Jason Isbell's seventh studio album, May 2020's Reunions, got nearly universal raves. But, as told in the HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, making the record was a challenge for the Alabama-born singer and guitarist. At the time, Isbell, a recovering alcoholic, was going through personal and creative tensions with his wife, musician Amanda Shires. Then the pandemic forced him to postpone a tour with his band, the 400 Unit.
"Sometimes you have a hard time connecting with people, whether it be your bandmates, your spouse, whoever," Isbell tells Newsweek. "I think the documentary does a good job of showing people who are just trying to make the right choices and trying to be good people. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but you just keep moving, keep doing your best."
Isbell has moved forward both in music and life. On June 9, he and The 400 Unit—keyboardist Derry deBorja, drummer Chad Gamble, bassist Jimbo Hart and guitarist Sadler Vaden—are releasing their new album, Weathervanes.
"I wanted to make an album that gave people a similar experience to seeing the live show," he says. "That was a big part of the reason why I chose to produce this record myself [after working with producer Dave Cobb on previous albums] because it just felt like we could capture something here that felt a little bit more like seeing us on stage. And I think we did that. There are some louder moments, there are some really dynamic moments, a lot of electric guitars on this record. It was a lot of fun to make."
Even so, however, themes of despondency and desperation run through Weathervanes' 13 heartfelt songs. Isbell says they are about "people who are frustrated with the way their lives have turned out, and not necessarily because of choices that they made. There are quite a few people on this album who have been duped—people who have been tricked into going along with something that didn't turn out to be as advertised. That's something that I constantly struggle with myself, growing up in a really small town in Alabama. I got out into the big world, and I thought, 'Okay, everything I have been taught—some of it is true and some of it's not.'"
The album's first single, "Death Wish," is about falling in love with someone suffering from depression ("What's the difference in a breakdown and a breakthrough?"). Isbell says, "There is that desire to support somebody without judging them and that's really what that song deals with. At what point do you stop helping? How far do you have to go before you get to that point of diminishing returns where you're actually making somebody's life harder by being connected to them so closely? And what is your responsibility to them, and what is their responsibility to you?"
The haunting rocker "Save the World," references a school shooting from the perspective of a parent. Isbell lives in Nashville, where on March 27 a gunman killed seven people at an elementary school, including three 9-year-olds. "You go out in the world with a kid, and you think, 'I'm trying to do everything right. I'm trying to raise this person to be happy and confident and stable and give them everything that they need to go out into the world and take care of themselves.' And then you have to contend with something that you have no control over."
The genteel-sounding "Cast Iron Skillet" takes aim at both masculinity and Southern nostalgia. ("Jamie found a boyfriend/With smiling eyes and dark skin/And her daddy never spoke another word to her again.") Isbell says "That song's about mistakes men make, among other things. I'm a big proponent of looking the past in the eye and actually paying attention to the darker parts of that and the mistakes that we've made and trying to learn from that. That's easy to say, but most people still manage to find a way to avoid it. That idea of Southern heritage and romanticized Southern pride is something that I've been dealing with my whole life. The fact is, for most people, the past in the South was awful. I like to try to keep people reminded of the fact that it's not always been beautiful for everybody."
Weathervanes' closing track, "Miles," is like a medley of two songs with different melodies and tempos, like a '70s progressive rock or Paul McCartney and Wings track. "This song covers such a huge time period," Isbell says. "It's about being a father and not being emotionally available and how things can turn out—all these little tiny decisions that we make every day add up to who we are at the end of our lives. This guy is not happy about it, and he really doesn't really understand where he went wrong: 'Why am I so disconnected from my family?' There should be some disconnect between the movements of the song in that way, too, to follow the different periods of his life."
Amanda Shires makes a guest appearance on Weathervanes, providing background vocals and fiddle. "You have to have somebody around you who will tell you the truth," Isbell says. "If you're gonna tie yourself to somebody for the rest of your life, then that person needs to be able to tell you the truth and you need to be able to hear it. So I'm just really grateful that she's around to do that for me, among other things, and that I'm around to do that for her."
When Isbell wrote the material for Weathervanes he was also making his screen-acting debut in the upcoming Martin Scorsese drama Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. He applied what he observed during filming to the new album. "Marty had a very clear vision, but he also was confident enough to listen to input and collaborate with other people," Isbell says. "Just seeing that was something that really helped me going into the studio because I thought, 'Well, you're still in charge, you're still producing this album. But that doesn't mean that you have to sell other people's ideas short.'"
Isbell stands outside the mainstream, generally conservative, country music community. He has commented on political and social matters on Twitter and wishes more of his Music City peers would speak out on important issues. "The truth is a lot of people just don't care," he says. "A lot of big country recording artists don't really care that much about other people's lives, and you can hear it in their music. If you listen to a lot of those super popular hit songs, it becomes pretty obvious that they're very self-centered. A lot of people don't realize that politics are personal for a lot of us. It's as simple as like, 'If you don't have clean water, you don't have food to eat.' Just trying to survive becomes a political act. I couldn't just sit back and ignore everything that I think is wrong and unfair and enjoy my own life. I really wish more people were like that, but that's a tough ask of somebody who's just trying to be as famous and as rich as possible."
Things have settled down for Isbell since Running With Our Eyes Closed, but now he has different problems to deal with. "That's about the best I can hope for," he says. "That's something that I realized right around the time I got sober: You're always gonna have problems. There's always gonna be challenges. The point of life for me is just to work and to grow.
"A lot of the issues that Amanda and I were having and the issues that I was having with my work and my career, have resolved or changed into different problems altogether. I think that's the sign of a successful journey. If you get the same problems that you had a decade ago, you're not doing a very good job of solving them," he says laughing. "The problem box is always gonna be full—it's just a matter of taking things out and dealing with them before something else climbs back in."
FURTHER LISTENING
Sirens of the Ditch, New West Records, 2007 Jason Isbell first came to prominence when he joined the Georgia alt-country group Drive-By Truckers in 2001; six years later, he released his first solo album, Sirens of the Ditch. As he told Glide Magazine, "There's not a lot of Southern mythology—heroes, villains, and all that—in these songs, though there's plenty of South on them."
Southeastern, Southeastern Records, 2013 Isbell's new-found sobriety following a stint in rehab informed his breakthrough album Southeastern, which contains the heartwrenching love song "Cover Me Up" and popular tracks "Stockholm" and "Elephant." "I think there's an openness you really have to accept if you're going to make a change like that," he said in an NPR Fresh Air interview in 2013. "You have to be all right with saying, 'I have weaknesses.'"
Something More Than Free Southeastern Records, 2015 Something More Than Free became Isbell's first Billboard Top 10 album and earned him two Grammy Awards. "I think it should be heard as a record of events, because I am trying to document a part of my life," he told Stereogum. "If the lyrics make you stop and pause the song for a minute—like when you're reading a novel and you have to sit down and think about what you just read and digest it—then I think it's been done right."
▸ David Chiu is a freelance writer who covers music. Follow him on Twitter @newbeats
Correction 2:25 ET: The album title in the headline was corrected to "Weathervanes" (from "Weathervane").
