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A while back, Jason Isbell was in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, getting ready to receive the key to the city. In 1979 he'd had the mixed fortune of being born just across the river, in Green Hill, and he grew up in the area, sitting in with the town's legendary session musicians in the restaurants that were the only places that served alcohol in an otherwise dry county. “When I was 15 or 16, it was awesome, because they couldn't kick me out,” Isbell said. “I would stay there all night. Not so good when you're 19 or 20.”
We were in a restaurant in Nashville, not far from where Isbell now lives, as he told this story, and at the table he acted out what happened next. The mayor of Muscle Shoals approached with the key. “I asked the mayor, ‘Does this open up the jail cells?’ Because there was a time when I really needed to open up some of the jail cells. And he nervously laughed. He's a sweet dude. But you know, I've been to jail in that city a few times.”
By now, Isbell's been telling outlaw stories for nearly as long as he was an outlaw. On his right arm, he has tattooed seven notches, for seven years of sobriety; he marked his eighth in February. “I'm gonna get one more,” he said, looking down at his forearm. Drinking almost killed him; then it became his great subject. “That turned into my sword,” he said. Before, he told me, “I had a bunch of tools and nothing to build. I'm really glad I have something to build now.”
Since getting kicked out of his prior band, the Southern-rock outfit the Drive-By Truckers, and then getting clean in 2012, he's made some of the most shattering and redemptive music about sobering up—and then marrying the woman who helped you into rehab—that anyone has ever made, starting with Southeastern, which came out in 2013, and continuing through Reunions, which he plans to release this May. He's a traditionalist by training and inclination, and an open book by nature, and his music—some Southern rock, some country, a hint of good old confessional punk rock—reflects that. “I want somebody to get just as fired up about the content of the songs as they do about, you know, Neutral Milk Hotel,” Isbell said. “But also I want it to remind them of the radio when they were kids.” Dave Cobb, Isbell's longtime producer, told me: “He really treats it as if he was writing the last letter he ever wrote.” His concerts have become places of communion, where drunks and former drunks cheer at the sobriety lines and new couples wait anxiously for the songs about Isbell's own marriage, songs he often performs with his wife, the fiddler and songwriter Amanda Shires, who is a member of his band when she's not off touring with her own.
He's talked about those two pivotal years—the bottom, rehab, marriage, Southeastern—many times and will do so many times again. On tour he relives them every night. It would be human, you would think, to want to move on, to talk and write about something else. But Isbell isn't done with that time just yet. “I need to remember those couple of years,” he said. “If I ever get to a point where I feel like I don't need that anymore, then maybe I'll be ready to move past it. But my whole life changed. And almost exclusively for the better. Most people never get those two years in their whole lives.”
One day in February, when snow was still on the ground, I visited Isbell at the home he shares with Shires and their daughter near Franklin, Tennessee, outside Nashville. He moved to the city eight years ago, because Shires was there and everything in his Alabama past was not. They've moved a few times since and now live out in the country, past some horse farms, on a generous property with a stately white house and a barn that the previous owner had been using to gut deer and store his boat. “We don't have a boat, we don't kill deer, and so we were like, ‘We need to make something out of this,’ ” Isbell said. They converted the barn into a rehearsal space, a gear warehouse, and a painting studio for Shires, with stained-glass windows from an old Isbell stage set and gold mirror balls hanging from the ceiling. “So basically it looks like a German rock club inside,” he said wryly as he showed me around.
The sides of his head were shaved, the rest of his hair medium-long and swept back. He has the broad shoulders and careful bearing of a man who grew up taking up just slightly more space than he'd wanted to. The sun had just set, the barn was more dark than light, and he poured himself a coffee as we sat down to talk. Isbell is unnervingly candid—want to ask about his drinking, or what he talks about in therapy, or his marriage? Ask away. There are no guardrails. Or maybe his honesty is itself the guardrails. “I remember in rehab they would say, ‘Keep your head and your ass in the same place,’ ” he said. “And I spent a lot of time thinking, What exactly does that mean? And it comes back to—a friend of mine and I laugh about the similarities between the teachings of Ram Dass and the coaching of Nick Saban of the Alabama Crimson Tide. We may be the only two people on earth who are in a position to evaluate both of those. And it's always about the process. You're playing the game; you're not playing an opponent. You're doing the work in order to do the work.”
