After getting sober I would work for hours at a time as I had nothing else to do, says Jason Isbell ahead of UK tour
JASON ISBELL is a song writer’s song writer. You can tell by the company he keeps.
He’ll never forget the moment some years ago when he heard a certain person singing one of his choruses back to him in unmistakeable tones.
“I’ve grown tired of travelling alone. Won’t you ride with me? Won’t you ride? Won’t you ride? ”
Isbell recalls: “At first, I thought it was somebody doing a Bruce Springsteen impersonation of singing my song. And then I realised, ‘No, that’s actually him!’
“It was a huge deal for me to meet Bruce, and for him to know who I was.”
Turned out that one of Springsteen’s sons had brought to his dad’s attention Isbell’s breakthrough 2013 solo album Southeastern, complete with the track Traveling Alone.
To the 47-year-old born in northern Alabama, two miles from the Tennessee state line, it was validation — just like his six Grammys and the fact that Southeastern appears in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of greatest albums of all time.
“I’m a punk but I’m not that big of a punk to pretend something’s not an honour,” the one-time member of Drive-By Truckers decides in his Southern drawl.
“I met Randy Newman and it was the same kind of thing,” he continues, casting his mind back to the 2021 Newport Folk Festival when both artists were on the same bill.
“I was so nervous to talk to Randy but I said to him, ‘Man, your songs are very important to me as a musician, as a human being’ — and he leaned in and said, ‘I like your songs, too’.
“I knew Randy was probably not the sort of person to bulls**t you.”
I’m speaking to Isbell as he prepares to hit these shores with his ace band, The 400 Unit, for a tour of the UK and Ireland which culminates with a night at London’s hallowed Royal Albert Hall on June 11.
But on this day, the hard- working singer is in Dallas for a solo acoustic show, showcasing last year’s captivating, intimate Foxes In The Snow album, when we’re connected via video call.
“My flight was cancelled last night because of bad weather so I drove here — took me nine and a half hours,” he reports from his hotel.
It’s 10am US Central Time and 4pm UK time and, despite the previous day’s exertions, Isbell seems fresh and focused for a deep dive into his life in music — and the songs that define him.
It’s clear from talking to this thoughtful soul that his career can be divided into two distinct categories — before and after he got sober — which he describes in depth later.
But first, we go back to his early life as the son of teenage parents, the subject of his song Children Of Children, and his early introduction to music.
Mom Angela was 17 and dad Mike was 19 when he was born so “I got to spend a lot of time with my grandad, who preached in a Pentecostal church in Alabama, and played guitar, mandolin, fiddle, banjo.
“And my uncle, my dad’s little brother, played guitar in a rock band.
“When I was around four, my parents would take me to band practice in his friend’s garage, and I would fall asleep, usually when they did Neil Young’s Like A Hurricane.
“Though my dad and mom didn’t play music, pretty much everybody else in my family did, at least as a hobby. It was seen as a birthright thing.
“I know this sounds like down-home Southern horses**t, but my grandad would make me play gospel music with him for a couple of hours a day.
“Then if I could get through it without getting lazy, I could play rhythm guitar. The guitar was huge, and I was small, and it would take a lot of work.”
Isbell became “obsessed” with blues after hearing Robert Johnson’s recordings and “this little white kid from a hillbilly town” would bombard his music teacher with questions about the Mississippi Delta pioneers.
“My teacher was a big rock and roll guy who had a different Rolling Stones T-shirt for every day of the week,” he says.
“He would call me out of class on the loudspeaker in a really gruff voice, so it sounded like I was in trouble. But I knew that he had made me a mixtape.
“There were a lot of people who took an interest in me early on. I got very lucky that way.”
As a teenager in the Eighties, “radio was huge” for Isbell, who singles out Crowded House and Elvis Costello in particular.
“As my parents were not much older than me, we listened to a lot of the same music,” he says.
“In those days, it was big arena bands like Journey and Foreigner, My dad liked country music, too, so he had Merle Haggard and Hank Williams records.”
At this time, Isbell started playing bars in the Southern music mecca of Florence and Muscle Shoals, which, “because of the liquor laws”, also had to sell food.
He says: “They would check the receipts to make sure you sold more food than alcohol, which was terrible for any kind of music scene — but really good for a 15-year-old kid because they couldn’t kick me out!”
In these places, he got to see legendary session men like Spooner Oldham, Donnie Fritts and, crucially, bass player and trombonist David Hood, father of Drive-By Truckers frontman Patterson Hood.
In 2001, Isbell joined the Truckers and hit the ground running by contributing two outstanding songs to their 2003 album Decoration Day, the title track and Outfit.
He says: “I liked playing guitar and singing background vocals, but I had a lot to prove.”
He describes how his dark, Southern gothic magnum opus about a multi-generational family feud came into being: “I wrote Decoration Day on the road, in Carbondale, Illinois, I think.
“We were staying at a friend’s and everybody else was asleep in the house.
“One person always had to sleep in the van to stop people stealing our gear. That night, it was me.
“I woke up early — around eight o’clock in the morning. So I had a couple of hours before everybody else started moving and I came up with Decoration Day.”
Another memorable Drive-By Truckers effort by Isbell is Danko/Manuel, his tribute to roots rock icons The Band, which appeared on the 2004 album The Dirty South.
