Critical Mass

Last of his kind: Welcome back to Little Rock, singer-songwriter extraordinaire Jason Isbell

Jason Isbell is touring in support of a new album, The Nashville Sound, which was on many best albums of 2017 lists.
Jason Isbell is touring in support of a new album, The Nashville Sound, which was on many best albums of 2017 lists.

Dear Jason Isbell,

Sometimes how it is for most people isn't how it is for you. And that's all right, or at least it's nothing to get angry about. You can't know how it is for them because we're all a little bit locked in to ourselves, which is why it feels so good when you make a connection with someone or something from the outside, a little prick of empathy that confirms and assures.

Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit

8 p.m. Jan. 21. James McMurtry opens.

Robinson Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St., Little Rock

Tickets: sold out

Information: (501) 244-8800

"One of us," the freaks chant.

We don't know what makes it possible for some people to live for weeks inside a D chord, to make that tight little triangle on the fretboard and ring it out again and again, adding and subtracting notes by pulling fingertips away and hammering them back down. But we do know that some people get fascinated by it the same way they might get fascinated by alcohol or methamphetamine or pornography on the Internet. Like maybe it's not always the healthiest thing. Like Clayton Delaney told Tom T. Hall, "there ain't no money in it."

Anyway, you want to talk about being born at the wrong time, the music business isn't what it was and, for most would-be artists, it never was all that great anyway. Still, you do what you have to do, you start your own label, you sell your own merchandise, you make records to give yourself a reason to tour. You walk out night after night and worry about the worn places on your guitar's neck and find the words you can't say any other way standing up before a crowd of strangers who also can't be anywhere else right now.

And you open something up.

Whether they respond or not has nothing to do with the process. What matters more than whether they hoot or dance or throw bouquets on the bandstand is the act of expression, the effort expended in attempting connection. Sure, if you try over and over and get nothing back, if nobody listens and nobody pays you, maybe you get discouraged and give up eventually (but some never do). So you count yourself as lucky that they're willing to call out song titles, that they are able to make a party from your repertoire.

Maybe it's presumptuous to wonder, but you don't really think so much about that, do you? You think about your family and what you shouldn't be embarrassed to call your art. About the logistics involved in getting from here to where you have to be ... and maybe about how lucky you've been.

. . .

I don't know anything about North Alabama in general or Lauderdale County in particular. But I can guess it's not too different from how it is here, from how it is in a lot of the South and a lot of places in the Midwest and Northeast and West Coast -- anywhere America in the shadow of a cosmopolitan cultural center. Someplace where it takes imagination to see yourself as something other than the models that present. Towns with churches and liquor stores and faces long memorized.

It's always dangerous to assume that certain details are autobiographical, but those lines in "Children of Children" ...

I was riding on my mother's hip

She was shorter than the corn

All the years I took from her

Just by being born.

Didn't mean to break the cycle

At 17 I went by Michael

No one ever called me by my own name anyway

... just have to be, right?

You don't get five full generations without a lot of teenage pregnancies, a lot of dumb kids looking for the only kind of viable escape they could conceive who get into young marriages, little families they could bring to Sunday supper at the grandparents'. Poor folks. Blighted in some ways perhaps, but they are not stupid or mean or dead to a kind of poetry.

Family presses a mandolin into your little hands, family plays the radio and makes available all sorts of ways of making joyful noise. Your daddy's daddy was a Pentecostal preacher who played guitar. Your hands and ears and lungs acquired the requisite skills to convert your feeling into quivering columns of sound. You've made music all your life.

You and your high school buddy Chris Tompkins played the Grand Ole Opry when you were 16. You were a French horn player in the high school band. (Surely somewhere there's a yearbook photo. I've looked, but so far no luck.)

Muscle Shoals was about 20 miles away from your town of Green Hill as the crow flies, with its history and its players, who were always around and playing clubs in Florence (on the doorstep of Muscle Shoals). Before you could drive, your mama used to drop you off and you'd sit in with them. They were generous and took an interest, especially David Hood, the bass player who was part of the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section known as the Swampers (see Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama") and father to Patterson Hood, who we'll get to in a moment.

You had a songwriting deal with F.A.M.E. (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises), the iconic (to some of us) outfit founded by Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill in the '50s. It paid $250 a week, which wasn't bad considering it was for doing something you'd be doing anyway.

Hall, who died recently, split from Sherrill in 1962, and beginning in 1963 with Jimmy Hughes' "Steal Away" turned his studio into the headquarters of what became known as the Muscle Shoals Sound, recording -- among others -- Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, Solomon Burke, the Rolling Stones and Percy Sledge. He employed the Muscle Shoals rhythm section and Duane Allman and was known for running a color-blind shop where musicians of all races could record together. In 1969, the Swampers broke away and started their own studio.

(I know you know all this, but we have to understand that not everyone shares our enthusiasms. To those who'd like to know more about Mr. Hall, I'd recommend the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals.)

(Oh, and Billy Sherrill didn't do badly for himself either. After splitting with Hall he went to Nashville, Tenn., and cut "Almost Persuaded" with David Houston and went on to work with Charlie Rich, Tammy Wynette and, for 19 years, George Jones.)

You ended up at the University of Memphis. Word is you're still a P.E. credit shy of graduating.

. . .

