Jason Isbell’s Road
Feet and trucks. Boats and ships. Planes, trains, and automobiles. The highway.
Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell sings and writes about a lot of things: lonely people and broken people; murder and graves and God and love; pregnancy and (a whole lot more than some listeners seem to realize) politics. But none of these, I would argue, are the subject of his work. A lifetime of lyrics suggests that Jason Isbell’s subject is journeying.
Most of the time, in most of Isbell’s writing, we hear about actual, physical travel, or at least the means and mechanisms of such travel — on one album alone he or a character finds his way to Sweden, Australia, and Fond du Lac. It’s the rare Isbell track that doesn’t make at least passing reference to movement, distance, or geography; a Crown Vic, a GTO, or a Greyhound.
So deep is the journey in these songs that it emerges from the music itself: the whoosh and whine of Camaros and Peterbilts; the drumbeat of trains; the agonized thump-thump of a helicopter that won’t save anyone in time. It could be that musicians who take to the road at age 22 and never really leave will inevitably incorporate such sounds into their vocabulary; it surely helps that Isbell’s hyper-talented wife and frequent bandmate, singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, conjures the spirits of wheels and wind on her fiddle.
But I would argue that you don’t need Isbell’s music to find his central concern. His words read just fine without production, or even (one hesitates to say) a guitar.
Caught hard in the throes of addiction, Isbell wrote in his mid-20s about wheels that “still move, but won’t slow down, even when you’re spinning in the same soft ground”; in his early 30s, two albums into recovery, he was able to write: “I thought that I was running to, but I was running from.” In 2007 a failed relationship was sketched as “two of us tied down to live through the ride”; six years later, newly sober, Isbell was singing “I’ve grown tired of traveling alone. Won’t you ride with me?”
In the trajectory from young barbarian to Americana stalwart, “home” has been a dream in Isbell’s lyrics, an aspiration, a deception, a revelation, and most recently an anchor, but never a terminus: “In a room by myself,” he sings on Southeastern, “I pace and I pray,” seeking passage even within four walls; on last year’s Nashville Sound, “the high road” is cast as both path and meeting point — if all else fails, he harmonizes with Shires, “we’ll ride the ship down.”
Whether for Isbell’s characters or himself, the single greatest danger in these tracks is stasis: the motel room where even the A/C has died; the cul-de-sac where family tragedy plays out; the town where “you take whoever you think you can keep around.” The line between choice and trap is thin, sometimes invisible: “I thought about moving away, but what would my mama say… Maybe the Cumberland Gap just swallows you whole.”
The journey then is not merely movement but also seeking, born in questions posed by a man endlessly engaged with humanity’s foundational ignorance. “What can you see from your window,” he asks a fallen soldier in one of his best-known songs, “I can’t see anything from mine.” Love bounded by time, people’s fundamental solitude, God as a pipe bomb or working man — all are examined but never given resolution, beyond the unavoidable truth of our own deaths. “Maybe time running out is a gift,” Isbell posits, in a love song steeped in the inevitability of loss.
Admittedly, there is a faint absurdity to analyzing two decades of lyrics as if they were a single entity. The songs are discrete, and the albums are not chapbooks. Every now and then, Jason Isbell’s car is just a car, and the road (rolling over him, never filling his holes, beating him like a drum) is just a road. “Somehow I’m still out here burning my days,” he sings in a love song to a band, “your voice makes the miles melt away.” He’s told interviewers that one of the perks of selling more records was getting a bigger bus.
Art grows from the heart that makes it, though, and pretty often, writers ask the same question a dozen different ways. Humanity’s incapacity to truly know much of anything hovers everywhere around Isbell’s words, but peace, it seems, can be found — as long as it never truly rests.
Emily L. Hauser is a Chicago-based freelance writer and librarian. She is a self-taught Jason Isbell nerd.
Writing is my job. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, & a long list of other print & online outlets, including The Chicago Tribune, Paste, DAME, & StarTrek.com. I’d you’d like to support my work, or just spot me a cup of coffee, you can do so via PayPal or Ko-Fi. And please share what you’ve read with your friends!
