoustic guitar. However, Cobb was inspired by Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” which was originally an acoustic piece but rereleased later with a full band added. He looked to combine the clarity of an unaccompanied performance with the grandiosity of an instrumental ensemble.
You can feel that intimacy from the first few seconds of Southeastern, when a simple guitar melody meets up with Isbell’s melancholic lyrics in “Cover Me Up,” ruminating on the mistrust and fear that alcohol instilled in him. Part of the narrative recalls a private show Isbell played, when a drunken stupor led to Isbell’s undoing. But at its core, “Cover Me Up” is a love song, written to thank Shires for her support through his darkest days. The song reflects a pained man coming to grips with his mistakes, repenting them and thanking those who got him through it alive.
Southeastern rewards close listening, and throughout the LP, certain images come to mind, like the desolate landscapes in Cormac McCarthy’s work, or the dismal Southern outlaws in Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country. It’s a type of distinctly American suffering that few can capture with grace and empathy — and one Isbell expresses perfectly. “Live Oak” embodies this sentiment with a fictional story of an outlaw reflective of Isbell’s own anxieties around getting sober. The narrator moves from town to town, on the run from the consequences of his life of robbing, stealing and killing. He falls in love for the first time and tries to mend his ways for good, but his reputation catches up with him.
To the narrator’s dismay, the woman he has fallen in love with is not disturbed when she learns about his past, but instead seems thrilled by it, as he sings in the chorus: “There’s a man who walks beside me / He is who I used to be / And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me.” Ultimately, he murders her before moving on yet again, returning to his outlaw ways.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit at Eastside Bowl, 6/9/2023
The album also nods to Isbell’s musical heroes. In “Songs That She Sang in the Shower,” he croons about Willie Nelson and Dusty Springfield. In the follow-up “New South Wales,” he slides a reference to Waylon Jennings into a line about throwing back Listerine. Next comes “Super 8,” an upbeat Southern-rock-infused number reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose title comes from the fabled rock-star tradition of trashing hotel rooms. Its levity makes it a bit of a black sheep on a record known for its emotional intensity. As Isbell explains, it’s not just a filler song; it stands out by design.
“There’s more to the human experience than the other songs on that album represent,” says Isbell. “Thematically, it’s important to represent the humor in addiction and recovery, and the humor that happens when you open yourself up and make yourself vulnerable to the people that you care about — and to your audience.”
Though it’s now a common theme across his catalog, Isbell reflects on white privilege for the first time in a big way on Southeastern. Since its codification as a genre, country music has been fraught with racism, capitalizing on some of the worst aspects of Southern culture. With this batch of songs, Isbell took a step in the right direction, confronting his whiteness directly.
“The myth of American history and the idea of equity and equality — those are things that you can’t really spend much time considering if you’re so possessed by the selfishness of addiction,” says Isbell. “And I spent a lot of years thinking about pretty much only myself, because I was in a cycle of escaping my own problems and creating new ones.”
Taken as a whole, Southeastern isn’t a story of pity or despondency. It’s one of hope, voicing the anxiousness of a man standing at a crossroads and deciding to get sober — even if it means he’ll have to face unpleasant realities in the future. Looking back 10 years later, the record continues to evolve, and with it, glimmers of hope for Isbell’s sober life come to fruition.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly indicated that part of the narrative of "Cover Me Up" referred to a Drive-By Truckers show. We regret the error.
