Artist of the Year: Jason Isbell

“We’re all really very similar, in all the towns and cities and everything,” Isbell adds. “But the setting is a really big deal for me, because it just makes me think from a different angle. If I wrote an entire record in New York, it would be about different things. I imagine it would probably be very personal about the size of human connections—because, for there to be that many people living on top of one another, then you have the question of ‘Well, does any of this matter? And, if so, how much? What is the significance of love between two people in a town where there’s 11 million of us stacked up on one another? I mean, why bother? What is the reason why we go through heartbreak and tragedy and all of this when we could just go outside and there’s hundreds of people walking down the sidewalk at any given moment.’ The place certainly works its way into the music, but the more I travel the more I figure out that people are very similar from place to place.”

Fans and listeners have been drawing comparisons between Weathervanes and Isbell’s days playing guitar in the Drive-By Truckers. There are similarities running throughout the tracklist—most clearly on penultimate song “This Ain’t It”—and they shine through in ways that are more intense than ever before, at least not since Isbell’s debut solo album, Sirens of the Ditch. For a long time, that kind of volume and heaviness was largely reserved for Isbell and the 400 Unit’s live shows. But, being 15+ years removed from his tenure in the Truckers, he’s now reached a place where he’s comfortable with letting his songs go there—because he’s eliminated having anything left to prove. And, across all five studio albums of original material in the last 10 years, Isbell’s work has never sounded like what he did with the Truckers—a deliberate choice.

“I think that part was intentional, I wanted to do something different—especially with Southeastern,” he says. “That’s one reason why it wound up so quiet and so small, production-wise, because I just wanted it to be just me, just mine. With Weathervanes, I thought, ‘You know, enough time has passed, I think everybody knows that we’re all on good terms and we’re all doing very separate things and nobody’s ripping anybody off. I think I can just let these songs be what they want to be.’”

That was also Isbell’s approach to producing Weathervanes. For the first time since Here We Rest in 2011, he opted to not bring back longtime engineer Dave Cobb. This time around, Isbell was able to leave his ego outside the door and go into the studio and just serve the songs he’d written. In many ways, it was like a rebirth for Isbell, but it was also an emotional and creative reunion. “It’s good, because there are certain constraints that you put on yourself as you go through years and years of working in this particular field,” he says. “And some of them fall away. It was nice when that specter of the time that I spent with [Drive-By Truckers] fell away and became just a part of who I am as a songwriter again.”

Weathervanes is Isbell’s most personal 400 Unit record to date, if only because he’s placing more focus on the whole, ultimate point of living—which is to grow and learn more about himself and how to be happy, joyful and stable. He’s always preferred to keep his characters “in-house,” but he’s candid about every album holding more of him than the album that preceded it. When it comes to the curiosity that keeps pulling him back into writing, it’s not so much about trying to better understand a particular type of character or a particular type of motif or circumstance. No, the curiosity comes via the immense potential of just how many stories are left to be told.

“I think a really great songwriter could sit in one room, isolated for 10 years, and still be able to write five albums-worth of good material—maybe if they just had one window that they could look out,” Isbell says. “I’m not saying that they should do that, either. But, I think that it would be possible, because there is so much to notice. A lot of my favorite songs in the indie rock world will be written about very small, very specific subjects; tiny, tiny, tiny things. When you go into poems, you get even smaller and you keep reducing the sphere of your perspective until, finally, you’re just writing about the tiniest possible speck of dust. And that’s the thing that keeps me motivated, the fact that there are just billions and billions and billions of different stories to tell.”

In a recent GQ interview, Scorsese spoke about how everyone we’ve known and loved has suffered and struggled so much, and then life is over. He said, “You get to the point of saying, ‘Well, what does it all mean?’ It doesn’t matter what it means. You have to live it.” This idea of not getting tangled up in trying to gather all of life’s answers hits home whenever I tap into a Jason Isbell record. When I’m writing poetry, I’m always wrestling with whether or not it’s my job to shepherd people to an answer. My advisor in college once told me that it’s not the writer’s job to always nurture a reader to the finish line, that it’s painfully human—but necessary—to give them the tools to get there on their own. For Isbell, a big part of the work he does, both in music and in maintaining a sense of self beyond if, is saying that we are wasting time looking for the answers—time we could be using to place attention on what’s going around us and who in our lives we love and care for.

“If I see an answer, that’s a red flag,” he asserts. “If I hear a song that has answers in it, then I think, ‘Man, this is amateur hour’—because that’s going to change in five minutes and five days and five months and five years. If you’re settling on something right now, then you’re undermining the version of yourself that’s gonna come later. And all I want to do is try to keep all versions of myself as honest and aboveboard as possible. Anytime something even reminds me of that—an answer to one of life’s big questions—whether it’s in song or in conversation, I try to say, ‘Well, in my experience, this is how I have tried and failed in the past.’”

