Showing posts with label Jason Isbell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jason Isbell. Show all posts
Monday, January 14, 2019
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Monday, October 29, 2018
Sunday, May 28, 2017
Decoration Day: The true story behind Jason Isbell's song
http://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/music/decoration-day-the-true-story-behind-jason-isbells-song-tl-dr---idgaf/55143917/
Posted 1/23/2015
From the article...
Everyone I know who has heard the song comes away with the same question: Is it a true story. I was under the impression that it was just a fictional song about the types of family blood feuds you hear about growing up in the South like I did. The most famous of the these feuds is, of course, the Hatfields and McCoys. However, if you are from the Deep South you hear a lot of stories like this. There are always those families you are told "not to mess with". In every holler in Kentucky and at the end of every dirt road in Georgia there is a family who runs the seedier side of things in the area. There are people who you don't want to cross. Inevitably though, there always seems to be another family that decides they, in fact, do want to cross them and this usually turns into a feud that can last several generations. It turns out "Decoration Day" is about one of those families and that it is an entirely true and interesting story that gives us a glimpse into the rural South in the early 1980s.
The setting of the song is around Florence Alabama in Lauderdale County. The song is written from the perspective of James Calvin Lawson (who by most accounts went by his middle name Calvin). Calvin was the son of Deward Cecil Lawson who was called "Dude". Dude Lawson was one of those sorts of people that you didn't want to mess with.
Dude Lawson was one of three "Lawson Boys" (along with his brothers Edward and Earnest) who had a reputation for being bad men that you probably wanted to steer clear of if you could. On July 14th, 1961 Detective Captain Jim Carter and Detective Owen King went to the Lawson place during a "routine investigation" and ran into the Lawson Boys. Dude, Edward and Earnest beat up the two detectives pretty bad (as they were charged with assault with intent to murder) and robbed them of their firearms.
I imagine it was tough being the son of Dude Lawson. He was an outlaw and hated by many people in Lauderdale County, especially law enforcement. Being born into that kind of family isn't easy, but Calvin still loved his father and, despite having a tough childhood, he had a decent relationship with his father. His father (now in his 60s) would come to visit Calvin and his girlfriend Mary Ann Moore at their trailer on Butler Creek Road.
On May 17, 1982 the three were out planting tomatoes in the garden outside the trailer. At about 7:00 PM an older model green Plymouth sedan slowly drove past, stopped, backed up again in front of the house and stopped again. Three men jumped out of the car. The three men were identified by Calvin and Mary Ann as David Hollan Hill (who went by Hollan) and his two sons John Barton Hill and Dennis Hill.
Hollan Hill yelled, "It's pay-up time" and fired a blast from a shotgun toward Mary Ann and Dude who were standing near each other. Mary Ann jumped into a ditch when she heard the first shot. Calvin (who was standing further away) testified the three men opened fire with Hollan and Dennis firing shotguns while John Barton fired a high powered .30-30 rifle.
Dude Lawson was shot several times with shotguns loaded with bird-shot and once in the back with a .30-30 caliber bullet. After Dude went down, Hollan yelled, "This ain't all, we'll be back" before the three men entered the car and drove off.
Calvin ran to a neighbor's trailer to call police. He then loaded his father in Mary Ann's car and sped off toward the hospital in Florence. They met an ambulance on the road and transferred Dude into the ambulance who then took him to St. Florian Hospital. The 66 year old Dude Lawson could not be saved.
Most people reading this would believe this to be an open and shut case... a slam-dunk for the prosecutor. You had two witnesses who saw the whole thing, identified the shooters, the weapons and even the color, make and model of the car. In the rural South in the early 80s, things didn't always work out like you would expect.
Hollan Hill was a man of some influence. He was popular and well liked by many including law enforcement and city officials. He was an upstanding member of the Church. He was an award winning fiddle player who played in local Bluegrass bands. He was somewhat of a celebrity by small town Alabama standards.
Meanwhile, the Lawson's were known as poor white trash. Calvin (like his father) had been in trouble with the law and was on parole at the time of Dude's shooting. In the end, it was Calvin who was on trial and not Hollan Hill and his sons.
The prosecutor phoned in the state's case against Hollan. He didn't even bother trying to establish a motive. Why bother when you know you aren't going to win?
