Near the end of May 2020, I drove from my house on North Padre Island to my high school to return a laptop I had been loaned for an Engineering Design class I was taking my senior year.
It took about 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes to get back so I used the time to check out some new music that I may have missed and break my habit of just listening to the same 10 Tame Impala songs as I did often that year. I opened Spotify and a pop-up hit me saying, “New Music For You,” with a new album from an artist that I had heard of but never listened to. I decided why not and pressed play on the first song. I got about 30 seconds into it and told myself, “This just isn’t for me I don’t think.” The artist was Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit and the album was Reunions. A little under a year later, after I had been following Isbell on Twitter and getting into more artists in his lane (American Aquarium, Tyler Childers, and Sturgill Simpson), news broke of Morgan Wallen saying a racial slur outside of his home in Nashville. Isbell put up an all-time day on his Twitter account and for some reason, it inspired me to give Reunions another shot. I have not looked back since.
I sound like a broken record saying this at this point but Isbell has slowly become one of my favorite artists in the Americana/Alternative Country scene. He is an incredible songwriter, incredible singer, and an incredible guitar player. Southeastern, which celebrated its 10th-anniversary last week, is, in my opinion, the best country album released in the past 20 years and has become one of my favorite albums of all time, just in general. Written and recorded after Isbell got out of rehab and found love and sobriety with his now-wife Amanda Shires, it’s a brutally honest and extremely well-written album that never fails to punch me in the gut lyrically and still manages to sound fresh even all this time later.
Southeastern kicked off what has proved to be an incredible hot streak for Isbell’s albums, continuing with 2015’s Something More Than Free, 2017’s The Nashville Sound, and most recently, 2020’s Reunions. He’s been staying busy since the release of Reunions, releasing a covers album in 2021 to celebrate Georgia voting Blue in the 2020 election that was a ton of fun, he’s also lent his guitar skills and vocals to Buddy Guy, Adia Victoria, Barry Gibb, and of course, Amanda Shires. Also, as soon as pandemic restrictions lifted, he and his band, the 400 Unit, immediately began tearing up highways and stages all across the globe. I’ve been lucky to see him live twice since the world opened back up, including an incredible evening at Buddy Holly Hall this past May, you can read Zach’s recap of the evening here.
But here we are in 2023, and it’s come time for a new Isbell record. Of course, I’ve been highly anticipating it, the Americana and Alternative Country world has been highly anticipating it, but it does come with two major changes in personnel this time around.
For starters, this is the first time Isbell has produced one of his own records since 2011’s Here We Rest. Starting with Southeastern, Dave Cobb handled the reigns of production for the run all the way up until Reunions. Second, and perhaps a bigger change to long-time fans, Amanda Shires appears contributing fiddle and vocals this time only as a special guest as it was confirmed with the first single, Death Wish, that she’s no longer a member of the 400 Unit. Even though she’s only credited as a special guest, Shires is still a prominent force all over the record. Her fiddle playing is a great addition to Death Wish and King of Oklahoma (many more thoughts on this song later) as well as providing some beautiful background vocals on the chorus of the song Volunteer.
This album does have two major flaws, however, in my opinion. The first is one that’s gonna make me sound like such a nerd but I don’t care, this album is not mixed very well. My first listen of this album was sort of distracted by how distorted and compressed this album could be at times, This Ain’t It was the worst example with everything just sounding blown out. However, I can look past that because of this album’s second major flaw and that is, I don’t know how to review it because it’s too good.
I feel like I’ve been beating around the bush too much so let’s buckle in and get into the actual meat of this record. The songs on this album vary wildly in topics, from trying your best to love someone that’s losing a battle to their depression and dark thoughts to a life crumbling due to opioid abuse to the anxieties of raising a child in a country with a never-ending problem with gun violence to regretting not standing up more for a woman having an abortion, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even as fun as This Ain’t It sounds, it’s still a sad song about a dad trying to force his way back into his daughter’s life as she gets dumped at a bar.
