Danny Clinch
It’s a chilly spring day just south of Nashville, and Grammy winner Jason Isbell sits in his yard, marveling at the beauty of his adopted home as he soaks up the sun.
There’s no place he’d rather be than Tennessee, Isbell says, breathing easy between tour dates and chatting about his band’s eighth studio album, Weathervanes, out June 9. But just then a gunshot rings out, and then a few more, breaking the silence in counterpoint to his inner peace. And while it’s no big deal— Isbell is a born-and-bred rural Southerner, after all—these days they bring a twinge of apprehen- sion he can’t ignore.
“I know it’s because I live out in the country and somebody’s target shooting,” he says. “But it’s still that sound, you know? You come out in the yard, and everything looks so beautiful, and then you hear that sound and it triggers something.”
Ironically, it comes as Isbell is talking about the new track “Save the World,” a jittery rocker with the on-edge feel of a father stunned stiff by he terrifying possibility of gun violence close to home. It’s just one of many social issues Isbell, an artist renowned for unflinching honesty with a storyteller’s touch, digs into on the new album.
Weathervanes is a project filled with tales of real problems, conflicted characters, and ugly truths. Isbell doesn’t shy away from hot-but- ton issues on the album, and, as always, his lyrics are less about preaching and more about pleading for people to stop judging and start coming together. Thirteen songs tackle every- thing from becoming an accidental addict to loving a person with mental illness. One even describes a young couple struggling with the decision to end a pregnancy. Through it all runs a thread of compassion.
“The trick is to try to see things through somebody else’s eyes. It’s easy to make rules for yourself, but once you start applying them to everybody else they don’t necessarily hold up so well,” he says. “We all have a different situation and we’re all coming from a different starting point.”
As a songwriter, Isbell admits that he’s no longer interested in garden variety love songs and he’s starting to think “nostalgia is an abomination.”There’s not much romanticizing the good old days on this one.
“I’m in my 40s now and a lot of the prob- lems I have aren’t the same ones I had when I was in my 20s and 30s,” he says. “My goals have shifted to where most of my challenges are creative, and a lot of times after songwrit- ers get older and have a little success, they start writing vague. But what I’m trying to do is keep those very concrete details happening, and to make the big issues personal issues. I did that a lot on this album.”
The approach comes into play right away with the opening track “Death Wish” bring- ing a national tragedy down to the family-unit level. An anxiety-laced mix of pent-up energy and rootsy chamber pop, the track finds a man holding on for dear life as his spouse battles mental illness, bluntly explaining he’s got no idea what to do. “King of Oklahoma,” written while Isbell was working on the upcoming Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon in Oklahoma, paints a picture of hard luck in the heartland, describing someone who thought he had it all, only to wind up stealing copper from work sites to fund an opioid addiction.
Isbell didn’t plan to write on set, but it was so hot during filming that he was stuck in his production trailer with time on his hands. He calls Scorsese “one of the only people in the world who could make a $200 million Western” and says the sheer scale of his creative vision influenced Weathervanes. Isbell was inspired by how driven the director was, but also how he welcomed input from others. Upon returning to Nashville and Blackbird Studio he did the same with his longtime band The 400 Unit. Ultimately it led to a dark but richly textured Americana sound, sometimes hushed in thought and other times raging with foreboding power. Just like the stormy metaphorical skies.
“Cast Iron Skillet” is a slow-simmering ballad in which Isbell, accompanied only by a fiddle, accordion, and acoustic guitar, thoughtfully questions the advice we’re told not to question when we’re young. “I think we have this habit of romanticizing the past, so we don’t learn as much from it as we could,” he says.
Elsewhere, two kids drive nervously toward the end of an agonizing decision in “White Beretta,” with the gentle roll of the road putting the listener right in the passenger seat racked with the same regret over the judgment they were raised to dole out, before it was them who needed help. For Isbell, who understands that the “rules” of those communities are deep-down intended to keep their members safe, it’s an attempt to showcase the humanity of those you disagree with. But where “White Beretta” comes with the nuance of never really saying what the issue is, “Save the World” is an open social commentary that hits close to home. Angry and afraid in equal measure, the track finds a father near his breaking point with worry over mass shootings, battling a rush of panic and looking for the exits anytime he’s in public with his family. “There’s some desperation in that song for sure,” he says. It was also a tough one to write, forcing Isbell to rework his lyrics several times to properly convey the angst, hoping to capture the exhaust- ed push-and-pull of our current reality.
“I wanted it to come across as creepy and paranoid in that way, because there are so many beautiful things in the world, especially living in a place like Tennessee,” he says. “Like right now I’m sitting out in my front yard and it’s absolute- ly gorgeous. I would not want to be anywhere else. I don’t think there’s a more beautiful place on earth, but some days it can be the most frus- trating place in the world, too.”
With a daughter of his own, Isbell knows the anxiety parents feel about sending their kids to school every day. But by turning the frustra- tion and pain into visceral roots rock, “Save the World” shows Isbell’s songwriting at its best; dragging what hurts to hear out into the light and letting listeners know that they’re not alone in their feelings. There’s no solution in “Save the World.” No hero to show up and fix things. But maybe that’s the most honest thing about it—and the album as a whole.
“Honestly, I think my goal is really just to communicate how I feel about the world and hope that resonates with somebody else,” he says. “I want people to hear this and think, ‘How did he know that?’That’s the best it gets for me.”