Jason Isbell Writes Songs To Sort Out His Baggage

After more than a decade at the musical coalface — five-six years as a member of Southern rockers Drive-By Truckers, and since 2007 in various solo guises — gifted singer-songwriter Jason Isbell finally struck pay dirt with his fourth solo effort, Southeastern. On the back of that album the Alabaman scooped the pool at the 2014 Americana Music Awards, winning Album Of The Year, Artists Of The Year and Song Of The Year (for Cover Me Up), and Southeastern also featured heavily in myriad critics' end-of-year lists.

When it came time to record the follow-up Isbell subscribed to the age old adage 'If it ain't broke don't fix it', once again enlisting producer Dave Cobb and writing another batch of ruminative, heartfelt songs which for new album, Something More Than Free. It's a plaintive collection of intricate character studies and deft narratives, all tied together by Isbell's emotive back porch delivery. He didn't let the success of Southeastern put him off his game; he's come too far to fall into that rookie trap.

"You have to ignore that kind of pressure," he states softly. "If you're going to be serious about this and really try to write good records and good songs, you can't collapse under the pressure of having something good happen to you. I'm really grateful that Southeastern found some success, but I know people who have real problems and people who have a hard time paying their mortgage or getting their kids to school on time — following up a successful record is not a real problem in my books. So I really just did as much good work as I could, and I didn't rush things — I didn't go into the studio nine months after finishing Southeastern, I just took my time and did a lot of editing, and just worked really hard on the songs."

Even after all those years of hard work and toil in relative obscurity Isbell wasn't bothered in the slightest by suddenly appearing on so many radars.

"No, that's what you sign up for, you know. It's been a lot more comfortable with the touring — we play better rooms and we're able to travel in a bus, and we have a bigger crew and all that. That stuff's really good, but I'm not going to be weirded out by success. Enough other things have weirded me over the course of my life," he laughs heartily. "I just followed the songs, there wasn't really any concept going into the writing of the record. For me I think they work best when I try to document what's going on in my life and if I'm creating a character try and follow that character and allow the character to behave in a natural way. And if I'm writing something where I'm actually the first person narrator in the song then I just try to explain to myself how I feel about the world — that's pretty much the same concept I have when I go into write anytime."

There are clearly autobiographical moments on Something More Than Free as well as tracts that are obviously fiction, and Isbell explains that he likes occasionally blurring the lines between the two realms.

"I like the fact that you can blend the two — you don't have to delineate between them, that's not how people judge songs, whether they're fiction or not," he offers. "Even though books are judged that way, and movies are shelved that way in stores. I like the fact that I can tell part of my story and part of somebody else's all at the same time. I wouldn't say that either is more difficult for me — if I'm writing about a character that's in a certain place or a certain time then I'll have some research to do, but that doesn't really make it more difficult, it just opens up more avenues."

Of course while Isbell's lyrics are important they wouldn't hold up as they do without strong musical accompaniment. Does he believe that his songs derive more power from his music or his words?

"I think the lyrics are the most important part of my songs, but you don't want to separate those really because the way a word works — the phrasing of the word — and the melody are tied in so closely with the meaning and the sounds of the word itself," he reflects. "Say people were reading the lyrics as they were listening to the backing tracks minus the vocal, then I think you might be able to differentiate between the two, but I think the fact that there's a musicality in the lyrics as well — just the sounds of the words are musical — so I think it's really hard to figure out which is which. I think I'm probably better at writing lyrics than I am at composing."

Southeastern was stripped back and more of a solo album in the true sense of the world, and while Something More Than Free isn't miles removed in tone from its predecessor the members of his backing band The 400 Unit definitely had a bigger role to play this time around.

"With the last album I set out to make a solo album — initially I even thought it would just be me playing on Southeastern, and then we brought some of the band members in and some other people in just to add certain things or fill in the holes," the singer recalls. "But we were all there in the studio from day one on this project, and most of these things were recorded live as a group so I would definitely say that [they played a bigger role this time].

"I'm lucky to have 'em. They're people that I've known for a long time. The rhythm section, we grew up together — Jimbo [Hart, bass] and Chad [Gamble, drums] — and then Sadler [Vaden] the guitar player, he's from Charleston, and I met him when he was touring with a band when he was 19- or 20-years old. And Derry [DeBorja] the keyboard player, he was in Son Volt, and we toured together years ago. It's not like I had to put up a wanted ad or anything like that — I didn't have to hold auditions, I was fortunate enough to be able to work with my friends."

That shared history must make life on the road more bearable?

"After I quit drinking I had a lot more time during the day and a lot more focus."

"It does, it does," Isbell chuckles. "We have a system now where we all get along with each other and we know what buttons not to push."

The final song on Something More Than Free, titled To A Band That I Loved, concerns much-missed Texan outfit Centro-Matic, who sadly pulled up stumps last December after nearly 20 years together.

"That was the last song I wrote for the record," Isbell tells. "We were off for the first weekend — we'd recorded all week and it was our first weekend off — and I'd been listening to their music a lot over the years and they'd recently called it quits, so I wrote that song for those guys. It's funny, people don't write a lot of songs about that and it surprises me that they don't, because I know for a fact that a lot of songwriters and a lot of musicians wind up grieving when one of their favourite bands falls apart."