You joined the Drive-By Truckers when you were 22 years old.

I imagine that all seems like a blur now, what parts of it you can remember. But you wrote some great songs, the title cut to 2003's Decoration Day (which feels true story-ish and something like Jeff Nichols' brilliant first film Shotgun Stories, seeing how both of them are about blood atonement and dumb male pride) and, most of all "Outfit," which includes career advice that had to have been handed out by your house painter father: "Don't let me catch you in Kendale, with a bucket of wealthy man's paint." (Kendale Gardens is a ritzy real estate development in Florence.)

But nobody's early 20s feel easy, and yours weren't -- your marriage to bandmate Shonna Tucker, the bassist and homegirl, came apart, and the drinking reportedly made you surly. DBT co-founder Patterson Hood -- David's boy, who's some 15 years older than you -- famously told The New York Times' Dwight Garner that "some people get drunk and become kind of sweet. Jason wasn't one of those people."

Yeah.

You were gone in 2007. I have memories of you in the DBT. I saw you as the sloppy (sorry) younger brother of Hood and Mike Cooley, whose band it always was even though you were arguably contributing the most affecting songs. I thought of you as a deep and resourceful guitar player with remarkable fluidity that comes more with instinct and aptitude than any of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice prescriptions.

You were the one I'd have bet on to burn out. The odds-on casualty, the Brian Jones figure. Watching you play, hearing your songs, gave me pause -- a sense of deja vu. Rock 'n' roll has always been a pageant that demands sacrifice, there's always somebody willing to join what Kurt Cobain's mother called "that stupid club."

There's always some fool Icarus, like to mess around and get himself killed.

. . .

Jason, I'm so glad that didn't happen.

Because without belaboring the point, your country needs examples like you. We need young men from north Alabama who've overcome bad things and see the world clearly, who aren't thwarted by fear or jealousy or too involuted or precious to move off the couch. Who realize there are more important things than selling records. Who have survived to start beautiful families.

I'm so glad you're going to be playing in Little Rock a week from today with that crusty James McMurtry opening for you. McMurtry told me he doesn't like books, having grown up around them and all. I don't believe him. I think you have to trust the art, not the artist. It's been a long time since I've looked forward to a concert as much as this one, and there are a lot of people around here who feel that way.

Some of them caught you when you came through town in 2009, playing at Stickyz. That was before 2013's album Southeastern, 2015's Something More than Free (which won two Grammy Awards) and 2017's The Nashville Sound (nominated for two Grammys) established you as the latest (and quite possibly the last commercially viable) great American singer-songwriter in a certain traditionalist vein that traces down from Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie through Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. By their lights I'm a late adopter.

I know you're a guitar monkey at heart, that you can shred effortlessly with a speed and stamina no doubt stemming as much from the family bluegrass sessions of your boyhood as your still relatively new sobriety. But what I connect to is your calm and unshowy literateness -- the way you arrange plain language to make your point, your wonderful command of the vernacular that never condescends or makes a joke of the characters you inhabit.

For me, it's your songs, son.

I heard you play "Elephant" on Marc Maron's podcast a few years ago, and that ruined me. I'd heard the song on the record (Southeastern), an offhand song about the terrors of living with and dying from cancer. But for some reason, that simple strummed version, you alone in a hotel room into a podcast microphone, well -- I can tear up just thinking about it.

You're an uncommonly fine writer. I get your meter, the organic use of specialized vocabularies, the tug and spark of the lyrics, with those shiny phrases glinting through here and there and, above all, the stubborn sense of place, the nailed down specific that evokes the universal. (From "Cover Me Up": So girl, leave your boots by the bed we ain't leaving this room/Till someone needs medical help or the magnolias bloom. From "The Last of My Kind": Nobody here can dance like me/ Everybody's clapping on the one and the three.)

But songwriting is not just lyrics, it's not English lit. There's something in the way those melodies pull against the meaning, along with the emotive flow of that voice -- which is just a touch too pretty for my tastes -- but works with your material, especially the rougher stuff. (You'd be a hell of a metal vocalist, I think, but I'm not offering career advice.)

I don't imagine everyone shares my opinion, and that's all right. To get downright harsh about it, not everybody likes music, and -- like T Bone Burnett once said -- it didn't take the record labels long to start making records that catered to that audience. Lots of smart people don't hear the words anyway, which is why so many of us party along to those sad, sad stories you're relating. There's a lot to recommend a tight band and a good bass line -- some people can live inside a kick drum.

I've heard too much to indulge the tyranny of my own taste. There's lot to love out there, and lots of ways to affirm humanity and worth as a human being. Art is for everybody, and whatever makes people feel happy or sad or anything at all is preferable to the alternative -- that numbness with which I believe most of us are at least acquainted. You offer the joy and the hurt and the sheer awe of being in the moment.

Bring it on, we're ready.

Your pal,

PM

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

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AP

Jason Isbell performed at the Americana Music Awards in Nashville on Sept. 13. Isbell and his band, the 400 Unit, performs at the Robinson Performance Hall Jan. 21.

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Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: bassist Jimbo Hart (from left), keyboard player Derry deBorja, guitarist Sadler Vaden, Isbell and drummer Chad Gamble.

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Album cover for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit's "The Nashville Sound"

Style on 01/14/2018

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