So.... These pages have once again been blank for too long. During this time your writer has not been idle attending two national Lutheran events and deciding whether or not to leave the one true church as well as going to Michigan a couple of times and maintaining a failing law practice and staying married blah, blah, blah... We still do not know. What this space will become but since I found something really excellent I wanted to share.
Jason Isbell formerly of the band The Drive By Truckers went solo a number of years ago. That band is much admired having reestablished the three guitar Allman Brother/Lynard Skynard brand of Southern (read American) rock music. Isbells singing is in the vain of Ryan Adams as far as tunefulness and mournfulness and that is quite a bit of fullness. He really has a great voice.
Isbell eventually left the band (or they kicked him out) after descending into alcoholism and having a very public break up with his wife, the bands bass player Shonna Tucker. It was ugly, akin to the Richard and Linda Thompson break up where they would almost attack each other on stage. Isbell released a number of CDs with his band The 400 Unit but everything release had kind of a cursory feel to it. Happily he tried out and found a new love, (singer songwriter Amanda Shires) but now has now come out with a solo CD that is easily, on the basis of songwriting alone, the best CD thus far in 2013. Hitting the high spots...
Stockholm could be a Ryan Adams song with his voice and as far as the harmonies. Just a really pretty song.
Elephant is simply a powerful, elemental song about a friend slow death from cancer. It is wrenching. It is heartfelt. Isbell states. That inspiration was no specific person but when he was on his long binge, he frequented a bar over period of time and people just...disappeared as cancer took them. So he made up a character and chronicled his relationship with her as she declined...
"She said Andy your better than your past.
Winked at me and drained her glass.
Sitting cross legged on a bar stool
Like no one sits anymore.
***
"I'd play her classic country songs,
She'd get high and sing along".
***
"I've buried her 1000 times.
Given up my place in line.
I don't give a damn about that now".
***
"One things very clear to me,
No one dies. With dignity.
You just try and ignore, the Elephant some how".
The Elephant becomes more and more of an issue and it is good to have it called out and in some cases acknowledged and even stared down. This is a little bit too heavy a song but it is awesomely constructed and presented on this CD. There are no wasted words in this song.
But he alleviates the heaviness with his song about a night out on the. Road and almost dying in a Super 8 Motel with my favorite line being:
"It wasn't quite morning and I wasn't quite breathing".
I have felt like that. Even in a. Fun song he looks pretty hard at the choices he was making.
Songs She Sang In The Shower is just a great song about being an asshole and going through relationships. It starts with being in a bar and our narrator saying to another patron,
"There are two kinds. Of men and your not either one".
It was the kind of thing I would have said in college if clever enough. He thinks he is funny as he gets a black eye and his girlfriend on the way home, asks if he has "considered living alone", and leaves him. Then he laments being the type of asshole that drives women away and he does so by being haunted by the songs the vicarious women sang in the shower. Great vehicle.
Different Days is my favorite song on the CD talking at first to a stripper about how as a younger man he might have tried to help her out:
"But those were different days".
Amen.
He goes through a couple of vignettes reflecting how we all grow up, grow old and change. For me this is the stellar question in my. Life. How to age gracefully or more gracefully and how to reconcile the way I know I am supposed to be living my life with the mistakes I have made. In the past and he gives us great insight and perhaps even a little compassion. We get better and smarter if we are lucky and pay attention and although he never gets to redemption...
"Jesus lose the sinner but the highway loves the sin".
Amen again.
This is just a brilliantly written and performed CD. I can recommend it without hesitation. Ad will stake my limited reputation on your. Enjoyment of it... But you got to listen to it.