The Hill's high-powered attorneys had an easy time attacking the credibility of the witnesses. Mary Ann Moore was a girl about town with a less than stellar reputation... I mean she was shacking up with a Lawson after all. They accused Calvin of being drunk the day of the shooting.
Only in the South will you see a string of government officials called to testify FOR the defendant AGAINST a man who watched his father murdered in front of him. A former judge, a former sheriff and a former state trooper all testified against the Calvin Lawson. In fact, there were a slew of people in town who testified against Lawson and/or for the Hills (even going so far as to give the Hills alibis).
On Wednesday, March 28th, 1984 it only took the jury one hour to find all three Hills not guilty of murder and attempted murder. It seemed that if your name was Lawson and you lived in Lauderdale county Alabama, you could be gunned down in front of witnesses and not get justice. No one was going to testify on your behalf and no one was going to shed a tear over your death.
Hollan Hill went on to live a long and fruitful life. He died in 2008 at the age of 83. Dennis Hill passed away before his father did, though I cannot find any details on his death. To my knowledge, John Barton Hill is still alive at the time of writing this article.
The Drive-By Truckers (Jason Isbell at center)
The most interesting thing about "Decoration Day" to me is that Jason Isbell is actually related to Hollan Hill and not the Lawson's. Hollan Hill was Jason's great uncle (his mother's uncle is what I read). Jason said in an article that he attended Hollan's funeral. It is just fascinating to me that he chose to write the song from the perspective of Calvin Lawson rather than his own relative's.
At a concert in Norway in 2012 Jason had this to say about the song: "So when I was a little kid I was about 5 or 6 years old, my Mama's Uncle Hollan killed a man that lived down the street from him... and uh, this was in the 80's, about like 85-86 when the state of Alabama when the "he needed killin' defense" still stood. So you could basically just say, "well he needed killin'" and that was the end of the trial and he didn't get into any trouble for it. That's kinda how it happened and I mean there's a few more details to that but the man needed killin', so...
He didn't try to hide, run off, or burn the body, he just said "I killed him, he needed killin', but um sometime around my 17th or 18th year somebody in the family actually told me what happened and before that they never really talked about it that much and it wasn't the kind of thing that we really wanted everybody to know about.
So, my Mother made the worst mistake in the world when she was telling me about it right as I was learning how to write songs. So I wrote this one on the front porch in Houston Texas, about 2001."
So, the Hill side of the incident sheds a little bit of a different light on the whole thing. It was their belief that Dude Lawson had done something which warranted him being killed.
In all my research, I could never find out exactly what it was that set this whole incident into motion. No one at the trial testified as to the motive. Neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorneys tried to establish a motive.
We really have no clue what Dude Lawson did, but we do know a lot of people in that town weren't too worried about him being dead.
That has to say something about his character. Did the Hills do the town a favor by getting rid of someone who needed to go? Is that why it only took a jury one hour to come back with a not guilty verdict? Did the incident with "The Lumber Man's son" actually happen or was that a bit of poetic license?
Since just about everything else in this song turns out to be true (more or less) it isn't too far fetched to think that may be at least partly based in truth too. Either way, I find the whole story captivating.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
Review: ‘Something More Than Free’ by Jason Isbell
An album that presents a lighter side of the talented Jason Isbell without ignoring the bleaker parts of his life.
By Barry Mazor
August 4, 2015
When I saw Jason Isbell perform in 2003, at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J., he was a young relative newcomer to the Drive-By Truckers, and had just contributed a pair of startlingly conceived and executed songs to the album “Decoration Day” by that smart and song-rich band of Alabama-raised alternative-country rockers. One was the title number, concerning multigenerational feuding families, one family being his own; the other was “Outfit,” based on cautioning yet encouraging life and career advice he’d received from his father, a working-class house painter. (“Don’t call what you’re wearing an outfit . . . don’t worry about losing your accent.”)
In the course of the decade that followed, Mr. Isbell left that group, wrote new, rootsy, narrative yet melodic songs, some leaning toward rock, others more toward country or folk, and made new records, both solo and with his own accomplished band, the 400 Unit. (The band was named for a Muscle Shoals, Ala. area psychiatric ward.) He married, divorced and married again, had serious trouble with alcohol, and then worked to get and stay sober. All of that became ballad fodder for his acclaimed album of 2013, “Southeastern.” That sober and sobering look back garnered him Album of the Year, Artist of the Year, and also Song of the Year (for “Cover Me Up,” his moving song about finally being ready for love), at the 2014 Americana Music Association Awards.
