Jason Isbell on success after excess
A summer song from Jason Isbell is enjoying great success these days -- a whole ALBUM of his songs, to be precise. Quite a reversal of fortune for him, as he tells Anthony Mason:
When 36-year-old singer-songwriter Jason Isbell picks out a guitar ("I like these old '70s Martins") and starts to play, sometimes his shirt sleeve will ride up on his forearm.
"What's the tattoo on your arm?" asked Mason.
"The tattoo is from 'Boots of Spanish Leather,' from the Bob Dylan song: 'Carry yourself back to me unspoiled from across that lonesome ocean,'" replied Isbell. "It's kind of a salvage song, you know? It's about loss, but it's also about taking something away from that."
Words mean everything to the artist USA Today ranked "one of the great American songwriters," and who John Mayer called the best lyricist of his generation.
Last week, Isbell's latest album, "Something More Than Free," debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's rock, country and folk charts.
To hear the title track from Jason Isbell's album, "Something More Than Free," click on the Soundcloud player below.
"That's gotta feel pretty good," said Mason.
"It does. It's really more fulfilling to judge yourself by a different standard. But that being said," Isbell laughed, "it's not everything, but it's a really nice thing!"
Isbell grew up an only child in northern Alabama. His mother, Angela Hill Barnett, remembers Jason first picking up the guitar at about age seven. She says it came naturally to him.
"Everybody started paying attention in the family," she told Mason.
Pretty soon they were paying attention in nearby Muscle Shoals, too, at the legendary Fame Recording Studios. At 21, he was hired to write songs for Fame, where Little Richard, Aretha Franklin and the Allman Brothers had all recorded.
The songwriting job was his first steady income from making music,"other than, you know, $50 in a bar."
"So what did it mean to you to come here?"
"Well, it's a really big deal. It was the gateway to everything we wanted to do."
Isbell would soon make his mark with a band called The Drive-By Truckers. He would spend six years with the Georgia rock group, and marry bass player Shonna Tucker.
But by 2007, he'd divorced his wife, been fired by the band, and was drinking heavily. "I started drinking to celebrate," he said. "And then eventually I was still drinking, but I wasn't celebrating any more."
"When was the worst point for you?"
"I didn't really hit bottom like a lot of people do, but I could certainly see it coming."
That's when he re-connected with Amanda Shires, a musician he'd first met on stage a decade earlier:
"I thought he was good looking," she told Mason. "So after the show we were talking. And I asked him if he wanted to go swimming."
"Swimming?"
"That was one of my ways!"
"That was her line back then," Isbell laughed. "'Hey, buddy, you wanna go swimming?'"
Isbell politely declined Shires' first offer. And then, she said, "Ten or so years later he was a single man and I was a single lady, and I let him take me on a date!"
But Shires quickly challenged his drinking: "I just basically said, 'If you want help then we're going to get help. And if you don't and you keep running away from it, I don't want to be with somebody that's going to be a coward.'"
It was a wakeup call for Isbell. The next week he was in rehab -- and he sent notes to Shires every day.
"Imagine who you think I would be if I never took another drink," he wrote. "I sure hope you're still mine when you get this letter. If not, call me up. I'm sure I'll be waiting for you somewhere."
"They were charming letters!" Shires laughs.
"I write a good letter, Anthony! I write a good letter," said Isbell.
Songs poured out of him now, too -- songs about downfall and redemption that would make up his 2013 breakthrough album, "Southeastern."
"There's a man who walks beside me, he is who I used to be,
And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me,
And I wonder who she's pining for on nights I'm not around,
Could it be the man who did the things I'm living down."
-- From "Live Oak"
To hear Jason Isbell's album, "Southeastern," click on the Soundcloud player below.
"Was it scary writing those down?" Mason asked.
"Terrifying," Isbell replied. "Yeah, the whole process was terrifying. I didn't even know if I would be able to write. I didn't even know if I would be able to entertain people anymore."
"What was it like then to go up on stage and sing those songs?"
"That part was cathartic, because people started cheering at certain lines, like in 'Cover Me Up,' when I talk about getting sober. That kind of thing is amazing. If that doesn't affect you, you're made of stone."
"Put your faith to the test when I tore off your dress in Richmond on high
But I sobered up and I swore off that stuff forever, this time
And the old lovers sing 'I thought it'd be me who helped him get home'
But home was a dream, one I'd never seen 'til you came along."
-- From "Cover Me Up"
Isbell returned to the studio in Nashville this past spring, opening his notebook of lyrics to record a new song, called "Children of Children."
"At root, what's the song about?" asked Mason.
"This guilt that I've always felt, about coming into the world at a time when our parents were very young and not necessarily prepared for it."
Isbell's mom was just 17 when he was born.
"I feel like the first thing I did wrong was interrupt this woman's life," he said. "She never tried to make me feel that way. But the older I get, the more I think about it."
When asked her reaction to the song, his mother, Angela, said, "When he gave it to me I was in the back seat of his car and I was just crying, because that song means so much."
"You must hear so much in his music."
"Yeah, we have a joke in our family: 'You gotta watch what you say around him,'" she laughed, "'cause it'll show up in a song usually."
And the family is about to get bigger. Isbell and Shires, who married two years ago, are due to have their first baby next month.
While both have their own bands, they play on each other's records.
"What's it like to be able to do that?" Mason asked.
"It's a beautiful thing to share," said Isbell. "We don't pull any punches. If I'm in her band, she will tell me, 'Play fewer notes,' or 'Turn your amp down. My name is on the sign and I love you very much, if you need to hear that right now, I'll tell you that, too. But turn your amp down.'"
Jason Isbell may be a solo act, but he's not alone.
"It's something magical even for me," he said, "to be up there playing guitar and your wife's playing fiddle. And you're singing harmony. It's a metaphor that, like, really happened. There's really harmony there."
For more info:
- jasonisbell.com
- "Something More Than Free" by Jason Isbell (Southeastern Records), available July 17; Stream via Spotify; Also available via digital download from Amazon and iTunes
- Touring schedule
- amandashiresmusic.com
- Fame Recording Studios, Muscle Shoals, Ala.