After multiple listens, I will say what I think I love the most about this album is how reflective it is, stylistically, of his career up until this point. The swing of Stockholm from Southeastern is present on Volunteer, If You Insist feels like it could’ve also made it onto that album if it was in half-time. His mid-tempo rock wheelhouse is killer on Death Wish, King of Oklahoma, and When We Were Close. Strawberry Woman, Cast Iron Skillet, and White Beretta could’ve fit perfectly on Something More Than Free. Vestavia Hills even feels reminiscent of his earliest work with the Drive By Truckers. Isbell plays to his strengths in the best ways possible on here and in turn, Weathervanes is all the best parts of what’s made Isbell great so far combined into one incredible record.
At its strongest, Isbell’s storytelling is vivid enough to paint pictures in your mind of everything going on as he sings. Take Strawberry Woman for example. Every verse and chorus here sets a scene for the story, opening with a young cowboy crying in a laundromat wearing square-toed boots, “so he ain’t for real.” Then we’re introduced to the love interest of the song who sits at a restaurant in Post, Texas with prairie dogs popping up to see her, he sings that he’d sell their farm just to see her smile and if he waits, it’ll probably happen due to either him doing everything right and making the smile come naturally or the relationship failing. The song ends with a line about how he remembers the woman dancing at a bar with a bloody nose after it had closed and she still looked fine and free, but it all wraps up with her back to his.
The record’s opening run sets the tone off strong. Death Wish took some time to grow on me but I do love the song’s slow build and lyrics about loving a woman that’s fighting depression and dark thoughts. Two more singles reside in the first half of the album with Middle of the Morning and Save the World. Save the World is the Be Afraid of this album except a bit more heavy-handed. It’s an uptempo rock song that Isbell wrote in the direct aftermath of the Uvalde shooting. He sings that a balloon popping in a grocery store leads him to try to find the nearest exit, then as he goes down the candy aisle with his daughter, a lady tells him “you have a lovely child” and he’s too afraid to say anything, asking in the pre-chorus after if he can keep at home instead and teach her how to fight. When everything seems bad, he asks one thing of Shires, “Swear you’ll save the world when I lose my grip, tell me you’re in control.” The drums just explode out of the speakers on this song and the little guitar duel between Isbell and Sadler Vaden is super fun in an otherwise dark song.
Middle of the Morning is a song that seems to reflect the world Isbell and Shires were in while Isbell recorded Reunions and is the focus of the HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed about the making of that record. The tension between the two as the pressure to exceed expectations hit Isbell is so thick, you could’ve cut it with a knife. As the pandemic forced everyone home, it didn’t exactly make everything better for the couple and that’s what I think the first chorus addresses where Isbell sings:
I know you’re scared of me, I can see it in your face
I can feel it in the way you move around this place
I know you’re scared of me, I can see it in your smile
Like an unattendеd child you can’t quite trust
I also love the lines about stepping on her shadow and feeling in the way along with his line about how he’s “tired of living in the moment and sleeping through the dream.” Instrumentally, the song has shades of The Allman Brothers and The Black Crowes, and vocally, it’s the best Isbell sounds on the entire record. His range on this song is fantastic.
One of the record’s first masterpieces comes just two songs in with King of Oklahoma which is a heart-wrenching song about a man’s life falling apart after a workplace accident that leads him into a pain pill addiction. Isbell sings that the man doesn’t know how he ended up this far behind. He had a solid job, a wife and kids who loved him, even saying the wife made him “feel like the King of Oklahoma.” Now that his addiction has spiraled out of control, he’s resorted to stealing copper pipes and throwing his truck up as collateral to fund his habit. His wife took the kids with her to Bixby and was tired of her help falling on deaf ears, there’s a line here about how the kids won’t even know his name anymore. Now that she’s gone, he misses the little things in the relationship. He misses the coffee every morning, he misses hearing her homemade slippers slide across the floor, and now that he’s alone, “nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore.” Isbell’s guitar solo on the song is fantastic, Shires’ fiddle playing fits in perfectly and adds to the atmosphere, and the way the band transitions from the verse to the half-time and key-changed chorus is the cherry on top.
