Danny Clinch
Isbell (with guitar) is as rebellious as ever. He’s at Breese Stevens Sept. 3.
Jason Isbell’s new album with his Muscle Shoals-flecked 400 Unit is as rebellious as ever. The Nashville Sound also showcases his tender side. His duet with bandmate and wife Amanda Shires, “If We Were Vampires,” vaporizes the cliches of growing old together. Shires and Isbell have a two year-old-daughter and make their home in Nashville. That’s where Andy Moore caught up with Isbell, who performs at Breese Stevens Field on Sept. 3.
You are the 400 Unit, but you are also a family unit. What’s it like to work with and tour with your wife while watching over your young family?
It’s good. I’m not the kind of person that gets bored. I always had stuff to do to keep myself occupied on tour — at least once I stopped drinking. So now I can spend time with my wife and my daughter. As long as I’ve got the family with me on the road, I can tour without ever really hating my job.
The song on the new album called “White Man’s World” seems to have predicted the horrible events in Charlottesville. How is what happened there a part of what you were concerned with when you wrote the song?
When I was growing up in Alabama, there was not really anybody in my neighborhood except for poor white folks, for the most part. So I grew up around a lot of people who were afraid of other cultures. Once I started playing guitar and I started writing songs, I started really digging into where the music was originally made. And I started thinking about any certain fears I had about any cultures and they were wiped away by the love that I had for that music. I think the growing pains we’re having right now are in a lot of ways about progress — like taking down some of these monuments that should have never been there in the first place. It breaks my heart. You know if you’re calling yourself a white nationalist, I don’t even have any idea what you do with the music you love. Because any type of music I can think of is directly connected to the people they hate. I don’t see how they’re consuming anything that makes them happy — their food, their movies, their books, their music — it’s all made by this combination of people they detest. I don’t think anybody who listened to enough Otis Redding could ever hate black people. I can’t wrap my mind around it.
What is the blessing of the American South? And what is the curse?
I think the blessing comes from being deeply entrenched in the family unit. The curse of it is directly tied to that. That can also be a curse. If your family has a close-minded viewpoint, then that’s going to get passed on directly to you.
Have you ever considered living anywhere but the South?
Yeah, I’ve considered it but I’m still real close to my family and, well, my dad’s here at the house now, and so I try to stay close to him. I guess that’s really the reason I am where I am.
What’s the best driving song there is?
“Running Down a Dream”—Tom Petty.
Who is the best Nashville-based recording artist of the 1970s?
It’d be hard to argue against Glen Campbell. But Dolly Parton, I think, probably wins. She was writing those songs, and if you can think of a more perfect song than “I Will Always Love You,” I can’t think of a more perfect song than that. Elvis wanted to record that song and said if he was going to record it, then she wouldn’t be able to put it on her own album, and she didn’t let Elvis. She kept the publishing on that song, for Christ sakes. Dolly always stood her ground.
What’s the best guitar you used to own, but you wish you still had?
I’ll tell you what. There was a Les Paul that I used to have that I used to play a lot with the [Drive-By] Truckers. It was one of those wine red ’70s Les Pauls. Very, very heavy guitar but it was stolen pretty soon after I started touring solo because I’d been in a bus for a while with the Truckers and I forgot that when you’re touring in a van you have to bring all your shit in every night or someone will just bust the window out and take it. And that’s what happened.
When you started out do you remember consciously borrowing from songwriters you admired?
Yeah. Yeah. I think I still do that. The thing is I’ve noticed this: Usually when I write something and I think it sounds too much like somebody else, by the time I get done with the song — the production and the arrangement of it — it doesn’t. That’s something that I’ve learned to stop worrying about because of that.