Isbell has always been transparent about his failures—particularly his sobriety and what life before that was like for him and the people in his orbit. As a sober person, I’m constantly trying to better understand how my own art shifts between the days when I was a student in high school or in college doing drugs versus now, when I’m a drug-free and employed adult. On Weathervanes, we find Isbell remaining immune to pandering, as he writes about familial, generational trauma (“Cast Iron Skillet”), school shootings (“Save the World”), abortion (“White Beretta”) and interloping in hometowns (“Volunteer”) with grace and affection. Though his clarity continues to grow with every passing year that he’s alcohol-free, writing about violence, disparity—and loss and the people in the world around you—in an empathetic and honest way is still hard even as he’s taken that step within himself, too.

“Any kind of recovery, whether it’s from addiction or from abuse or from any sort of trauma, you grow and you get wiser,” Isbell says. “And the wiser you get, the harder it is to really pick a voice and decide on the correct way to tell a story that’s this heavy. It just gets harder to write the songs as I go on, and it should. I would be so disappointed if it was easy to write a song now compared to when I was 22 or 23 years old. I think that’s the beauty of creating art throughout the course of your life—that, the better you get at it, the harder it gets. There’s no final boss, and that’s because I’m always trying to refine not only the nuts and bolts of the work, but the perspective of the work also.”

On Reunions and Weathervanes, something that has helped Isbell on a personal level—that has, certainly, found its way into the music—is that he’s been able to forgive the person that he was before he got sober. It took a long time, because he was afraid that doing so would lead him back to behaving in those ways again. “For the first decade, or close to it, I had to look at that guy as ‘This guy’s out of my life, I don’t speak to this guy.’ And then, somewhere around Reunions, I decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to call this guy and see how he’s doing. It’s been long enough, I think I can talk to him and keep my boundaries intact enough to have a relationship with this person again.’ And when that happened, it allowed me to access some of the strength in those emotions from that time—because we would never become addicted to drugs and alcohol if it didn’t do something positive for us, at least in the temporary. I think, once you get past that stage, where the ground beneath you is a little bit shaky, I think it’s important to go back and forgive yourself and, maybe, get in touch with that person again in the same way that you would an inner-child.”

Something about Jason Isbell’s songwriting that I hold close is how, so often, he remains a beacon through the best and worst of times—if only for his willingness to write songs that are sometimes romantic and sublime yet painfully true and honest. “Yes, I’ve tried to be grateful for my devils and call them by their names,” he sings on “Middle of the Morning.” “But I’m tired.” I’ve been thinking about what it means to make art in a world where we are also responsible for protecting the people we love, be it our kids or our partners or our parents—how the stories we write are impacted by the kind of world we want our loved ones to interact with and find safety in. You want to write about a forgiving, empathetic planet, but too often that’s not the reality of it—and unlearning how to see anything but brutality and disparity is a really long to play. When it comes to Isbell’s songs, like “King of Oklahoma,” where he concludes with my favorite line of the record—“Nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore”—I immediately start wondering how he grapples with what story to tell and how to not make the planet look so bleak.

The truth is that, for Jason Isbell, when you’re writing about the people you are close to, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done before you actually sit down with a guitar and a pencil and paper. “The work you have to do before that is to try to surround yourself with love and with honesty,” he says. “And, if you’re being honest with all the people in your life at all times—and you’re leading with kindness, with generosity of spirit—then you’re not really going to be capable of writing something about them that crosses over the lines of privacy. I’m not saying that there’s nothing that should be private between two people, whether it’s a parent and a child or spouses, or whatever. But, if you’re leading your life honestly, then your songs are probably going to be honest, as well.”

When it comes to the bleakness of his characters and some of their stories, however, Isbell points to the access he has to sing these songs. For Weathervanes, he had eight hours a day in a climate-controlled environment, a guitar, a pen and some paper. He had the time to write a song about his world and then workshop and edit it until it was something he could deliver to everybody else. According to Isbell, there is “an asterisk beside the suffering,” because he has time to tell you about it. “When you’re truly suffering, you’re not passing the story of that along to anybody,” he says. “You’re just trying to get from moment to moment and survive. Things are pretty dark out there in a lot of different situations right now, but we’re living longer—I mean, people across the board are living longer and healthier lives than we ever have before.”

Isbell immediately recognizes the caveats to that truth, though. “There’s a lot of problems with the healthcare system, there’s problems with race, there’s problems with gender, there’s problems with pushback from the right when we try to make some kind of progress,” he adds. “All of these things are real, and they’re all happening. But shit has been way, way worse in the past. People are talking about ‘This is the worst time in American history.’ Oh, contraire. There was a point where there were bleachers set up around battlefields and people who were related to each other and had grown up together were killing each other on these battlefields—if they could survive having diarrhea and being dehydrated long enough to actually get up and fire a rifle or stab one another. Things have been way worse in America, especially for people who aren’t fairly wealthy and white.” Isbell’s route to balancing songs like “Middle of the Morning” and “Strawberry Woman” with “Save the World” and “Volunteer” comes from a sharp duality: He gets great rewards from talking about his family and singing his love songs and, for him to be able to address the injustices of the world, he first has to survive and be himself. And, to do that, he has to be able to write these songs we’ve long adored.