Lately, he said, the work was simply returning to reality after doing what he'd needed to do to make another album. He'd finished Reunions maybe a month ago, was still driving around listening to it in his car. Shires had been on the road, so he'd been looking after their daughter, Mercy Rose. He'd been running errands and going to therapy, trying to get his life, and his mind, back in balance. “The last time in the studio was really hard,” he said, “because I was very, very focused on what I was doing and also I was feeling pressure and not admitting to myself that I was feeling that pressure, because I thought that admitting to myself that I was feeling the pressure would take away part of my advantage against it. And that took a while to figure out.”
Why do you think you were feeling pressure?
“Well, I made three good records in a row.”
Isbell has actually made six solo records, beginning in 2007, but these three would be Southeastern, 2015's Something More Than Free, and 2017's The Nashville Sound, each of which sold north of 140,000 copies; the latter two also won him four Grammys, a fact that Isbell is straightforwardly proud of. All three are deeply romantic, often very sad, and just as often mordantly funny (In my sleep, I build machines / Nobody ever wants to hear about my dreams). “Before, for a long time, he got in his own way,” Patterson Hood, Isbell's old bandmate in the Drive-By Truckers, said. “And there was so much greatness there that even with him getting in his own way, it was still getting out. But once he removed that part from the equation, you ended up with, you know, Southeastern.” David Crosby, who sings on Reunions, told me about Isbell: “He's a very good musician. He's a fine guitar player. But the thing that separates the men from the boys for me is content. It's the words. It's what he's actually talking about. He's talking about love in ways that I admire.”
Isbell's last three records have built him one of the broadest and most devoted fan bases in modern music: emotional hipster kids, hard-bitten Nashville guitar players, brainy suburban moms. On Twitter, there is a running joke among sportswriters—not usually the most persuadable group—that Isbell has replaced Bruce Springsteen in their very limited pantheon. “Nobody had gone after them before,” Isbell said, grinning, when I asked if he'd noticed this. “Everybody thought—it's like the line from [Leonard Cohen's] ‘Famous Blue Raincoat.’ You know, I thought it was there for good so I never tried. You thought nobody could win over the cold heart of sportswriters of America, but you were wrong.”
Those records brought him a measure of fame and some fortune: Unlike the majority of his peers, Isbell owns his own record label, which means he also owns his own masters. No one gets paid before he does. Isbell recorded Reunions at RCA Studio A in Nashville, shelling out for the sessions himself. “When I sell 59,000 copies of that record, I've recouped, and that means that I start getting paid,” he said. Some of the money from the record sales goes to his distributor; Isbell gets about $4 or $5 a copy. He wasn't particularly worried about hitting 59,000: “Last album, I did it in 10 days. This album, hopefully we can do it in a week.” On the royalty statements he gets, he sees both the label's share and the artist's share. “And those are not the same size. Not by a long shot. It's way more for the label. Because that's who owns the masters. The artists, if all you are is an artist, you don't own shit. You're an employee. And I've been that before in my life, as a recording artist.”
I imagine at this point people have come to you with quite a few formal record-deal offers.
“Yes. I went to one label, a big, historically proud, very fashionable, very cool record label. And me and Amanda and Traci [Thomas], my manager, sat down and asked them, ‘What can you guys do that we've not already been able to do?’ This was right after Southeastern. And they gave us a list of things that we had already done. So then they're like, ‘Well, we understand. Thank you for coming in. Can we show you around the place?’ And there was an old executive there who had passed away, and they said, ‘His office is just like it was when he died. We didn't change a single thing.’ So I go in there, they start showing me the pictures on the walls, and they were wrong about who was in the pictures on the wall. I had to tell them who was in the pictures. I was like, No, that's not the artist that you're saying it is. That's this other artist. Who was also a black woman from the 1960s, but not the same one you think it is. And that was the last time I went to one of those meetings.”
Being his own boss has provided Isbell a measure of freedom to speak his mind, which suits him. He has been, in his music and on Twitter, where he has a few hundred thousand devoted followers, public and blunt about his politics, which are not those that tend to dominate the state that he was born in or the one he lives in now or the particular musical traditions he comes out of. In a week, he said, he was off to Alabama, to play a fundraiser for Doug Jones, the Democratic senator facing an enormously tough reelection battle there. They've become friendly; Isbell had done the same for Jones the first time he ran: “I'm in a room full of young Democrats in north Alabama to try to help this old man beat this other old man out of this fucking spot. It was strange and it was something I really enjoyed—you know, in New York there are a lot of people that are like you and a lot of people that are different from you on every block. But in Alabama you don't see that too much. We had to look for each other growing up.”