Isbell's own personal tastes seem quite varied — for instance he recorded a great version of Guided By Voices' Everywhere With Helicopter for the Sing For Your Meat tribute album a few years back — does he listen to a lot of stuff outside the Americana oeuvre?

"Oh yeah, definitely," he posits. "I probably don't listen to a lot of music that would be considered Americana, honestly. My friends when they make records I'll listen to those, or if it's Hayes Carll or Sturgill Simpson or Elizabeth Cook or Caitlin Rose I'll listen to those — if I know the person making the album — but if I'm just listening to something on my headphones then I like The National the lot, their last couple of records and I love the newest Ben Howard record, I think that's really great. Let's see, what else? My wife got me listening to that A$AP Rocky record out of nowhere, and it's funny because there's a Lucero sample on the first song on that record — my wife noticed that because she's known [Lucero frontman] Ben Nichols for a long time and she recognised it — and I thought that was a really interesting thing. Maybe that was one of the ones that Brian Burton produced, I don't know, but it's an interesting choice for a hip hop record."

So why does Isbell think that he's drawn to the type of music that he plays? Is it perhaps to do with being raised in the Deep South?

"Maybe so," he ponders. "It's not a conscious effort to make the type of music that I make — I didn't set out to make a certain kind of music, I just set out to tell certain kind of stories and the way those stories demand to be recorded is usually something that falls into that vein. But the things that I listened to very early on and the things that are still my favourite kinds of music are R&B music from the '60s and bands like The Allman Brothers and Little Feat in the '70s, and then '80s pop music — the stuff that was on the radio, you know? Crowded House and 'Til Tuesday and Prince and bands like that, artists like that — that stuff I think all wound up getting mixed up into the music that I make. But at its foundation it's probably a lot of the stuff that was recorded in Muscle Shoals before I was born — a lot of that R&B that people call 'soul music' and then the old rock'n'roll that people like The Rolling Stones were making."

Isbell's earliest songwriting forays actually earned him a publishing deal with the revered FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals — where dozens of the world's biggest hits of the '60s and '70s were laid down — while barely out of his teens, and he says that these days there's a real respect for the music that came from the region.

"Yeah there is, more so now than when I was a kid really," he explains. "They've had a bit of a resurgence because of the documentary that came out a couple of years ago [2013's Muscle Shoals], and there's been more attention paid to that place than there has been in any other time in my life. But from the inside there are still a lot of those musicians who are out playing on the weekends and working, and they're treated pretty well; they don't have what they deserve but they're local celebrities at the very least. Some of the best music ever came out of that place."

Which segues nicely into Isbell's time with Drive-By Truckers — that band's frontman Patterson Hood is the son of bassist David Hood, one of the famous Muscle Shoals 'Swampers' (the backing band at FAME who played on pretty much all of the studio's big hits back in the day). Does he look back fondly on his time with the hard-working Truckers?

"Oh yeah, we're still friends," Isbell admits. "Especially me and Patterson, we still talk quite a bit. It's one of those things where it works like any other friendship, really; it ebbs and flows, and sometimes you're really tired of being around each other and then time passes and everything's ok again. I don't know if we'll ever make music together again because I don't really feel like that's necessary at this point for either of us, but definitely I'm glad that I did it — I don't regret it at all."

When he left the Truckers in 2007 was it daunting starting off alone after being in a road band like that?

"Partly," Isbell ponders. "The pace of the show and having to do all of the heavy lifting when it came to singing the songs and writing the songs, that was a little difficult. But the fact that it was in my name and the success or failure of the project depended on what I was doing and how hard I was working and how creative I could be really kind of made up for that. I was really proud of the fact that I didn't have to compromise any kind of vision and I didn't have to negotiate when I was in the studio or making up the set-lists or anything like that, in a lot of ways I was so happy to be free from that that I didn't notice how much work I was doing.

"I definitely think I've gotten better at what I do. A lot of that is due to the fact that I've gotten older, and a lot of it is because I put more work into it now. There was a time when I thought that I wasn't finding success because there was some outside forces conspiring against me, but after I quit drinking I had a lot more time during the day and a lot more focus and I was able to work a lot harder on each individual song and each album, and that's really paid off a lot. I think I was probably a bit over-encouraged early on and I didn't realise that I wasn't working as hard as I could be working, and once I did that things changed."

So his recent wins were as much to do with elbow grease and hard work than any other factors?

"You have to start with something, you know?" Isbell continues. "When I started the solo project I'd been playing with the Truckers for quite a few years and then with other bands in Muscle Shoals and with friends, and I'd been practising songwriting for a long time before that, so I wouldn't say that it's something that would be a success for anyone who works hard enough at it — it also certainly takes some luck — but for me the change happened when I really dug into my own! I guess unconscious mind, for lack of a better term. I started pulling up all these things that were concerns for me — things that I'd buried — and I started facing these fears and writing about things that were difficult for me to discuss. And then spending hours and hours and hours on each song, rather as soon as the sun went down thinking, 'Ok, it's time for me to go out and start drinking' I could actually sit and write for eight or ten hours at a time."

So the creative process itself can be cathartic?

"Oh yeah, definitely," Isbell concedes. "I would say that's very much the case for me, far more than any kind of escapism. There are people who write for different reasons, but for me it's to sort out my own baggage and to unpack things."