On all of Isbell’s records—but especially Weathervanes—he’s striking a balance between sentimentality and hard-nosed realism. Songwriters and nostalgia go hand-in-hand, for better or for worse, but, on Weathervanes, Isbell’s telling of these way-back stories feels like an earned type of retrospect—rather than a bygone praise that comes when the well has run dry. For him, it’s a matter of the level of indulgence for the sentimental or the nostalgic shifting depending on what type of song he’s writing. When Isbell is working on a love song, nostalgia comes in handy. But, he’s also acutely aware of how, if you use that kind of wistfulness incorrectly, it can become a weapon. He cites a conversation he had with Celine Strong about her film Past Lives, and how the way that cinema utilizes—or enables—yearning:

“We were having a conversation about how nostalgia is the weapon in that movie. And that movie really feels like a thriller, because you don’t know what people are going to do next—and the bloody knife in the corner is nostalgia,” Isbell says. “That’s the thing you have to really watch out for. But, if you’re gonna write a song for somebody that you care a whole lot about—and you want to point to the reasons why—then you’re going to need to use a little bit of it. It really all comes down to what story I’m trying to tell. If you’re making a movie for a year, you got one story. Now, you’ve got a long time to tell it, a couple hours—or more, if you’re Marty. I have a short amount of time to tell a story, and then I tell another one and then I tell another one. The goals and the tools can shift from song to song. “King of Oklahoma,” you need nostalgia. You need that character to feel nostalgic. But “White Beretta,” you need the opposite of that. You need reality. You can’t romanticize those emotions, or you undermine the whole point of that song.”

Isbell’s most revered solo album, Southeastern, was written in the period after he got sober. It came out 10 years ago this past June, two days after Weathervanes was released, and 10-year anniversaries are both tricky and interesting to me—largely because the records we’re celebrating came out when I was at my most formative age. And what they meant to me then isn’t always what they mean to me now. If I had encountered Southeastern in 2013, I wouldn’t have understood what the hell Isbell was singing about. But now, I think I can meet him at least halfway. When looking back at songs like “Cover Me Up” or “Elephant”—or even a line like “I’ve buried her a thousand times, giving up my place in line, but I don’t give a damn about that now,” the work doesn’t take on new meaning for Isbell, even if he is more than a decade clean and more than a decade removed from the work. He gives Southeastern some leeway, though, because it was a crucial record for him, for his audience and it was his breakthrough release. So, in that way, it’s romanticized for him—but he wouldn’t change how those songs were written and recorded, because the album was lightning in a bottle captured during a gravitational time of transition.

“Most of my favorite stories—whether they’re books or movies or songs—throughout history, have happened at this moment of transition, when there’s a person—who is writing this or creating this—who isn’t completely certain of what’s going to happen next,” Isbell explains. “That was significant for me, the fact that, all of a sudden, I had more time to work with the raw ability that I had before I got sober. I was able to sit down and capture what was going on in a way that was more skillful—because songwriting is song editing, and I spent so much time trying to get those songs completely right that I think, if it were to be anything different now, if I were to go back and rewrite Southeastern as a 44-year-old who’s been sober for as long as I have, I don’t think it would be the same. I had to capture that period of transition and I don’t necessarily think of myself as the person who wrote that album anymore, because that guy was very unsure of what was about to happen.”

Southeastern is the project that turned Jason Isbell into a household name, and it became obvious that things were shifting when, upon coming back to the States after an international flight, he saw himself in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on the same day at the same newsstand. When he started touring the album, it became really obvious. “We sold out dozens of shows in a row,” Isbell notes. “I remember one show, in St. Louis, there were people waiting in the parking lot at the show who knew they weren’t gonna get it. The show was already sold out and the building was full, and there were people in the parking lot just so they could hear through the walls or the windows. I remember thinking, ‘This is insane.’ And, for a while there, we couldn’t keep up with the demand—because we were trying to increase the size of the venues as we went from town to town. Sometimes, that wasn’t logically doable, so we had some shows that were pretty crazy. It was a beautiful thing to see, that feeling that what you’re doing is working on that level.”

Southeastern was written at a transitional period in Isbell’s life—one that he admits was a moment etched in that time and that time only—and you can certainly say the same about Weathervanes, as he attempts to make sense of his place in a world brimming with regret, violence and grief. The album is a changeover, a passage to a new, hopefully kinder chapter. And in that way, Weathervanes is—like all great folk, country and Americana records—a historical pursuit done in the name of where we come from, who we used to be and who came before us. There’s pride there, in remembering the places your DNA still retreats to. Isbell’s music so often dislodges mainstream preconceptions about rural art, even if he writes it anywhere but. I ask him what the secret is to writing songs that are in service to undoing those prejudices. “You just tell the truth,” he replies. It’s as simple as that.

Watch Jason Isbell’s performance at the Living Room in 2011 below.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.