Singer Jason Isbell opens up about battling alcoholism and coming to terms with his past in new album Reunions
IT takes a brave man to dredge up memories of his alcoholic former self and share them with the world.
But Jason Isbell has done it with unswerving candour on his latest album, Reunions.
On penultimate track It Gets Easier, he recalls “the cold burn of whiskey” down his throat and how the hand that fed his addiction “turned into a rattlesnake”.
But his story is a classic case of triumph over adversity . . . of getting sober, of finding the love of his life, of starting a family, of forging a successful career in music.
Speaking this week from lockdown in Nashville as Reunions becomes his third consecutive US top ten album, Isbell admits: “I can’t imagine where I’d be if I’d kept drinking.
“If I hadn’t died in a car, I’d probably still be alive but it wouldn’t be much of a life.”
Isbell explains that with help from AA he’s been off the demon liquor for eight-and-a-half years.
Giving this precise length of time means he still counts the months of a commitment which, as his song points out, “gets easier, but it never gets easy”.
Crucial to his sobriety is second wife Amanda Shires, who sings and plays fiddle in his band The 400 Unit and is making big waves in country supergroup The Highwomen.
She’s the mother of their four-year-old daughter Mercy Rose and together they’ve been described as Americana’s “power couple”.
I ask Isbell if he had a lightbulb moment when trying to deal with his drink problem.
“I had about ten of those,” the Alabama-born singer and guitarist sighs. “In fact, I had them over and over and over, every morning.
“But when I started spending a lot of time with Amanda, I realised she wasn’t going to put up with it for much longer.
“She was the first person I cared so deeply about but I knew she wasn’t going to stick around. I recognised that and thought I’d better do something for real this time.
“She has become irreplaceable,” he says. “She’s the first person to hear my songs and, since she’s a great songwriter herself, I trust her opinion completely.”
Isbell has crammed a lot into his 41 years, spending six of them from the age of 22 in Southern roots rock outfit Drive-By Truckers, before striking out on a solo career yielding seven studio albums and four Grammys.
“I was quite resilient,” he says of his younger self. “I don’t know how I was still able to perform or tour bearing in mind the state I was in.
“I think I was a good person and mostly did good things but it hasn’t always felt that way.
“For the first four or five years after getting sober, I was running away from the person I used to be because it wasn’t a safe place to go. I hated that guy’s guts.
“But now I feel comfortable sitting down with him and having a conversation.”
On the free-flowing, beautifully crafted Reunions, it is clear that Isbell has come to terms with his past.
“There are a lot of ghosts on this album,” he says. “From what I can gather, a ghost is usually someone you’re reuniting with, even if it’s the ghost of your former self.”
He found the writing process “a little scary” but adds: “I have a personal rule . . . if I’m afraid to let something out, then I HAVE to let it out.
“That’s how I keep myself honest and open. With It Gets Easier, I started getting a little bit sweaty and told myself, ‘OK, this one has to make the album’.
“I thought the line ‘it gets easier, but it never gets easy’ couldn’t be something I’d just made up. Surely I’d heard it in an AA meeting or somewhere.”
Isbell likens it to over-used expressions such as “one day at a time” and “let go and let God” but he employs it so effectively that it doesn’t matter.
Reunions track list
- What’ve I Done To Help
- Dreamsicle
- Only Children
- Overseas
- Running With Our Eyes Closed
- River
- Be Afraid
- St Peter’s Autograph
- It Gets Easier
- Letting You Go
Talking to this refreshingly honest character in 2020 means, of course, we discuss the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on his family life.
On being in lockdown, he says: “It’s strange, we should be out touring but we’re healthy and relatively sane.
“We’ve got our daughter, our instruments and nice weather. We’re doing our best not to get sick and have a good time.”
Unlike so many artists, Isbell “had the luxury” of being able to keep his album release date and would have been disappointed to see it pushed back.
“I think of albums as documents of time, and my life and concerns change fairly quickly.”
For now, he’s not thinking about the rest of the year. “I try not to go that far,” he says. “As a recovering alcoholic, I just like to get today sorted.
“Hopefully, we won’t have to sell any guitars. One day, things will be different, maybe not back to normal, but different to how they are now.
“This has also been a time of loss for us and for a lot of people we care about, so that’s been really hard.”
Among those he’s referring to is John Prine, one of America’s finest songwriters, who succumbed to Covid-19 in April.
Isbell describes him as a mentor and revealed in a touching tribute that his daughter “would call him Uncle John as he bounced her on his knee”.
He tells me: “We love John’s music and we loved John himself. It was a devastating loss. We’re still trying to process our grief, and even that is difficult under these circumstances.
“John was still making relevant and important music into his seventies. He was pretty special, that’s for sure. I’ve never met anybody like him.
