Review: REUNIONS — Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

One day, five months into the presidency that threatens even now to undo the American experiment, I heard someone on the radio sing “there can’t be more of them than us, there can’t be more,” and burst into tears.

I was in my car, maneuvering an entrance onto the I-290 known among Chicagoans for its potential lethality, and tears were ill-advised. But what could I do, just seconds earlier Jason Isbell had also sung “I know you’re tired/ And you ain’t sleeping well/ Uninspired/ And likely mad as hell,” and let’s just say I was primed.

I’d never heard his name before May 11, 2017, but “Hope The High Road,” the lead single off Nashville Sound, became something of a lullaby for me on subsequent nights; when the album dropped the following month, it was as if someone flipped a switch and my life bifurcated: Before Isbell, and After.

In an existence marked by enthusiasms, many of them musical, I have never absorbed a single artist’s output the way that I took to Jason Isbell’s. I read and watched so many interviews that they run together now, but I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard certain tracks (watering my newly-seeded grass — “Codeine.”) I examined the lyrics and the references and the sources for the references; in the years since, I’ve undertaken areas of study and professional pursuits that can be traced directly to the months I spent immersed in one man’s trajectory from young barbarian to Americana stalwart. It was, simply put, a joyful thing.

I’ve since taken to calling myself an Isbell nerd; I would not, however, call myself a Super Fan. Super Fans love heedlessly, breathlessly, without discernment. They like everything. I do not. There are a few tracks that I would politely term Not-My-Favorites; Live From The Ryman is also, respectfully, Not My Favorite (though I could listen to Live From Alabama every day and twice on Sunday.) “Isbell nerd” is accurate; so, I believe, is “Isbell scholar.”

I tell you all this by way of explaining that there was no reality in which I would come to Reunions, Jason Isbell’s just-released seventh solo studio album, with anything like chill. There’s no chill.

I preordered it through his website the instant I could; when he arranged for an early release through independent record stores, I preordered another. Then, when that store didn’t get back to me within something like 48 hours, I preordered another-nother. (Then of course the first store did, in fact, get back to me; shout-out to Isbell’s merch supplier for agreeing to cancel my original preorder, so I wouldn’t ultimately find myself with three copies.)

So is this a review? I don’t know. Sort of? It is, in one sense, a sigh of relief, because, wow, imagine if it’d been a stinker! So just in case, I’ll tell you right now that it is not a stinker. Here’s my tl;dr review: Excellent; four-and-a-half out of five stars; two thumbs way up; devil’s horns and pixie dust. Go get you a copy.

But this is mostly a discussion of Reunions from the kind of person who mentally corrects folks like award-winning music journalist Jim DeRogatis when they say things like “…sixth full-length studio album by Jason Isbell” (seventh.) (Though you should listen to the Sound Opinions review in which he made that error, it’s really good.)

Isbell has said in interviews that the album’s title refers to his growing sense that visitations from the ghosts of our past aren’t hauntings, but rather reunions with people and places that still have something to tell us. Reunions engages with this idea as through a glass darkly (“Overseas”), with tender clarity (“Only Children,” “St. Peter’s Autograph”), brute honesty (“It Gets Easier”), and even by way of ghosts that haven’t gotten here yet (“Letting You Go.”)

The ghosts aren’t found only in the stories or the characters (or, indeed, the repeated appearance of the word “ghost”), however; Isbell has also said that he was able to revisit ideas with which he wasn’t able to fully grapple at earlier stages of his life — here, however, your humble nerd must rely not on certain fact but informed supposition.

“River,” for instance, sounds to these ears as if the songwriter might be revisiting the kind of men we encountered in songs like “Never Gonna Change” (a track from Isbell’s Drive-By Truckers days), “Seven-Mile Island” (off Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit), and “Live Oak” (Southeastern). All of these characters were various kinds of lost and violent, none able to fully acknowledge their responsibility for the shape of their lives. In “River,” by way of contrast, we find a character slowly revealing his sins, holding each to the light and naming them as his own, even as they take him under.

I would even argue that there are ghosts in the notes themselves. I’ve long felt that Isbell pays homage, sometimes veiled but always intentional, to the music played by artists he admires; he once noted on Twitter (in what I later realized must have been the early stages of recording “The Chain” with The Highwomen) that “the solo section of ‘The Chain’ owes a bit to the ‘Free Bird’ outro I do believe” — which is to say: There’s a level of granularity to his musical awareness that would certainly support such an approach to songwriting.

And so: The opening of “Overseas,” a lush piece that unfolds into a story that might be “about” any number of things and people, owes at least a bit to the opening of “Swimmer” (a track off his wife Amanda Shires’ 2018 release To The Sunset), I do believe. Placed side-by-side, the lyrics themselves could almost be in response, lovers caught across time and oceans and words sung to empty spaces.

There seems to be a bit of Jackson Browne in “Running With Our Eyes Closed” (though not the track that might initially come to mind), a bit of The Allman Brothers in “Dreamsicle,” and any number of moments that feel warmly familiar to someone who’s spent three years inside Isbell’s world.

But if that were all he had done — corralled a bunch of ghosts that remind a nerd of other stuff — it wouldn’t have amounted to much. It certainly wouldn’t deserve stars and pixie dust.

I’ve put Isbell’s lyrics under a microscope in the past as well (here and here), and much as it gives me joy to engage in close study of anything dear to me, I remain wary of pulling on any piece of art too hard. Ultimately, these are ten gorgeous songs, a few of them as near to perfect as any four minutes of recorded music have any right to be, on an album that is both rich and lean, without an ounce of self-indulgent fat on it anywhere. The nerdery is just a bonus.

And so here is my review: Reunions is the work of an artist at the height of his powers, a man who sees the gifts he’s been given and honors them with both his love and his hard work. It’s an excellent, excellent record. Go get you a copy.

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