One reason I know Jason Isbell is a special talent is that he can write issue songs without losing me. I almost always bump up against overtly political songs, but he finds a way to make them work.
Isbell’s ninth album, Weathervanes, has a couple of those. One, ‘King of Oklahoma,’ tackles the opioid crisis and another, ‘Save the World,’ is a response to the Uvalde school shooting. In both cases, the songs succeed because he digs into the messy emotional truth at the core of the issues. He doesn’t write polemics, he writes diary entries.
Weathervanes is full of diary entries, some very personal and some by characters Isbell has invented. Every song — the fast ones and the slow ones — has an aching center that has become a hallmark of his songwriting. He’ll always knock you out with a turn of phrase or an unexpected melody.
This album contains one of my very favorite Isbell verses, in a song called ‘If You Insist‘ about a couple of lonely people meeting in a bar. “My mama spent every day alone in a house with noise and names,” he sings. “She got so tired of putting out fires she just laid down in the flames.”
‘Cast Iron Skillet‘ is another stunner, blending home-spun country wisdom (“don’t wash the cast iron skillet”) with painful memories about the violence and racism in those same small towns.
A couple of these songs were originally written for movie soundtracks but fell through. Isbell contributed a song to the 2018 A Star is Born and his songs have shown up on TV shows (he says getting ‘If We Were Vampires’ in an episode of This is Us led to a big payday). I’d love to see him on the Oscar stage someday.
Today’s SOTD hints at some trouble in his relationship with wife Amanda Shires. Isbell said this about the track:
There’s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody’s progressing like they’re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there’s loss in that. It’s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common.
He filed for divorce six months after this album’s release.
There’s a warm wind blowing through the laundromat
There’s a young man crying in a cowboy hat
He got square-toed boots, so he ain’t for real
Wouldn’t last five minutes on a pedal steel
[Chorus]
And I remember you at that place in Post
You were thick-cut bacon on Texas toast
Prairie dogs popping up to see
That strawberry woman sitting next to me
Strawberry woman sitting next to me
[Verse 2]
Monday morning, wake up slow
It was Friday night two hours ago
I’d sell the farm to see you smile
Well, it might just happen if we wait a while
[Chorus 2]
I may go stay out in the woods
Some time apart could do us good
I’ve been to heaven in a 6th Street bar
Strawberry woman and an old guitar
Strawbеrry woman and an old guitar
[Verse 3]
Well, the highway’s straight and the night’s so still
Barеly have to touch the wheel
But it hurts to move and it hurts to learn
I just kept on goin’ when I made a wrong turn
[Chorus 3]
I remember you looking up at me
Drinking Irish whiskey on the Irish sea
And we walked through weather and we walked through time
Strawberry woman with her hand in mine
Strawberry woman with her hand in mine
[Chorus 4]
I remember you when the bar was closed
Dancing on the table with a bloody nose
And you still look fine and you still look free
Strawberry woman with your back to me
Strawberry woman with your back to me
Meet Me In Montauk 
This deep dive, coupled with a look back at the other songs you have highlighted on your blog in the past, has me getting more and more excited to see Isball at the legendary Ryman in October. You coming with us?
very sad about the divorce 😢
Thank you for linking to all these other entries; this has been such a wonderful two weeks of deepening my love for Isbell and getting to revisit (and, sometimes visit for the first time) all these great moments and memories on your blog.
”Cast Iron Skillet” is a song that got me on first listen and another I’ve not yet heard in the context of its own album. When I listened to “If We Were Vampires” the other day in its rightful place on its album, it was as if I was hearing it for the first time.