All along, he’s had considerable performing tools to work with—dramatic flair, vocal grace that conspicuously distinguishes his sound from roots-rock rasping, and guitar prowess to match. He’s got range. In recent months I’ve seen him and his band rivet a partying throng that sang right along with his “Southeastern” songs at the Jimmie Rodgers Music Festival in Meridian, Miss., and a more sedate nightclub crowd respond to an acoustic duo show, performed with his wife, violin-playing singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, at Nashville’s City Winery. (They are expecting their first child in September.)
How the now much-appreciated Mr. Isbell would respond artistically to cheerier times has been an open question, but the question is answered by his new, fifth album, “Something More Than Free,” released July 17 on Southeastern/Thirty Tigers Records. He takes more advantage of his performance latitude and of his best melodic instincts, and has come up with an album at least as strong and engaging as his previous, much-lauded one.
The new songs do not swing in mood either to the perpetually sunny or the party-time side of the street, and they don’t simply shove his bleaker experiences aside. That “something more than free” of the album title implies “free of burdens” and, one suspects, “free of bad habits.” To the tired working man narrator of the title song, though, the phrase also suggests finding new appreciation and acceptance of “doing what I’m on this earth to do.” Mr. Isbell displays broader self-acceptance and a healthily creative new dynamic throughout this album. You sense that most in the sounds—and the way those sounds play against the lyrics, sometimes rough, sometimes sweet, always in league.
It is a record dominated by hooky guitar riffs, songs with earworm tunes, and arrangements that range from understated acoustic guitar picking to, at times, Wall of Sound-style orchestral rock from the 400 Unit. Dave Cobb, who produced Jason Isbell’s previous outing as well as recent, acclaimed albums by country adventurers Sturgill Simpson and Chris Stapleton, again produced. Mr. Isbell blatantly, even gleefully pays appropriating homage to such musical predecessors as Joe South, Steve Earle and Bruce Springsteen by picking up on and playing with their tunes, riffs and rhythms.
For example, the catchy first single, “24 Frames” (as in the frames for one second of motion-picture film), attaches the suggestion that, in some moods at least, God seems “something like a pipe-bomb ready to blow,” to jangling buoyant pop sounds reminiscent of R.E.M. or even, with the keyboards evoking bagpipes, of 1980s Scots roots rockers Big Country. “Flagship,” on the other hand, set off by a simple guitar strum throughout, considers a once-grand hotel, an old couple at the bar sitting “a thousand miles apart,” and arrives at an offhand thought that rises to a suggestion, even a vividly detailed promise: “Baby, lets not ever get that way.”
The song that may best capture how this gifted, always surprising songwriting singer sees things right now—aware of complex backstories true and false, letting the sounds used add to the sense, and loving both artists and art—is “Palmetto Rose.” The song observes and contemplates the “rose” bouquets woven from sweetgrass and long hawked to passing couples on the streets of Charleston, S.C. The track sounds like unadulterated old-school Southern blues rock, but then the catchy, very country chorus that kicks in seems derived from Jimmy Martin’s “20/20 Vision” bluegrass hit of the 1954, crossing race lines in a song that also recalls the slave trade. The legend long offered by the Charleston vendors, mainly enterprising African-American kids approaching white tourists, says that Palmetto roses were handed to Confederate soldiers leaving for the war as “everlasting” love tokens. Mr. Isbell dismisses that old tale as rubbish (a stronger term is employed), but what is saluted, unabashedly, is the authentic artistry and skill employed by the street kids in weaving those alleged history-laden keepsakes.
The artistry at work here makes this album instantly accessible, engaging, but also built to last—a smooth yet deep outing that proves, along the way, that Jason Isbell, who is now finding growing popular success, has the goods to be a James Taylor- or Paul Simon-level singing, songwriting star.
Mr. Mazor, author of “Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music” (Chicago Review Press), writes about country and roots music for the Journal.
Jason Isbell's New Morning
The former Drive-By Trucker blew up his life — then became a master of Southern-gothic heartache
Jason Isbell (David McClister)
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.
Isbell had no problem adapting to the Truckers' lifestyle. He would wake up and start drinking, finishing off a fifth of Jack Daniel's by the end of a show. "We were lucky if we could walk off the stage," he says flatly. "I'd wake up in a lot of pain and not know where I was — some girl's house somewhere."