“He was able to conceal the magic, make it look like those songs (Sam Stone, Hello In There and Angel From Montgomery for instance) fell out of him naturally because they were so conversational.”
While Isbell remains heartbroken over Prine, he can count a living legend as his friend and collaborator.
He is David Crosby, the wonderfully whiskery 78-year-old who made his name in The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
They met at the evergreen Newport Folk Festival when Isbell and The 400 Unit asked him to be a special guest for their headline slot.
“We wanted to play (anti-Vietnam War anthem) Wooden Ships but David was a bit reticent because he didn’t know if we could pull it off.
“I could see why he would be sceptical about a bunch of young guys trying to play Wooden Ships without any rehearsal but we had it down. He heard that and said, ‘If you guys make another record, you have to bring me in to sing on it’.”
And that explains why Crosby’s gorgeous harmonies can be heard on Reunions.
“When the time came, it was a no-brainer to call David,” says Isbell. “He’s a joy to be around if he likes you. An honest man and a true architect of the type of music we make.”
He adds: “His voice is still incredibly strong. It blew me away, even to a point where I asked, ‘David, I’m sorry if I look surprised but how are you able to sing that powerfully at your age?’
“And he said, ‘I tried everything I could to kill it but it won’t die so I figured I’d better keep using it as long as I can’.
“He’s still making records and even emailed some songs to me and Amanda a couple of nights ago which are really good.
“He’s like John (Prine) was, still just as addicted to the process of singing, writing and recording as he’s ever been.”
The first track written for Reunions was the heartfelt Only Children, which serves as a letter to Isbell’s younger, more wayward self.
It emerged from a place associated with one of the songwriting greats. “I was on vacation on Hydra, the Greek island where Leonard Cohen stayed, with my wife and a couple of really close friends.
“It’s beautiful there. When they put the phone lines in, he (Cohen) wrote Bird On The Wire.
“My friends are both writers so we were sitting in a circle sharing our work, something I used to do a lot as a teenager. Only Children came from that.”
Perhaps the most personal song is Letting You Go, written from the perspective of a dad watching his beloved child heading off into the world.
Isbell consciously gave it a “traditional country” setting and “straightforward delivery” to make it a “very simple, emotional story”.
Reunions begins with the soulful Michael Kiwanuka-inspired What’ve I Done To Help, which points to bold new sonic horizons.
“I came up with the chorus while driving and tried for days to make it sound different from a Kiwanuka song that I love,” he says.
“But none of the alternate versions sounded right to me, so we reached out to Michael and he was kind enough to let us treat the melodic similarities like a sample.”
Then there’s Overseas with its fluid, almost David Gilmouresque lead guitar passages, recalling classic Seventies FM rock.
Isbell says his varied influences are symptomatic “of listening to a lot of music from different times. It could be stuff coming out this week and or in the 1930s and everything in between.
“It’s like making a dish where you use so many different herbs that there are very small traces of each one.”
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You may very well sense hints of Prine, Crosby, Cohen, Hank Williams, Neil Young and more.
The song Only Children mentions stealing words from Bob Dylan years ago and a tattoo on Isbell’s left arm quotes a line from Boots Of Spanish Leather: “Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled from across that lonesome ocean.”
But ultimately, Jason Isbell is his own man, finally at peace with the man he used to be.
Family go Gaga over phone call
THE remake of weepie musical A Star Is Born starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga was a huge box office smash.
And it comes with a lovely anecdote about Gaga from Jason Isbell, who wrote the featured song Maybe It’s Time. Here it is, in Isbell’s own words . . .
"My daughter was about a year old, probably not even that. She was very small and I was feeding her dinner.
"My wife Amanda was working on her master’s thesis in the bedroom and she said, “I’m going to close this door, don’t open it under any circumstances.”
"So I said, “All right, I won’t bother you.” Then Lady Gaga called my cellphone and said, “Jason, this is Stefani.”
"I’d never met her before, and I was like, “Stefani who?” And she was like, “Gaga?” And I was like, “Stefani Gaga?” It took me a minute and then I realised and I was like, “Oh hey, what are you doing?”
"They were recording the A Star Is Born soundtrack and she was calling me to thank me for writing that song, it was very sweet.
"Then she asked me what I was doing and I told her I was feeding my daughter peanut butter with a spoon and would she like to talk to her.
"So I put my daughter on the phone because I thought, one day, 15 years from now, she will appreciate having had a phone conversation with Lady Gaga.
"Then, of course, my daughter said “gaga” to her because that was about all she could say!
"My wife wasn’t happy. “Why didn’t you come get me?” she said. “You told me to not bother you under any circumstances”, I replied.
"It was the last time she said that, now it’s, “Don’t bother me unless Lady Gaga calls.”
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