7/30/2023 0 Comments Hooked ona feeling album coverSincerity, his trademark, serves him well, but sometimes his persona feels a bit more learned than natural. I'm already feeling the presence of a musician who'd rather lay it on the line now than dance around to keep up with his own web of B.S. Spirited, smart and kind, Isbell does authenticity unnervingly well. He chats up the staff as he moves down the makeshift assembly line, scrawling what might generously be regarded as his signature in the upper left corner of each record sleeve. When I reach his manager's bright and breezy home, I find Isbell is in the front room, Sharpie in hand, signing vinyl copies of his fantastic new album, Weathervanes. The one before the drinking took over, before the rehab, and before he took control of himself and released some of the best records of his generation. As I approach our meeting, it is the young Jason Isbell that drifts through my mind. But his friends and his future wife, Amanda Shires, helped him into rehab, which he paid for by taking out a bank loan. Isbell released a few post-Truckers albums that showed glimmers of promise but lacked voice and focus. Walking across East Nashville earlier this month to meet Isbell, I am thinking about how the dreams of more than one singer-songwriter ended in this part of town. "Some people get drunk and become kind of sweet," Patterson Hood, one of the leaders of the Truckers, told The New York Times Magazine a decade ago. goddamn lonely love." Under the sway of his own addiction, he began to lose touch and say stupid things on stage. "I'll take two of what you're having / And I'll take all of what you got / To kill this. Just a few years after joining the tour, Isbell confessed his identification with the weary and dying musicians of The Band in "Danko/Manuel." Its slow-running bass pacing out the brutality of road life, he sings, "Got to sinkin' in the place where I once stood / Now I ain't livin' like I should." Then came the aching "Goddamn Lonely Love," a tight study in killing sentiment with alcohol. "Outfit" still stands as an Isbell crowd favorite, encapsulating, in his father's voice, warnings about succumbing neither to the dire fate of working-class entrapment ("don't let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy man's paint") nor the perils of a musician's life on the road ("don't tell 'em you're bigger than Jesus, don't give it away.") Then there was "TVA," a meditation on three generations and the meanings of the New Deal, the Wilson Dam and the time when "Roosevelt let us all work for an honest day's pay." "Decoration Day," a dark, rocking examination of intergenerational violence based on his own family's lore, proved to be so good that the band named their next album after the cut. Not long after Isbell joined the Truckers, he penned three incredible songs in rapid succession. Two, he lost sight of himself in a haze of booze. One, he quickly revealed his genius for empathetic portraiture, painting alienated, lost souls and revealing entire worlds in precise drops of telling detail. So began the wild years of Isbell's young adulthood, a fiery, creative period that delivered him to two ends. Spin, reviewing Isbell's first show with the Truckers, called them "alt country's rockingest neo-rednecks" who delivered "poetry among the wreckage." In one song, the devil sports a George Wallace sticker on the bumper of his Cadillac. The group he joined in 2001, the raucous, punk infused, careening-toward-the-ditch band, the Truckers, had just released its epic masterpiece, Southern Rock Opera, a whirlwind of Southern rock, punk and gothic hell - literally. Isbell may have been a young adult, but he looked more like a doughy high school sophomore, especially among the more grizzled members of a hard touring band. He joined the band for the show and then departed on tour with the band for the next six years. As a result, Isbell got a rapid field promotion onto the stage. A member of the Drive-By Truckers, a band that had returned to its home in the Shoals to play a breakthrough house concert for Spin magazine, failed to show up for the gig. Then, at the age of 22, his moment arrived. By his early 20s, he returned to his home in the Shoals of Alabama, an obscure corner of the country that produced some of the greatest R&B in the universe, where he found work writing for FAME Studios. Playing local bars before he was even a teenager, and the Grand Ole Opry by 16, he went off to college but, famously, never completed his degree for want of a single required health studies class. He would sit alone in his bedroom for days on end, isolated and insulated from his parents' arguing, tearing through the classics. He had honed his skills as a songwriter and guitar player since he started playing the mandolin back when his hands were too small to wrap around a guitar neck. Luck favors the prepared, as they say, and young Jason Isbell was ready.
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