“You’ve got a house and shit….You’re adults now!” Elizabeth Cook exclaimed to Jason Isbell before asking him a question. “Are you growing up?”
Cook was putting it to Isbell who brought his 400 Unit and his pregnant wife Amanda Shires to the SiriusXM Outlaw Country studios above the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. The celebration of Isbell’s new releaseSomething More Than Free was an appeal to listeners to support the record and what only the inimitable Cook could describe as the “Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires Diaper Fund.”
With September 2 looming as the birthdate of their baby daughter, Isbell surely had the impending responsibilities of parenting on his mind. “My parents and her parents they did a pretty good job,” he reflected. “I don’t want to be the first person on the chain to drop the ball.” Then with the typically dry wit and wry sense of humor he provides daily on social media, he offered some self-assurance when he said he’s come across some people who were complete idiots but had three beautiful and wonderful children.
With the 400 Unit standing at attention and ready to rock, Cook complained it was too hot and opted to sit down with Isbell. The singer turned radio host has known Jason’s wife a long time and says the fiddle player and harmony singer is both very pregnant and very beautiful.
Cook’s homespun southern accent is so pronounced it makes Alabama-born Isbell sound like he’s from the big city. She took a step back and asked Isbell to recount the history that began with the Drive By Truckers and led to his solo career. Isbell gave a quick history lesson talking about growing up around the Alabama/Tennessee state line in Green Hill, about twenty minutes from Muscle Shoals, the famed town where some of the greatest r&b records were made.
By the time he was 15, Isbell turned years of playing music with his extended family into a weekly gig of sorts. He convinced his mother to drop him off at restaurants which featured live music on Friday and Saturday nights. In those days, Isbell recalled, restaurants had laws that allowed them to serve 51 per cent food and 49 per cent alcohol thereby competing with clubs. The young Isbell would go in, order chips and salsa and nurse the basket all night hoping he’d get called up to play.
Some of the musicians included members of the band the Shooters, songwriter Spooner Oldham and Muscle Shoals studio musician David Hood, the father of Patterson Hood with whom Isbell would later join in the Drive By Truckers. Isbell found them to be hospitable if not practical as they were good people who needed a break – and didn’t mind having Isbell come up to play during a break over a four hour show.
Prior to playing “If It Takes a Lifetime,” a song his wife particularly likes, Isbell talked about the work ethic he got from his family and how he approached music like it was a job. “If I sat around and waited for things, I’m not going to get better or be anymore successful,” he said of the philosophy he took. He describes the song about his father (“he’s in a lot of them”) and a relationship that went bad at one point and that he’s trying to repair. It’s a song more about forgiveness and Isbell acknowledges his own challenges of holding on, admitting “Some things piss me off so much I don’t want to give up being pissed off.”
Cook suggests a song called “The Life You Choose” is more relevant to country music than country music is today. She adds that she can point to a person she knows in every song he plays. “I’m always going to be in there,” he says of his songs. “They’re somewhat autobiographical but I’m not the first person narrating the song. These things didn’t all happen to me.”
Of the writing process, he says he tries to start out with a character and build from there. When he sings of revisiting his old sweetheart and looking back, he draws on details of people he grew up with. One includes someone he knew who had a work accident and ended up with a large settlement. “He was the guy to party with.”
After the searing violin of Shires amplified another small town tale called “Children of Children,” Cook notes that it didn’t have any trucks mentioned in it. “I didn’t think you could relate to rural America if you didn’t talk about getting through a gate and going down a dirt road.” Cook says if she got a boyfriend from a small town who heard Isbell sing, his music might serve the purpose of not letting him beat her ass.
Isbell admits that his songs dealing with cancer and divorce are not for everyone – and says it’s fine that people enjoy songs while they’re at sporting events or barbeques. But if he had his druthers, he’d like people not to do other things while tey listen to his music. “I now that’s selfish,” he admits, “but the details are really important to me. It’s not for tailgating.”
Earlier in the show, Isbell performed “24 Frames,” buttressed by Shires’ harmonies and harrowing violin lines to augment what Cook calls a song about the spectrum of life. Isbell says the song is about the second of time it takes to pass celluloid in a movie, adding that some film are more detailed in 45 frames. But they end up too detailed like old British television episodes of Monty Python where you see the actors’ blemishes and imperfections. In response to Cook’s question about where he knows all this stuff, Isbell responds that most things he learns today are from Twitter.
With just a little over a month to go before the impending birth, Isbell can still say he doesn’t mind travelling and playing. But the track “To The Band I Loved” shows how much time has passed since the days when he was young and began touring with the Drive By Truckers. Cook assumed the song was about the band but Isbell tells her it is about Centro-matic, the band the Truckers toured with when Isbell first joined.
Isbell recalls a time in his life before the band members grew up, had families and decided that they wanted to be serious and sell some records. He said early in the tenure of the Truckers, the group had a gig in Denton, Texas that began at 2:30 in the afternoon. He said for a group that was basically a punk rock band, playing that early did not sit well with the band and they kicked into “Buttholeville” and basically cleared everybody out of the venue. The only people standing were Will Johnson and Dan Bonham from Centro-matic who he joined for barbeque, making his first friends on the road of people not from where he came. Isbell later would go on the road by himself and sit in just to play rhythm guitar with Centro-matic. When Isbell heard the band was breaking up, he says he started grieving and wrote the song that closes the album.
A month after the baby is born, he and Shires will go on the road in October. They will play four consecutive nights at the Ryman, the same stage where he swept the Americana Music Awards last Fall. The awe in Isbell’s voice can be felt as he says the name of the venue and savors its greatness.
A second later, Cook reminds listeners to get the new album at jasonisbell.com. She plugs the t-shirts too. And while shopping there, she says to look for an autographed diaper bag by Jason and Amanda.
Originally posted here.