Isbell married bassist Shonna Tucker in 2002 after, he says, she saved his life one drunken night (she joined the band a year later). But the honeymoon didn't last long. "I slept with people I shouldn't have slept with," he says. "I started going outside the marriage." They separated — sort of. "We were still in the band together, and so we were only separated by the distance between those two bunks," he says. "She didn't deserve that, but I shouldn't have married her in the first place."
The toxic environment — combined with Isbell's explosive temper at the time — was too much for Hood and Cooley, who fired Isbell in 2007. (They've reconciled.) Isbell burned more bridges, lost more friends and recorded two albums with his band the 400 Unit. In 2011, he started seeing Amanda Shires, an old friend who had played fiddle and guitar with everyone from the Texas Playboys to Todd Snider. She had little tolerance for his excuses: "I told somebody in her presence, 'I don't drink in the morning,' and she said, 'Your morning is one in the afternoon. And you do drink at one in the afternoon.' " Shires and friend Ryan Adams convinced Isbell to go to rehab. "Rehab is like a divorce," he says. "The divorce isn't nearly as sad or shitty as the two or three years leading up to it."
After sobering up, Isbell started reading "big, thick books," including Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian — and dedicated six to eight hours a day to writing songs full of aphorisms like "There's one thing that's real clear to me/No one dies with dignity" and "Is your brother on a church kick?/Seems like just a different kind of dope sick."
"A lot of people in Nashville think that the best song is the catchiest, or the one that sells the most copies," he says at one point. "They're editing songs in a way that make them seem more consumable, I guess. I'm trying to edit them in a way that makes them more honest."
One of those songs is a new single, "24 Frames," a searing account about how loss can upend one's world. "I still have the problem of thinking I'm in control of things I'm not in control of," he says. "No matter what you thought your plans were, that's not how things are going to work out, and that's the only way you can really, I think, live successfully."
Isbell takes a long drag off his last cigarette and cracks another Red Bull. "With karma too, it's like, 'What have I done to deserve this?' That's always the wrong question. It doesn't matter. The only right question is 'What do I do now?' That's it."
From The Archives Issue 1241: August 13, 2015
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/jason-isbells-new-morning-20150807#ixzz3iPRbtZlL
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Related:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jason-isbell-on-success-after-excess/
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Jason Isbell's success shows that country music is splitting in two
Alienated from the commercial country scene, 2015 has seen a group of more soulful artists find success on their own terms, and without the help of radio
Jason Isbell: incisive in his disenchantment. Photograph: Dan Hallman/Invision/AP
By Grady Smith
28 July 2015
This week singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, the Alabama native whose breakout album Southeastern landed him on the top of many critics’ year-end lists in 2013 (this one included), debuted in first place on Billboard’s country chart with his latest set Something More Than Free. Despite being unknown to the vast majority of modern country music fans, Isbell’s wildly acclaimed album sold about 46,000 copies, just a few hundred more than Alan Jackson’s Angels and Alcohol, which wound up in second place.
Both these albums are excellent. Isbell’s songwriting thrives because of his honest reflections about southern identity and working-class life that are rarely glamorous, but always incisive in their disenchantment. “You thought God was an architect,” he sings on standout track 24 Frames. “Now you know He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow.” Dave Cobb – who has become one of Nashville’s most sought-after producers after delivering lauded LPs from Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton and Lindi Ortega, not to mention Isbell’s Southeastern – once again masterfully captures Isbell’s ragged tone with simple and potent arrangements that ask you to lean into the sound rather than bop along with it. Though it’s got clear roots in southern music, the album isn’t exactly a straightforward country album. Tellingly, it was also listed as the No 1 album on the rock and folk chart this week too.
Jackson’s disc is more upbeat, a little twangier and much more in line with what many listeners know as traditional country music. The veteran star, whose biggest career hits include Chattahoochee, Don’t Rock the Jukebox and Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning, keeps things straightforward on Angels and Alcohol, and what a delight that he does. There is no Auto-Tune here, no drum machines or handclaps, no repeated “Hey!” shouts over the chorus, and no other concessions made to the embarrassing trends of modern country radio. Jackson just plays his songs (he wrote seven of the 10 tracks on his own), and the prominent steel guitars and fiddles augment his naturally jovial voice. Winsome songs like You Can Always Come Home and When God Paints don’t feel at all out of place beside playful tracks like Jim and Jack and Hank. The collection is utterly charming.