Now, he said, he tries to pay the favor back to his younger self and all the other younger selves who helped that guy survive. “And some people get mad about it, but that's their fault,” he said. “That's their fault, you know? I'm trying to make art. Like, shut the fuck up, I'm trying to make art. I did not ask you to purchase this product.”
A few weeks later, we were speaking on the phone from our respective quarantines: Isbell had postponed some tour dates because of COVID-19 and was hunkering down with his family in the meantime, writing new songs and continuing to pay his band and his crew for as long as he could. He said he thought he'd still put Reunions out in May, though lately he'd been barraged by people asking for the record early. He wasn't inclined to do that, he said, in part because there were no record stores currently open to sell it, and he didn't want to be complicit in their downfall, and in part because he, like everyone else, was caught up in bigger problems. He was thinking about kids like the ones he'd grown up with, who were trapped in abusive homes or relationships they couldn't leave. He wondered how the quarantine was making bad situations worse. What he wasn't doing, he said, was listening to the people begging for Reunions to divert themselves from whatever else was going on. “Distraction is not much of a priority, in all honesty,” he told me. “I'm sorry people are bored, but that's the least of my concerns.”
One day Isbell was in Nashville, wrapping up a photo shoot at the Ryman Auditorium, the former home of the Grand Ole Opry and a place that's become something like his home theater. Over the past six or seven years, he's played 27 shows here, all of them sold out, and in 2018 he released a concert album, Live From the Ryman. Staff members greeted him as he walked around. We were headed to dinner, and on our way out, we walked through the pews, and he stopped to look at a glass case of important Ryman-affiliated memorabilia by the door. “That's the first black Stratocaster ever made,” he said, gesturing at one of two guitars behind the window.
Isbell is specific about engines and cars and guitars in particular. He is wary about what success has brought him. “It's easy for a lot of folks, and very tempting, to just say, ‘Hey, me and my people are taken care of. I'm fine.’ And that's just the road to ruin, if you ask me. You lose your art that way.” But last year he did allow himself one extravagance, when a chance presented itself to buy one of the most famous guitars ever made: a 1959 Les Paul formerly owned by Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ed King. Isbell bought the guitar, known to the world as Redeye, from King's widow. “It was a ridiculous purchase, and I had to play a bunch of weird birthday parties and shit to cover it, so nobody else was affected by the ridiculousness of my guitar purchase,” he said. “But I'm so happy that I did it, because, you know, I don't go in there and polish the Grammys every day, but if I'm home and I have a minute, I take out the Redeye and play it. It sounds like I wanted my guitar to sound when I was 15 in Green Hill. ”
In front of the glass memorabilia case at the Ryman still, he looked at the other guitar, a red Washburn acoustic. He walked closer, to see it better. “Oh, that's mine,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised. It was his first guitar, purchased when he was 11 or 12. A ghost behind glass. This kind of sudden encounter with the past had been happening to Isbell more and more; it's why he called the new record Reunions.
“I didn't notice it when I was writing it,” Isbell said. “And not really even when we were recording it, either. But when we were mixing it and I was listening back to mixes at the end, I thought, Man, almost every song has a ghost. Like, a literal ghost. And I start thinking, What is a ghost? Usually it's not a stranger. In the ghost stories that actually mean something, it's somebody that you've known in your past, so you are reuniting in a way with that person.”
Isbell's BMW X1 was parked in the lot outside. A baby seat was strapped into the back. Now that he lived out in the countryside, he'd drive around just to write in the car, vocalize with the radio off, he said. Reunions was mostly composed this way, in the last four months or so of 2019. The first song he wrote for it, “Only Children,” was an homage to a dead friend, someone he'd lost a few years ago. “She was one of those people who was kind of like an oasis in one of those small Southern towns,” Isbell told me. But it's also a song about what happens when “one person succeeds at something and one person doesn't,” and about that moment before, when nobody is anybody yet, and you sit around and play music or talk at 2 a.m., blissfully unaware of the universe's plans for you. It's a sweet, sad song, unflinching in its details:
Heaven's wasted on the dead
That's what your momma said
And the hearse was idling in the parking lot
She said you thought the world of me
And you were glad to see
They finally let me be an astronaut
He kept writing after that, about childhood and divorce, about fatherhood and sobriety, about the wages and responsibilities of success, about the country itself: This used to be a ghost town, but even the ghost got out, Isbell sings on another song, “Overseas.”
