The rebuilt heart of Jason Isbell
Luck favors the prepared, as they say, and young Jason Isbell was ready. He had honed his skills as a songwriter and guitar player since he started playing the mandolin back when his hands were too small to wrap around a guitar neck. He would sit alone in his bedroom for days on end, isolated and insulated from his parents' arguing, tearing through the classics. Playing local bars before he was even a teenager, and the Grand Ole Opry by 16, he went off to college but, famously, never completed his degree for want of a single required health studies class. By his early 20s, he returned to his home in the Shoals of Alabama, an obscure corner of the country that produced some of the greatest R&B in the universe, where he found work writing for FAME Studios.
Then, at the age of 22, his moment arrived. A member of the Drive-By Truckers, a band that had returned to its home in the Shoals to play a breakthrough house concert for Spin magazine, failed to show up for the gig. As a result, Isbell got a rapid field promotion onto the stage. He joined the band for the show and then departed on tour with the band for the next six years. Isbell may have been a young adult, but he looked more like a doughy high school sophomore, especially among the more grizzled members of a hard touring band.
The group he joined in 2001, the raucous, punk infused, careening-toward-the-ditch band, the Truckers, had just released its epic masterpiece, Southern Rock Opera, a whirlwind of Southern rock, punk and gothic hell — literally. In one song, the devil sports a George Wallace sticker on the bumper of his Cadillac. Spin, reviewing Isbell's first show with the Truckers, called them "alt country's rockingest neo-rednecks" who delivered "poetry among the wreckage."
So began the wild years of Isbell's young adulthood, a fiery, creative period that delivered him to two ends. One, he quickly revealed his genius for empathetic portraiture, painting alienated, lost souls and revealing entire worlds in precise drops of telling detail. Two, he lost sight of himself in a haze of booze.
Not long after Isbell joined the Truckers, he penned three incredible songs in rapid succession. "Decoration Day," a dark, rocking examination of intergenerational violence based on his own family's lore, proved to be so good that the band named their next album after the cut. "Outfit" still stands as an Isbell crowd favorite, encapsulating, in his father's voice, warnings about succumbing neither to the dire fate of working-class entrapment ("don't let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy man's paint") nor the perils of a musician's life on the road ("don't tell 'em you're bigger than Jesus, don't give it away.") Then there was "TVA," a