That both albums are selling so well continues the trend that has already defined 2015 in country music discourse: quality country artists are thriving without the support of country radio. Jackson hasn’t climbed higher than No 50 on the country airplay chart during this album cycle, and Isbell hasn’t charted on it at all. And yet here they are with the top two albums in the format. Former Sony Nashville CEO Gary Overton couldn’t have chosen a more ironic year to utter his now-infamous statement “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” This year has seen Kacey Musgraves’s Pageant Material, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s Django and Jimmie, Aaron Watson’s The Underdog and Blackberry Smoke’s Holding all the Roses reach the pole position on the albums chart without having songs that cracked the Top 40 at country radio. Chris Stapleton’s ultra-buzzy Traveler opened in second place without a radio hit, and Ashley Monroe’s The Blade, after topping the iTunes chart over the weekend, appears poised for a strong debut as well.
It’s exciting to watch quality musicians achieve major commercial recognition for their hard work. Good music is good music, and it’s always nice when people actually hear it. But amid all the blogosphere chatter about how the success of artists like Isbell and Jackson is great for country music, I have to wonder whether that’s really the case. On the one hand, these acts succeeding without the support of country radio seem like obvious evidence about where country music should be headed. Country fans are finding their music on their own already, so it’s easy to dream about how well an artist like Stapleton or Sturgill Simpson would fare with the Nashville promotional machine fully behind them.
On the other hand, the success of these acts reveals a glaring dichotomy that has gradually developed in country music – namely, that the genre is splitting in two.Country radio isn’t backing down from its data-driven quest to make country sound as broadly consumable to as many people as possible anytime soon. All the pop choruses, programmed drum beats, fast tempos, electric guitars, hip-hop cadences and other trends that have thrived in the business of mass-market country radio aren’t going away. They’ve been good for the short-term bottom line, and even if they’re hurting the long-term brand of country music, the immediate dollar signs are all that business folks can understand.
Jason Isbell wouldn’t sound at home on country radio stations now, and it’s almost inevitable he won’t in the years to come – especially as stations are increasingly owned by only a handful of major corporations. In recent months, many country acts seem to be putting down their pitchforks and retreating from the battle about state of the genre. Trying to take back the soul of “country”, which has become a massive marketing moniker that bears little to no resemblance to the country lifestyle, is feeling more and more like a fruitless battle.
Kacey Musgraves’ label, Mercury Nashville, recently commissioned an indie radio promoter to take her music to Americana radio stations. They’re still pursuing country airplay with her new single Dime Store Cowgirl, but it’s notable that she’s currently sitting at No 5 on the Americana radio chart – along with Jason Isbell, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, Chris Stapleton, Dwight Yoakam, Kasey Chambers and Will Hoge, too – and excitedly tweeting about her success there. Country stars have long resisted artistic identities outside the country market, so as to not water down their stock with country radio programmers. But lately, those acts who have either gotten too old or who have been shunned by country radio altogether are beginning to seek greener pastures under various genres like the burgeoning umbrella genre Americana, which also encompasses folk, blues and rock. The countriest country stars working today are getting increasingly uninterested in being known as “country”. And so, it appears the schism of country music has officially begun. Let’s see where it goes from here.
Monday, March 03, 2014
Newly sober Jason Isbell casts a dry spell on the listener
February 5, 2014
A lot has changed since Jason Isbell’s last headlining show in Madison.
His Feb. 7 show at the Barrymore Theatre will follow a string of 15 consecutive sold-out shows on the east coast. He’ll play songs new and old, including some from his most recent album, “Southeastern,” which has topped critics’ and bestsellers’ lists since its June 2013 release.
Travel has gotten more comfortable, and there are a lot more people at the shows, Isbell says on a day between stops in Ohio and Indiana, as he works his way toward the Midwest.
“It’s good stuff,” he says, his voice softer than his songs let on. “Really exciting.”
But it’s not just the size of the venues or the reach of his records that have changed.
He’s been sober for about two years, now, and married for a little less than one. His wife, fiddle player Amanda Shires, tours with him. They share the stage with his band, the 400 Unit — named for the psychiatric ward of a hospital in his home state of Alabama.
