Jason Isbell Paints a Picture of a Better New Nashville at the Ryman

Jason Isbell isn’t the hero Nashville asked for, but by God, he’s the hero this city needs right now. 

The Spin caught Isbell and his spectacular 400 Unit at the Ryman on Saturday night. But two blocks south of the Mother Church, the usual teeming bullshit on Lower Broad had already built itself into a low roar in the hour before Diarrhea Planet took the Ryman stage to open. So-called honky-tonks blared ’90s rock, packs of bachelorettes hopped from bar to bar, and various forms of “transportainment” carried drunk revelers into the maw with thumping dance-club beats and plenty of "Woooooooooo!"

Inside the Ryman, though, concertgoers were treated to an alternate Nashville. A better Nashville. One where its music stars haven’t sold their likenesses to be plastered on the side of a multi-story entertainment complex or built their bar’s booze menu around their own peach-pecan whiskey. One where the music still matters. (The fact that Isbell likely wouldn’t accept the title of “hero” further proves the point.)

Over the course of an epic six-show stand, Isbell sent out six different opening acts as a way of saying, “Here’s some of the best talent that Nashville has to offer right now.” This signal-boosting opened up the venerable room for acts like R&B guitarist Melanie Faye, Isbell’s wife and bandmate Amanda Shires, singer-songwriter and award-winning guitarist Molly Tuttle, veteran rockers JEFF the Brotherhood and fire-breathing punks Bully. He even pulled Diarrhea Planet out of their recently self-imposed retirement for one more high-energy show, and the pop-punkers did not disappoint — though they did occasionally call for help.

Six songs into a set filled with band members hamming it up, throwing picks into the crowd, rolling around onstage and breaking into a Chuck Berry duck-walk at every turn, DP frontman Jordan Smith declared: “We don’t have enough guitars up here.” Out walked both Isbell and his 400 Unit guitarist Sadler Vaden, and the shredding continued with six sets of six strings. 

From our vantage point in the balcony, we saw guitars played on heads, on pelvises, vertically, horizontally, backwards, flat on the stage and even once with teeth. The band relished their chance to go out on top, winning over a crowd that stood and roared for a seventh guitarist, noted DP admirer Sturgill Simpson, who came out alongside Isbell and Vaden to close the set. After an evening where Smith said that DP “never dreamed we’d be here,” he declared the band “officially retired.” Guitarist Evan Bird marked the moment by slamming the Ryman stage with a Squier overhead smash worthy of Pete Townshend. 

By the time the first chords of “Last of My Kind” rang out to open the 400 Unit’s set, it was obvious that the standing-room-only crowd was locked in and ready to hear Isbell’s message: a mix of introspection, pure storytelling and the struggle to find a safe place in a cruel world. “24 Frames” carried a particular edge, with the audience bellowing “You thought God was an architect / Now you know / He’s like a pipe bomb ready to blow” just days after a madman tried to mail death to so-called Enemies of the People. The next song, “Hope the High Road,” was met with a similar cathartic response from the crowd, who agreed loudly that “last year was a son-of-a-bitch / For nearly everyone we know.”

The South that Isbell writes about isn’t the land of parties and pickups, or sipping moonshine as a call-out to some misplaced idea of what “country” is. It’s a complex mix of race and class, working men and women struggling with life, love and even sobriety. It’s a “Speed Trap Town” built around high school football, broken families and a need to start over. It’s dry counties and dying fathers. It’s fictional characters whose stories cut deeper inside us than we ever care to admit.

Sitting in the middle of the set, “Decoration Day” showed us just how far Isbell has come since his days with the Drive-By Truckers. The 15-year-old song imagines him in a Hatfields-and-McCoys-esque blood feud: “It's Decoration Day / And I knew the Hill boys would put us away / But my daddy wasn't afraid / He said we'll fight till the last Lawson's last living day." Played by the Truckers, it would have built into a cacophony of guitars. But with the 400 Unit, “Decoration Day” rose and fell and rose again on the back of Shires’ fiddle, its sound slicing through the Ryman as she traded licks with Isbell’s guitar. It’s at that point we realized how Isbell and his crew have mastered this particular room.

The music Isbell & Co. have built defies genre, too rocking for country and too twangy for rock. You can call what he and the 400 Unit are doing Americana if you want, but we would rather call this Southern gothic — life with a sense of longing punctuated by guitars that sometimes need to be picked softly and sometimes demand to wail, like on “White Man’s World.” If a fiddle makes it unplayable on pop radio, and the uncomfortable lyrics about privilege keep it off country stations, that didn’t seem to stop the bro-country boys wearing Croakies and the hipsters dressed in black from singing along at the Ryman: “Your creature comforts aren't the only things worth fighting for.”

Sometimes, the set list called for a little subversion. Isbell and Shires have performed the popular “If We Were Vampires” as a soft duet in the past, the love of the characters in the song reflecting off the couple’s voices with a power that can affect even the most bitter concert-goer. But on Saturday it had more bite, punctuated with feedback from Jimbo Hart’s bass and enveloped by Derry DeBorja’s haunting keyboards. And other times the songs were fine as written, like on “Cover Me Up,” when Isbell’s gentle twang slid into an urgent, longing howl — “So girl, hang your dress up to dry / We ain't leaving this room / Till Percy Priest breaks open wide / And the river runs through” — his head thrown back, Isbell sang from his toes about a man lucky enough to find grace from his partner in spite of his past sins. The set closed with “Children of Children,” a gorgeous nine-minute lament of teen pregnancy and guilt made vital by Chad Gamble’s thundering drums and Isbell's and Vaden’s guitar work.

Like Isbell’s 2017 residency, which featured a different Tom Petty song every night, this year’s run leaned into some of the band’s favorite covers for encores, including Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and The Allman Brothers’ “Melissa.” Saturday gave the crowd a pair of covers, wrapped around “Maybe It’s Time,” Isbell’s contribution to the A Star Is Born soundtrack: Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer” and Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.” It was a bravura way to end an already great evening.

Still buzzing from the three-hour session, we tumbled out onto Fourth Avenue, face-to-face with a neon-lit school bus with its top partially removed, “THE ULTIMATE PARTY” written down the side and woo-girls dancing in the open air to blaring bass beats. This may be the reality of the New Nashville. But inside the Ryman, we saw a vision of something better. That’s the Nashville we want to live in.

See our slideshow for more photos.

Set List

Last of My Kind

Molotov

24 Frames

Hope the High Road

Speed Trap Town

New South Wales

Decoration Day

White Man’s World

Relatively Easy

Cumberland Gap

The Blue

Flying Over Water

If We Were Vampires

Codeine

Cover Me Up

Encore:

Mutineer (Warren Zevon cover)

Maybe It’s Time

Like a Hurricane (Neil Young cover)

In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.