JASON ISBELL
Jason Isbell should have nothing left to prove. If you’d bagged a pair of Grammys and a spot in the Billboard top 10 album charts for your past two albums – 2015’s Something More Than Free and 2017’s The Nashville Sound – while building an army of remarkably passionate fans, you’d be pretty confident of your own brilliance, right? But for the 41-year-old former Drive-By Trucker, the picture was very different as he attempted to craft his seventh solo album, Reunions. In fact, so tortured was its gestation that Isbell admits it even strained his relationship with his wife, musician Amanda Shires. Nothing left to prove? Hardly.
“I think it was the opposite,” says Isbell, with a soft Alabama drawl. “That was causing pressure for me. I still don’t think that I’ve done my absolute best work. I guess some of it is probably me trying to prove to other people that it wasn’t a fluke – and I don’t know when that stops. When do you start thinking, ‘Okay, it’s not a fluke?’ I don’t know.
“I just didn’t want to let everybody down. I didn’t want to come into a project without having done my homework, without having strong songs and enough material to make a strong album. I didn’t want there to be any filler. We don’t have a lot of casual fans – either they don’t listen to our music at all or they pore over each individual lyric and sound. I like that. I would rather it be that way. But it makes you think, ‘Okay, I can’t get away with anything!’”
Isbell might be the last person on Earth who thinks this is all still a fluke but what’s less surprising is how forthright he is about his struggles with that impulse. Part of what makes Isbell’s music so engaging is the unflinching honesty he brings to his songs, whether that be his battles with alcoholism or his relationship issues. It’s something that, even 13 years into his solo career, he’s still wrestling with.
“I’m not necessarily comfortable with it,” he reflects. “But one of the things that I