“Southeastern” is Isbell’s first solo effort since 2007’s “Sirens of the Ditch.” His last headlining show in Madison was just a month after the release of 2011’s “Here We Rest,” one of two albums that carried the 400 Unit name. He played the Barrymore in April 2013, with Todd Snider. Those shows and albums came after Isbell’s time with the Drive-By Truckers.
“I had a whole lot more time and focus to work on this album,” Isbell says. “I was home, and I wasn’t going out and drinking every night. I wasn’t spending most of the day recovering from a hangover. I was able to put a lot more work into the words and the melody. I think it helped, and made the album a lot more consistent. It made it possible for me to express myself a lot better than I had in the past.”
He says his shows are also better, as a result.
He still plays the old songs. Some of the staples from his days with the Truckers — including “Decoration Day” and “Outfit” make their way into his performances. Nothing is off limits, he says.
Even with a new perspective on his own life, the old songs remain the same.
“I wrote ‘em all for a very specific purpose,” he says. “I still remember, or try to — I remember the place I was in, the situation I was in when I wrote ‘em initially. That’s my way of really delivering them honestly to the audience. Why did I write this song to start with — what was I feeling, thinking, what was going on with my life?”
Some songs can take a day to write, while others take a year, Isbell says. It’s no surprise when he says he likes to listen to 'story songs.' He appreciates songwriters who can open up to their audience and write things that are personal — and he tries to write to his own tastes.
The result is songs like “Live Oak,” in which Isbell lays his own fears bare in the guise of a murderer’s tale. “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,” the song begins, with only his rich, haunted voice.
As it goes on — “I was rougher than the timber shipping out of Fond du Lac / When I headed south at 17, the sheriff on my back” — it sounds like the killer might be from Wisconsin.
“He is,” Isbell says.
Where did the story come from?
“I made it up,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know, really. I don’t know why I chose that location for it. That was a little bit of allegory. I was worried about when I cleaned my life up and got on the straight and narrow, I was wondering about how effective I’d be as an artist, as a partner in my relationship and as a friend to people. I was wondering about what parts of myself would be different on the other side. Looking back, it was something I had to get down at that point in time, because I don’t have those concerns anymore.”
Isbell is a chameleon as a narrator, singing of his own experiences and others’ with a shared level of honesty. He fits the nuances of a novel into the length of a song, and sets the stories to music.
“I think being honest with folks really goes a long way,” Isbell says. “To start out, you really have to have a pretty good understanding of how words work, how to phrase things and make ‘em sound musical — but I think the most important part of what’s worked for me is just being really honest with people, and trying to make them feel like they’re not alone.”
Read more: http://host.madison.com/entertainment/music/newly-sober-jason-isbell-casts-a-dry-spell-on-the/article_338e28ba-06dc-53d1-aa8b-fbfbe986bd83.html#ixzz2uu8m3Tx9
Saturday, October 05, 2013
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Jason Isbell – The Troubadour of the New South
Submitted by cullmansense on Mon, 2013-07-15 01:29
My adoration for Jason Isbell is no secret. It is rooted in his brilliantly folkloric southern sensibilities. His previous work, particularly his 400 Unit albums, listen like parables of the modern south, utilizing the iconic imagery for anyone below the Mason-Dixon but still reflective of something poignantly personal. While these elements are all present in SOUTHEASTERN, he has never produced a more intimate album. Isbell is confessional and reflective about his struggles with alcohol and cocaine, his reckless youth, and his transformative sobriety. And in typical fashion, he is both direct and allegorical depending on the song or the verse. Melancholy regret and remembrances do not dominate all tracks; there is also a celebration, as Isbell is clearly happy with who he has become- a sober man in love.
For instance, COVER ME UP and TRAVELING ALONE tell the story of someone who has crossed a personal Rubicon inviting hope and happiness into a darkened life. The shadow of that darkened life swirl around the set list as the song LIVE OAK metaphorically discusses the elements of our past that haunt us using the canvas of American outlaw mythology. This track, more than any other, draws obvious parallels with the darker side of American music legend Johnny Cash.
With the metaphor stripped away, YVETTE and SONGS THAT SHE SANG IN THE SHOWER seem to be deeply cutting experiences that expose moments of Isbell's reckless youth. In SONGS, Isbell's lyrical genius weaves a vivid story though the words are Spartan- "On a lark, on a whim, I said there's two kinds of men in this world and you're neither of them. And his fist cut the smoke. I have an eighth of a second to wonder if he got the joke." The scene is painted, the brushstrokes few. Then, in the aftermath, a confessional- "In a room by myself. It looks like I'm here with the guy that I judge worse than anyone else. So I pace and I pray and I repeat the mantras that might keep me clean for the day."
