jason_isbell

The best album of the year is released today (6/11/13).  It’s Jason Isbell’s Southeastern.  “Best” is pretty subjective, especially when it comes to music.  If you think that Taylor Swift or John Fogerty or Black Sabbath or Rascal Flats has released the best disc of the year…well, you’re right.  Although what you probably mean to say is so-and-so released your favorite album of the year.  Music = subjective.  So, Southeastern is my favorite album of the year.  But, I’ll battle you on one aspect; Southeastern is lyrically the best written album of the year.  What is it about these Southerners?  Their plays, poetry and songs are so frequently better than any others.  I think you have to go back all the way to the period after Kris Kristofferson left the Army to find a collection of songs so rich and characters so developed.

I’m pre-disposed to like alt-country, power-pop, lo-fi, and neo-soul.  Perhaps it’s actually hyphens I like best.  No, I like alt-country best, so I was pretty anxious to hear Isbell’s new album and lucky enough to get hold of it a few weeks before its release.  I hardly even notice the music surrounding Isbell’s strong vocals and songwriting.  I’d buy this disc if it was a cappella.  If you printed the lyrics in a fancy book and put a nice picture on the cover, I’d buy that too.  I laughed and cried when I first heard it.  I still laugh and cry after a dozen spins…even though I know how all the stories end.  Isbell has an amazing ability to develop characters that you really grow to care about in just a couple of minutes.  Who among us can create rhymes for Pedialyte, Klonopin and Wheatherby and not have to color outside the lines to do so?  Who dares release an album full of cancer, incest, drunkenness, loneliness, suicide, murder and despair and expect commercial success?  Jason Isbell does.  Or maybe he has no expectations.

Much has and will be written about Isbell’s split with Drive By Truckers, his drinking, his relationships, his drinking, his new wife Amanda Shires, his rehab and his drinking. If every step along that path was necessary to create Southeastern, I’d argue it was all worth it.  There’s probably a thousand ways to say “I was an asshole.” A thousand more ways to apologize and express regret.  We’ve heard them all before….yet Isbell invents poetic new ways to own his recklessness and illustrate his remorse.  Isbell can describe bad behavior at a party leading to a black eye and a breakup with an amazing economy of words yet without sacrificing hi-def detail as he does in the first few lines of “Songs That She Sang In The Shower.”  He’s a loveable hell raiser in “Super 8,” the funniest and most rollicking song of the collection.  Another altercation is described there and you can almost hear the pork rinds grinding underfoot as Isbell sings:

Big boy bustin’ in / screamin’ at his girlfriend /swinging round a fungo bat
Bass player steppin’ up / brandishing a coffee cup / took it in the baby fat

The shits and giggles of “Super 8” are quickly forgotten as it segues into the next track.  The first time I heard “Yvette” I immediately replayed the song to confirm that I had processed it properly.  Yvette’s dad may be dead, but chivalry is still alive.

Isbell closes with “Relatively Easy,” perhaps his way of shrugging off the challenging subject matter that has just been presented with a “worse things happen at sea” attitude.  In Jason Isbell’s world, there’s always someone worse off than you.  He knows – he’s been that guy.