Hope is a dangerous thing, according to Drive-By Truckers expat Jason Isbell
“Still, at the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe,” Bruce Springsteen once posited on the stark, yet essentially optimistic “Reason To Believe” from minimal 1982 masterpiece Nebraska. An assessment with which Jason Isbell—himself a huge Boss booster—would respectfully disagree. “It’s been a long time since Springsteen said that, and I don’t know if that reason is around anymore,” says the ex-Drive-By Trucker, who was raised in small-town Green Hill, Ala. “Now, at the end of the day for most people, it’s just a whole lot of frustration— there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for a lot of them now. People don’t have any time to … to live.”
Isbell’s last album—Southeastern, his fourth, featuring vocals from wife Amanda Shires—turned the microscope on his own life, lyrically dealing with his lengthy battle with alcoholism and subsequent stint in rehab (“I drank a fifth of Jack Daniels a day for a good two years or more, and I realized at one point that Amanda was going to go— she wasn’t gonna hang around and be with a drunk,” he says). But on its follow-up, the new Something More Than Free, he casts a sober, clinical eye outward on the God-fearing, righteous-valued working-class folks he grew up with. And he’s compiled a set of grainy, rugged Everyman portraits that’s the sonic equivalent of Richard Avedon’s book In The American West.
The disc opens on the deceptively whimsical, toe-tapping acoustic melody of “If It Takes A Lifetime,” and the singer’s whispery down-home drawl: “I’ve been workin’ here/ Monday it’ll be a year/And I can’t recall the day when I didn’t wanna disappear/But I keep on showin’ up/Hell-bent on growin’ up/If it takes a lifetime.” Delicate strummer “Speed Trap Town” paints a less-than-idyllic picture of rural existence: “It’s a Thursday night, but there’s a high-school game/Sneak a bottle o the bleachers and forget my name … Everybody knows you in a speed-trap town.” And on the loping title track, he mournfully confesses, “When I get home from work, I’ll call up all my friends/And we’ll go bust up something beautiful we’ll have to build again.”
While the collection shifts focus—from rundown-hotel-as-relationship metaphor “Flagship” to losing ballad “To A Band That I Loved,” an ode to late-lamented group (and old Drive-By touring comrades) Centro-matic—it remains rooted in family. Isbell’s mother-inspired “Children Of Children,” and its poignant line “all the years I took from her just by being born.” “My wife’s mom was really young when she was born, and my mom was, too,” says the 36-year-old. “And I spent a lot of time thinking about that—how their lives would have been di erent had we not come along.”
Mainly, the various clock-punching laborers on “Metropolis” all stem from one source: Isbell’s own father, who’s 57. “My dad still works really hard; he’s still doing manual labor,” he says. “And he’s not poor by any means. But he gave up a long time ago on building an identity outside of his own home, his own family. So, even the good people—the people who resign themselves to their lot in life and are working hard until they can’t work any longer—once they’re done with that work, they’re not in any shape to enjoy whatever it is they worked for all those years.” Isbell’s grandfather recently passed away after retiring, then buying a swank RV with the wealth he’d accumulated. “But it sat in his yard for a year and a half until he died, because he didn’t really feel up to going anywhere, so he told Amanda, ‘Try to enjoy things while you’re young enough to actually participate in them,’” he says.
Isbell is usually backed by his Muscle Shoals culled band the 400 Unit, and he first flew solo with 2007’s Sirens Of The Ditch. Does he have any Nebraska-vintage hope? He sighs. “I try not to think too hard on the fact that we’re making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves,” he says. “But I come from a place where people make the world very small for themselves, and I think that’s still a big part of who I am. Maybe it’s a little bit isolationist, but as far as controlling my own well-being, my family’s fed. And where I come from, if that’s taken care of, you don’t have a lot to worry about.”
—Tom Lanham