In SUPER 8, Isbell delivers the carefree, irresponsible country tinged rock and roll songs that harken back to his DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS days. The riches of Isbell's transformation do not only manifest in his lyrics; his wife, Amanda Shires, his obvious anchor in a storm of temptation, is a marked presence on the album. The sweeping violin, played by Shires, transforms the song NEW SOUTH WALES from a story about strangers in a strange land to an authentic English (via Australia) folk ballad. Nowhere is Isbell's gift of intelligence in language, metaphor, and imagery more polished that in STOCKHOLM and ELEPHANT, where he wrestles with falling in love and death respectively. Both songs layer innuendo, meaning and cliché within Isbell's typical narrative clarity. The album is a journey of reflection and change, so the fitting capstone is RELATIVELY EASY. This is the grown-up, sober Isbell seeing the big picture of life. Despite problems, personal demons, loss, and trivial irritations, things for Jason Isbell have become "relatively easy."
I had the opportunity to catch the last show in the first leg of his SOUTHEASTERN album tour in Chattanooga, TN on Saturday night. For those that know the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel and campus, you may know the venue. Nestled in the far back of the tourist hotspot is a former roller rink turned rock venue called Track 29. The large standing room, place was lined with dedicated fans. Isbell is always a stellar live performer with his backing band the 400 Unit (named for The Shoals infamous mental ward).
He is one of the rare performers who sound better and richer live than in the confined and controlled environment of the studio. The most striking aspect of the show was the crowd’s eagerness to sing along and celebrate his new album. Usually, at a show, the attendees all eagerly await the “hits” or a personal favorite. Here, songs that are scarcely a month old were sung in chorus from an adoring crowd as if they were perennial hits. When Isbell’s lyrics took a personal turn and his sobriety was mentioned the entire crowd rejoiced, unprovoked, in support and celebration of his life style change.
During his encore, he took the stage alone and did an acoustic rendition of a favorite from his days in the Drive- By Truckers. The song, TVA, could not have found a more receptive audience, as the Florence born Alabama native praised the Tennessee Valley Authority as a continuing economic and cultural boon created in the depths of the Depression. He was after all playing to a Chattanooga crowd in the very heart of the TVA. The feeling that pulsed through the crowd was almost religious. He and the band closed with a rare cover, the Rolling Stones’ CAN’T YOU HEAR ME KNOCKING. The Stones like Isbell are one of rock and rolls greatest gifts, irrevocably tied to the sounds of the Alabama Shoals.
I'll leave this hopefully insightful commentary with perhaps my favorite turn of phrase in an album filled with them. It is indicative of the trials and redemptions related in this masterpiece called SOUTHEASTERN- "A heart on the run keeps a hand on a gun. You can't trust anyone. I was so sure what I needed was more I'd shoot out the sun. Days when we raged, we flew off the page. Such damage was done. But I made through `cause somebody knew I was meant for someone."- COVER ME UP by JASON ISBELL
RECOMMENDED LISTENING- Alabama Pines, TVA, Stockholm, Heart on a String, Decoration Day, Outfit, and the album Live in Alabama by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit (2012)
By Dillon Lee
Filmmaker, CHS Theatre Director, Pop Culture Critic-At-Large
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Jason Isbell, Happily Singing Sad Songs
Now sober and married to singer/fiddle player Amanda Shires, the former Drive-By Truckers star has a new outlook and a new album, "Southeastern."
After closing his set with a ditty about death, Jason Isbell wryly suggested that his listeners go out and see a feel-good movie, or catch a show by Cirque de Soleil.
"Yeah, I hoped they would do something happy to get that taste out of their mouth," says Mr. Isbell, a former mainstay of the alt-country rock band Drive-By Truckers. Now solo, he was performing a set at New York City's Rockwood Music Hall to showcase his new album of emotion-freighted story songs, "Southeastern," due June 11. "It's important not to bring everybody down too much, but I like to be up there playing those really sad songs."
Accompanied by his bride of three months, Amanda Shires, whose sweet mournful fiddle playing helped set the mood, Mr. Isbell, strumming a six-string and singing in a rich, clear-channel tenor, made death by cancer ("Elephant"), homicide ("Live Oak") and despair ("Stockholm") sound good. "Even when you're singing about miserable characters," he says, "there's a happiness in doing it right. If you tell a good story, there's a joy in that that transcends unhappy subject matter."