The middle of this record is the stretch that hits the absolute hardest. In an interview with Apple Music, Isbell said that If You Insist is written from a woman’s perspective but I don’t think it really matters as it’s a story of someone finding someone they’re interested in at a bar and trying to find a way to make sure they don’t end up a stranger but they just don’t have any interest. The lyrics on this song are incredible, he asks in the second verse what the person is looking for? Something easy? Something to make them feel alive? Or maybe “a love that tears through your life like a category five.” The third verse shows the narrator realizing the person is ready to leave and their nights are about to end. He closes by saying he won’t ask for her name or number and sings one of my favorite lyrics on the album, “I’m too tired to get excited and too old to be ashamed.”
Cast Iron Skillet is nothing but Isbell and his guitar for most of it but it might be one of his best-written songs ever. The choruses are built on southern advice that Isbell has grown to find kinda sucks. Don’t wash your cast iron skillet, don’t drink and drive because you could spill your drink, and don’t ask questions, just believe what you’re told. The verses alternate between two stories. The first is about Nathan and Eric Boyd, two people that Isbell grew up with who would go on to murder a restaurant owner in Alabama. Isbell sings that remembers the two being sweet and soft, wonders how they got to this point, and says that he remembers Eric shying away from inside fastballs and ended up dying “doing life without parole.” The second is about a young girl who finds a boyfriend that her family isn’t fond of because he’s not white. Isbell sings:
Jamie found a boyfriend with smiling eyes and dark skin
And her daddy never spoke another word to her again
…
How did he get so low?
Seems like just a week ago
She was sitting on your shoulders watching fireworks in the sky
He treats her like a queen, but you don’t know ’cause you ain’t seen
It’s hard to go through life without your daddy by your side
The last lines are so cutting and hit me in the heart every time. What hits me even harder though is what I think is the best song on this album, When We Were Close.
Instrumentally, it’s the closest the album gets to a song Isbell would’ve recorded in his time with the Drive By Truckers. Lyrically, while he hasn’t outright said his name, all signs point to this being a song about the late Justin Townes Earle and knowing that makes this song hurt even more. At its core, it’s a song about survivor’s guilt. Isbell sings in the chorus that he was the worse of the two but he doesn’t know why he’s the one still here. The second verse on this song is probably the saddest writing on the entire record with Isbell singing that he saw a picture of Earle laughing with his daughter and he says that he hopes she remembers his smile, “but she probably wasn’t old enough the night somebody sold you stuff that left you on the bathroom tiles.” While the two were never able to make amends after a falling out, Isbell still remembers the good memories, how Earle “always dressed in [his] Sunday best” before they had people styling them and picking out their clothes, how Earle would always let him sing and share the stage with him even though Earle was the main draw. While it’s not on an Elephant or If We Were Vampires level of tough song to get through, it’s still one that’s stung on repeated listens.
The album bows out on a great final run, starting with the runaway love song Volunteer. It follows the story of a kid with parents that fight until they eventually kill each other, leading the kid through the foster system that he runs away from. He finds a companion in a girl that he says he doesn’t necessarily love but she is someone to talk to as he dreams of a better life and dreams of his mom holding him tight. Vestavia Hills is a hilarious song about a sound guy at a bar watching an artist grow quickly and burn out quicker, eventually retiring since his wife is the breadwinner in the family, telling the artist that they’re at war with their heart and aren’t strong enough to win. White Berreta brings things down one final time before This Ain’t It and Miles close out the album with a rowdy finish. This Ain’t It is so much fun and that’s something I never thought I’d be able to say about an Isbell song.
Are you guys tired of hearing me talk yet? I hope not because I gotta give y’all my final thoughts. They’re simple though. If you couldn’t tell already, I love this album. It’s another score on the board for this insane hot streak Isbell has been on for a decade at this point. It’s also nice to see that he’s still great at crafting songs and arrangements even without Dave Cobb by his side. There are a lot of songs on here that are going to be in constant rotation this whole summer for me and there’s an equal amount of songs on here that I cannot wait to be able to hear live. While the production and mixing can leave a bit to be desired at some points, it doesn’t detract from this album’s quality at all.
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