He says: “At the time, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel were the only two not still alive. Now, none of them are.
“I was reading [drummer] Levon Helm’s book, This Wheel’s On Fire. He talked about having to siphon gas out of cars in parking lots while the rest of them were on stage. They were a bunch of feral kids in the early days.”
In 2007, largely thanks to heavy drinking and unreliable behaviour, Isbell left the Truckers and went solo.
It’s good to report that he’s on friendly terms with his old bandmates these days and joined them on stage last year for Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show.
He says: “We were very close at one point. It’s not easy to make friends in general so I try to keep the ones that I can.
“Even after I got sober, I didn’t quite know why I’d had drinking problems to start with.
“At first, you’re just hanging on for dear life and trying to stay sober. Eventually, if you do it right, you do repair the parts of yourself that you were ignoring.
“Once that happened for me, I was able to reconnect with those guys. We were able to be friends again and they’ve continued to make really valuable music.”
When it came to Isbell making his first solo album, Sirens Of The Ditch in 2007, highlighted by a couple of fan favourites, Dress Blues and The Magician, he had a lot to learn — and fast.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he sighs. “I know I had to argue a lot, which actually turned out to be a good thing.”
A big moment for him arrived with a yearning composition on his third album, Here We Rest (2011), his second with his band The 400 Unit and the last before he went into rehab for alcohol addiction.
To this day, Alabama Pines is one of his most performed live songs.
“When I wrote it, everything else in my life sucked,” he says. “It was a very dark time. I was in physical and psychological pain. Working on it was the most relief I got.”
He adds: “The complication in that song adds a lot of value to it — the fact that you’re yearning for a place that isn’t perfect.
“It’s a dynamic that finds its way into a lot of Drive-By Truckers’ work and a lot of my own. It’s very possible to miss a place that wasn’t necessarily all that good to you.
“That song doesn’t have a chorus, it never gets huge so it’s not an anthem. But it stands out in my solo work and I still like it. It has never let me down.”
Everything changed for Isbell after rehab and first notice of his sober approach is 2013’s breathtaking Southeastern with its enduring keepers, Cover Me Up, Stockholm, Elephant and the aforementioned Traveling Alone.
“I wasn’t in the same type of pain,” he says. “Recovering from addiction heavily involved dealing with myself — my life, my emotions, my situation — not postponing it.
“When I was drinking, I would write until the sun went down and then I’d think, ‘I need a drink’.
“With Southeastern, I would stay working for hours and hours at a time because I didn’t have anything else to do. It’s not like I was going to the bar.”
The record proved a big commercial success even if a song like Cover Me Up, recently covered by Morgan Wallen, is about recovering from addiction and the healing power of love, while Elephant is an unflinching study of mortality and the impact of cancer.
Today, Isbell performs such tracks from a slightly different perspective.
“With a room full of people cheering for these songs, we get to celebrate the fact that these horribly sad songs exist,” he smiles.
Next, we rattle through a few more Isbell staples like 24 Frames from 2015’s Something More Than Free with its sparkling electric guitar passages.
“I may have doubled up two exact same slide-guitar parts on that. It’s the old George Harrison trick from My Sweet Lord and it works every f***ing time.”
He sees guitar playing as his “hobby”. “My girlfriend paints very seriously and that’s her work,” he says by way of example.
“Lately she started working with miniatures and building doll houses, and that’s her hobby. It’s very close to painting but it’s not a commercialised part of her life.
“That’s how I look at guitar playing. Singing, songwriting, touring — that’s my job. If left alone for a couple of hours, I just sit and play guitar — that’s my hobby.”
There’s a profound Isbell song on 2017’s The Nashville Sound, If We Were Vampires, a big favourite of his friend, the late, great singer John Prine, who he describes as “thoughtful, witty, highly intelligent and emotionally open”.
“There’s some magic in that song,” he says. “Everything else on the album was written when I thought, ‘There’s so many f***ing love songs, why would I bother to do another one?’
“By the time I got to the chorus of If We Were Vampires, something hit me — the reason you love somebody, go through all that effort and pain, is because you’re going to die.
“Without death, we wouldn’t be motivated to live. It was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Wow! Thank God I weaved my way to that path’.”
A telling Isbell insight is revealed by It Gets Easier with its line, “it gets easier, but it never gets easy”, from the 2020 album Reunions.
It addresses his sobriety and brings this reflection: “I don’t think about drinking as much as I used to, but I do sometimes, not necessarily when things are bad.
“When it is going badly, the first thing you do is you make a plan – talk to friends, talk to a therapist, go to a meeting.
“For quite a few years, the hardest times have been to not think about drinking when things are going really well.”
Isbell’s consistently fine recorded output includes 2023’s Weathervanes, with standouts like reflective acoustic ballad Cast Iron Skillet and gritty rocker King Of Oklahoma, about the downward spiral of a blue-collar worker who turns to prescription meds.
Mention of them is cue for him to offer a warning to those attending his upcoming shows.
“When I’m writing a record, I think, ‘How am I going to make these people hold their pee for four more minutes?’
“Because when the new material comes out, that’s usually when everybody heads to the bar!”
- Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit play Belfast June 2, Dublin June 3, Bristol June 5, Gateshead June 6, Glasgow June 7, Manchester June 8, Birmingham June 10 and London’s Royal Albert Hall June 11