As much as he enjoys conjuring misery in song, Mr. Isbell says that he's never been happier. After a failed marriage (to former Drive-By Truckers bassist Shonna Tucker) and seeming bound for a booze-fueled fall, he turned his life around. In the space of a year, he quit drinking, finished a tour with fellow musician-in-recovery Ryan Adams, moved to Nashville to be with Ms. Shires, got engaged, recorded "Southeastern" on the eve of their February wedding and listened to final mixes while honeymooning in Costa Rica.
Amid all that whiplash life change, sobriety seems to have been the linchpin. "I wouldn't have gotten married if I hadn't quit drinking, I can tell you that for sure," Mr. Isbell says. "She wouldn't have put up with any more of that.
On stage, the rapport between the newlyweds is plainly evident. "I remember from my first marriage, being in a band with my first wife; it can be really, really difficult if things aren't going right," Mr. Isbell says. "A lot of people remember Linda kicking Richard Thompson in the shins when he's trying to play a solo. That's tough when that happens in front of an audience.
"But if things are going right as they are for me and Amanda, it's beautiful."
A gifted songwriter and performer in her own right, Ms. Shires, whose third solo album, "Down Fell the Doves," (Lightning Rod), is due Aug. 6, appears on one track of "Southeastern;" but she played a larger, impossible-to-credit role in birthing the album.
"We had just moved in together and got engaged," says Mr. Isbell. "We didn't want to spend a second apart from each other. But we needed to to get some work done. So we decided that two or three times a week we'll get up in the morning and you'll go to one part of the house and I'll go to another and we won't go to the movies or go out to dinner or watch Netflix or play Scrabble until we're each done writing a song. Then we'll play it for each other."
Mr. Isbell says that half the 12 tracks on "Southeastern" came from those writing sessions and "probably that many on her record too."
"It's a little intimidating," he says of the couple's head-to-head writing challenge. "She's got really good taste. I think there is [a sense of competition] but it's friendly competition; you don't want to get too competitive with your wife about anything. Like her grandfather says, you can either be happy or you can be right."
Raised in an extended musical family in one of the most music-rich sections of the south—his hometown of Greenhill, Ala. is a short drive from Muscle Shoals, Ala., home to FAME Studios, a soul music shrine—Mr. Isbell was taught to play and sing by his paternal grandfather, a Pentecostal preacher. "My first real exposure was a form of day care," he says. "My parents couldn't afford to send me anyplace they had to pay for so I stayed with my grandparents; my grand-dad would play music and teach me to play really early on. He did it to spend time with me and to bond, but also to keep my hands busy and keep me from breakin' stuff."
Schooled in his grandfather's gospel and "old country stuff," Mr. Isbell was sitting in "with the grown-ups" on bandstands as a 15-year-old high schooler. "My parents would drop me off on a Friday or Saturday night [at local restaurants that featured live music] and I would be there for three or four hours sitting in; some of those folks were David Hood [father of Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood] and Spooner Oldham and other people who had worked on the Muscle Shoals [recordings] in the 1960s and '70s. As I got older, soul became my favorite kind of music and I listened and studied it. I went `Wow! David from the Mexican restaurant played on "I'll Take You There," by the Staples Singers!' "
After playing in local rock and country bar bands, Mr. Isbell was a junior at the University of Memphis when he was offered a 45-minute solo spot at a local coffee house. "I stayed up the night before the show and wrote 45 minutes worth of songs," he recalls. "Those were the songs that got me a publishing deal. Monthly money for writing songs!"
Back home in Alabama, Mr. Isbell's friendship with Mr. Hood led to an invitation to join the Drive-By Truckers in 2001. Six years later, Mr. Isbell launched his solo career following what may be the most congenial breakup in rock history.
As for his own story line, Mr. Isbell says the dramatics were kept to a minimum. When he quit drinking, he says, "there wasn't gunfire or anything. I just wanted to remember all this stuff. When it happened with the Truckers, I had a real good run but I don't really remember most of it.
"Most times you don't get two chances to find success in the music business. This time I want to remember all the little things, all the good shows and all the good days."
A version of this article appeared May 31, 2013, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Jason Isbell, Happily Singing Sad Songs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)