What was happening in your life, for all these ghosts to appear?
“Um, that's a good question. Maybe it's my age. Probably having a child. And so you start seeing people a little differently. And then you start thinking more deeply about relationships from the past and maybe empathizing with those people a little more than you did in real time. And I mean, it could be argued that that's what a visit from a ghost is. You actually learning to empathize with somebody a little more than you did when they were around. And a ghost is always, you know, trying to tell you something that you didn't understand about them then.”
At the restaurant we clinked water glasses, and I asked if Isbell ever got tired of talking about his sobriety, which he is inevitably asked to do in situations like this one.
“Over and over and over,” Isbell said. “Yeah. But I don't mind repeating it, either. You know? That's probably the only thing I don't mind talking about over and over. Because it reminds me. And it reminds other people sometimes too. But reminding me is really important, because it's easy to get complacent and think: I've got this.”
I'm sure a lot of people owe their sobriety to you, or at least associate it with you.
“Yeah. Maybe they thought about it because of one of the songs, or because of an interview or something.”
Which is kind of an awesome responsibility.
“It's great. It's fucking great! It keeps me sober sometimes. There have definitely been times that I've felt if nobody knew or nobody cared that I relapsed, I might have a drink right now. Now, that hasn't happened in years, but early on there were times when the fact that I'd been that open gave me somebody to feel accountable to.”
Isbell once called the drunk version of himself “intolerable”—one of the milder ways he's described his drinking years. “He went through a number of years of not necessarily being his best self,” Hood told me. “And you know, a lot of people never come back from that. And the fact that he did and rose to the occasion and grew up to become the kind of person that he really had the potential of being and then some is super admirable to me.”
I asked Isbell if, in all the talking about his past self, he'd found a way to begin forgiving the person he'd been.
“I mean, I'm coming around to forgiving that guy. But it's pretty recent. Because I think for a lot of the first few years of my sobriety, I needed to hate his fucking guts. So I didn't have any risk of turning back into him. But I think there's a phase now that I'm moving into. My friends and my wife remind me sometimes: You know, you weren't that bad, you weren't all bad. You know? I loved you then. And…lately they've been saying that more, and that's helpful to me.”
Maybe it's safer to say it now than it was then.
“Maybe they feel safe, yeah. And that itself is a compliment to me. I'm just really grateful. I'm grateful that I was a drunk. I'm grateful that I know what all those things are like, what those feelings are like, how bad it can hurt, how great it can feel. I'm grateful that I have a story to tell.”
One name that came up repeatedly in that story is Ryan Adams, the singer-songwriter-producer who, along with Shires and others, helped Isbell into rehab in 2012. Isbell's first show when he got out was opening for Adams. “Ryan was around a lot” back then, Isbell said.
Last year, the New York Times reported that Adams engaged in “a pattern of manipulative behavior in which Adams dangled career opportunities while simultaneously pursuing female artists for sex.” (Adams denies the allegations.) When the Times story broke, Isbell said on Twitter that he believed the women who had come forward to accuse Adams. At dinner he told me that the two of them were no longer in touch. “I was disappointed in myself for not realizing that those kinds of things were happening,” Isbell said. “And the situation with Ryan and with the Times story made me rethink my friendships with other men and how much we're actually sharing with each other. And I think it really helped me redefine, you know, what kind of a friend I want to be to somebody.”
In what way?
“There were a lot of things that I thought about Ryan's situation, foremost being that I felt sorry for the people who had had to deal with it, for the women who had had to deal with it. But one thing that I thought was I need to actually care more about what somebody is doing on a day-to-day basis, because, first of all, I don't want to be close to somebody who is doing these kinds of things again. And also, if you're gonna be somebody's friend, you need to know 'em better. I wasn't being a very good friend. You know? Whether he deserved a good friend or not, I should have known that those things were going on.”
