Jason Isbell’s most recent album, released earlier this year, is a solo acoustic effort recorded in the aftermath of his divorce from Amanda Shires and a new romance with Canadian artist Anna Weyant.
Like so many heartbroken artists before him, Isbell turned his breakup into meaningful, melancholy art. Even the songs about new love, like today’s SOTD, are tinged with sadness. He knows that some of his greatest love songs were written about a romance that didn’t last.
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.
On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, when it looked like Joe Biden could defeat Donald Trump by holding the Blue Wall and flipping some reliably red states, Jason Isbell took to Twitter:
“If Biden wins Georgia I’m gonna make a charity covers album of my favorite Georgia songs- REM, Gladys Knight, Vic Chesnutt, Allmans, Cat Power, Precious Bryant, Now It’s Overhead, etc… And damn is that gonna be fun.”
Jason Isbell’s seventh album, Reunions, came out in May 2020 in the early days of Covid. Its air of melancholy nostalgia proved a perfect soundtrack for those uncertain times.
Recorded once again with The 400 Unit, the album finds Isbell digging into his past. “There’s ghosts all over the record,” he said in an interview. “That’s why I called it Reunions, because that’s what a ghost is: reuniting with somebody long enough for them to tell you what you missed the first time around.”
Continuing my Jason Isbell deep dive…
The gateway album for a favorite artist (the first work of theirs you hear) always holds a special place. Often it ends up being my favorite release. In the case of Jason Isbell, that album was 2017’s The Nashville Sound.
This record came to my attention after the track ‘If We Were Vampires’ showed up at #20 on the year-end Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. The album showed up at #5 on the publication’s albums list.
Meet Me In Montauk 