Jason Isbell’s New Morning
Jason Isbell felt a rush of familiarity when he watched the final episode of Mad Men on his tour bus. As he saw Don Draper go AWOL from his advertising job and embark on an aimless cross-country road trip, Isbell recalled his own life around 2008, after his first marriage had fallen apart and he’d been fired from the Drive-By Truckers due largely to his heavy drinking. Isbell bought a motorcycle and took off from his home in Alabama. “I drove down to Florida, back up through Georgia and visited some of the girls I had met on the road,” he says in a husky Alabama drawl. “It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself. I got home feeling and looking worse than when I’d left, just completely lost.”
Isbell eventually went to rehab and turned his dark past into some of the best music to come out of Nashville this decade. On 2013’s Southeastern, he reflected on cocaine nights at Super 8’s, mistreating vulnerable women, and starting over. “I was behaving in a way that was deplorable on a lot of levels,” Isbell says, drinking Red Bull and smoking cigarettes on his tour bus, outside the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, New York, one recent afternoon. “The problem with drinking is you can drown out your conscience until it shuts up.” Bruce Springsteen called Southeastern a “lovely record” and sneaked up on Isbell at a Dr. John benefit to sing Isbell’s song “Traveling Alone” into his ear. Isbell sold out four consecutive shows at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in October.
“I’m kind of picky about songwriters, you know,” says John Prine. “But when I heard Southeastern, it just killed me. I loved it. I like songs that are clean and don’t have much fat on them — every line is direct, and all people can relate to it. That’s what I try to do, and that’s what Jason does. I really haven’t heard anybody that different in probably 30 years.”
Old ghosts still exist on Isbell’s new album, Something More Than Free, like an ex-lover who spills unflattering stories about Isbell to his wife. But Isbell finds more material in the common truths of the overworked and underprivileged people of the rural South — truck loaders, railroad workers, housewives. “I don’t think on why I’m here or where it hurts/I’m just lucky to have the work,” he declares on the title track, which he wrote partly about his father, a retired house painter. “Physical labor, manual labor — if you can stay close to those folks, there’s always plenty to write about, ’cause their issues are real issues.”
Isbell grew up in the low-income town of Green Hill, Alabama. “People came to school [just] to eat lunch,” he says. Green Hill is 20 miles from Muscle Shoals, where Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Percy Sledge and others did some of their best work. As a teenage guitarist, Isbell got to know many of the musicians on those records while sitting in at bars with bassist David Hood and organist Spooner Oldham.
As a student at the University of Memphis, Isbell made up songs to entertain his frat brothers and read original verse at poetry readings. One night, Isbell sat in with the Drive-By Truckers, a hard-living band led by Hood’s son Patterson. The Truckers invited Isbell to join as a full member, and he left on tour with them just two days later, becoming the third great voice in the group after Hood and Mike Cooley, who had just completed Southern Rock Opera, a concept album about Lynyrd Skynyrd. Isbell boiled down complex ideas into novelistic songs like “Decoration Day,” a devastating chronicle of family/neighbor turmoil, and “Danko/Manuel,” in which he compared his demons to those of two fallen members of the Band.
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