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He was working on paying better attention, he said, just in general. How much goes by when you're not really looking at it? He was aware of living a kind of surreal life now, the kind that a sustained career in public brings. I mentioned to Isbell that nearly everywhere I'd gone in Nashville I'd heard songs from the soundtrack to A Star Is Born, the 2018 movie to which he contributed a song, “Maybe It's Time,” which was performed in the film by Bradley Cooper. “And I'm glad I did,” he said, laughing, “because they sold way more copies of it than I would have.” The soundtrack did very well, and Isbell retained, as he always does, the publishing to his composition. “That was my last chance to get a platinum plaque, and I got one,” Isbell said.
He admitted that he had taken some persuading, at the outset, to get involved. Cooper, the film's director and star, had gone to Dave Cobb, Isbell's producer, for help in pulling the soundtrack together, and Cobb had eventually come to him. “I said, ‘No, Dave. I don't have time for that shit.’ And my wife said, ‘You're an idiot.’ ” Isbell listened to his wife and wrote Cooper a song. Cooper called, said he loved it. Lady Gaga, the film's other star, called, said she loved it. But Isbell, even then, had some doubt—what if Cooper butchered his song?
“What happened was, he sent me a voice memo, like a demo. And I was getting on a plane. And I was like, ‘Man, I'll listen to this when I get off the plane.’ But then I was thinking, This might be bad, and if this is bad, I don't know if I want to tell Bradley Cooper, ‘You can't sing my song. You suck.’ First of all, I don't think he gives a shit what I think about it. But I was wrong.”
The flight Isbell boarded was a cross-country one, and when he finally got off the plane, he listened to the demo. “I texted him back. I was like: ‘This is good, Bradley. Thank you for sending that. I think it's great.’ I didn't know this, but he had been waiting on that response to go forward. I didn't know he was sweating it out. But he gave a shit. He really cared about it. So that was more than I expected out of Hollywood, you know? Way more.”
Isbell laughed. “Turns out I was wrong. That's gonna be the title of my memoir: Turns Out I Was Wrong.”
Isbell offered to give me a ride to wherever I was going in Nashville, and so we got back in the car and drove past hordes of bachelorettes and the sound of cover-band blues leaking through porous club doors. He got to talking about the mailman turned singer John Prine, how Prine was discovered in some bar like the ones we were passing now, by Roger Ebert, an alcoholic at the time, who walked out of a 1970 Chicago film screening in search of a drink and found Prine instead. The weird cosmic vectors, the random luck, the drinks drunk and renounced, behind success. Isbell said he and Prine, who lives in town as well, had become friends. Isbell was over there for some party recently with his daughter, he said, and she started singing Prine's “Clocks and Spoons.” Prine heard her and came around the corner harmonizing. She got bug-eyed, realizing that Uncle John was the guy who sang that song. “Most people don't get to do that, or see that,” Isbell said. And then, barely six weeks later, Prine was dead, felled by complications related to a COVID-19 infection. “We love you John,” Isbell posted on Twitter.
He was always trying to really stop and appreciate these moments as they happened, he said in the car, not knowing what was yet to come. To practice gratitude, to acknowledge the great distance his life had traveled, one deliberate moment at a time. In interviews, he said to me, “people always ask, Is there anything you want to add? And there never is, because that's dumb. ‘Oh, I just want you to know my record's coming out so-and-so.’ But people in our situation, they just aren't as grateful as they could be sometimes. And I know that sounds like recovery talk. But it's just really a good rule of thumb. I don't mean if you have, like, depression or anxiety, or people aren't playing you on the radio because you have a vagina. I mean if you're, like, a white dude that makes songs and sings and sells albums and that's your only job in the world, you should be pretty fucking grateful for it.”
Sobriety had helped him pay attention, he said, and to appreciate his circumstances, whatever they might be. But even when he was a kid, when he only dreamed of being a songwriter, what he dreamed of in particular were the details, those little grace notes that made songs into art and life into something worth living. “I feel like the whole process of growing as a human, as a man, as an adult, as a husband or a father, a musician or an artist, all those things come back to awareness. And you know, how many different perspectives can I be aware of and how many different stories can I really pay attention to? And how many things can I notice? Just as simply as that. Just let's see what all we can notice today.”
Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2020 issue with the title “Redemption Songs.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Michael Schmelling
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Jess Berrios at AMAX Talent
Tailoring by Jason Jarrett at Eric Adler
Produced by Virginia Ridgers
Special thanks to Nashville’s Historic Ryman Auditorium, Nashville
