Jason Isbell’s not here to make it easy for you. If you’re looking for some tidy redemption arc—the guy who got clean, got married, and wrote his big, serious masterpiece—he’s going to let you have that. But he’s also going to roll his eyes a little. Southeastern is bigger than that, and he knows it.
“People call it the sobriety record,” he says, settling into a chair backstage at Bonnaroo, the Tennessee heat already creeping in. “That kind of pisses me off, if it’s just that. I tried to make it all those things at once—recovery record, honeymoon record, funeral record, songwriter record. But if calling it a sobriety record helps somebody quit drinking, great. I don’t care what they call it.”
That last part, at least, is true. Isbell won’t waste much time explaining himself. He’s never been one for mythology. What Southeastern does, more than anything, is lay his cards on the table, unvarnished, no bullshit. These are songs about mistakes, regret, and whatever comes after.
The old drinking songs still make the setlist, though. The ones where he’s drowning loneliness in whiskey, romanticizing self-destruction. Is it weird to sing those now? “If anything, they mean more to me now,” he says. “I remember how I felt, but I’ve outgrown it. It feels like a triumph, being able to document that part of my life and move past it.”
Writing, he says, isn’t about waiting for some mystical lightning bolt of inspiration. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work,” he says, quoting painter Chuck Close. “The motivation came easier when I wasn’t thinking, ‘The sun’s down, time to start drinking.’”
For a guy who gets lumped into the alt-country world, his musical DNA is pure pop. “I was in love with Crowded House, Squeeze, Janet Jackson, Prince, Michael Jackson,” he says. “If you start singing ‘Oh Sheila’ over one of my songs, you’ll go, ‘Wow, it’s a wonder he didn’t get sued.’”
One of the stranger what-ifs surrounding Southeastern is what would’ve happened if Ryan Adams had produced it. That was the plan at one point. Then schedules didn’t line up, and Isbell had a wedding to get to. “There would have been things that were different, but the songs were already there,” he says. “His way of making records is pretty similar to mine. But I wanted to finish before my wedding, so I could go on my honeymoon and not be sitting in Costa Rica worrying about overdubs.”
Dave Cobb ended up producing instead, and Isbell gives him plenty of credit. “Dave pulled things out of me that I’d never been able to do on my own,” he says. “But I don’t think it would’ve been that different. I just would’ve driven my wife crazy if I was in LA while she was planning a wedding.”
All of which brings him to the tricky part—writing love songs that don’t sound like greeting cards. “It’s a challenge,” he admits. “You have to avoid the clichés. The details matter. Read a bunch. Listen to good music and only good music. I know songwriters who spend too much time on the Top 40 just to hear what they hate. I won’t do it. Life’s too short.”
He’s still drawn to the hard-luck cases in his songs, though. “The people who are happy don’t need a voice,” he says. “They’re fine. I’m more interested in the ones who look like they’re having a hard time.”
His politics aren’t a secret, but he’s careful with how he injects them into his songs. “I’ve angered some people with my take on it,” he admits. “But if you tell the story right, people draw their own conclusions. Reality has a decided liberal bias, but people don’t care what you believe. They care what you do.”
He keeps coming back to that idea—story first, everything else second. The rest doesn’t matter if the song doesn’t hold up. “You pick what parts of the story you want to tell, and that puts your personality and beliefs in the song,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it’s my song.”
He grins. “And nobody cares what you believe.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
