Blowing in the Wind
Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell’s latest album upholds his place in the pantheon of musical storytellers that began with Dylan.
Review by Joseph Collum
When Cormac McCarthy died last month, singer-songwriter Jason Isbell paid his respects on “I could go onstage and say ‘This next one was influenced by Cormac McCarthy’ and literally sing any song I’ve ever written,” Isbell wrote. Over his 20-year career, Isbell has found success in Americana, or the whatever-that-means-today genre, gracing the cover of the Spotify Indigo playlist and winning some daytime Grammys. But to associate himself with perhaps the greatest novelist of a generation might seem a tad presumptuous.
But then, on his song “Cumberland Gap,” Isbell sings, “Remember when we could see the mountain’s peak, the sparkle off the amphibole? Like a giant golden eagle’s beak… now they say no one wants the coal.” This line and others like it appear throughout Isbell’s career to defend his claim to a place in Cormac McCarthy’s lineage: a poetic landscape, uniquely American in its intimidating beauty, and a heartbroken narrator, interrupting himself with a remembrance of his disappearing livelihood. Isbell is a member of the current generation of songwriters who strive to write literature in their lyrics, a job which Bob Dylan created.
From his days in the Drive-by-Truckers twenty years ago, Isbell has achieved that level of poetry again and again. He was 24-years-young when he wrote “Decoration Day,” a stunning Southern epic about a family feud in the Hatfield-McCoy vein. The song tells the story from the point of view of the most recent inheritor of the feud. “It’s Decoration Day,” Isbell sings, “and I’ve a mind to roll a stone on his grave. What would he say? ‘Keeping me down, boy, won’t keep you away.’” Isbell imagines the headstone as a weight to keep the ghost down, a truly original image. Yet he stays true to his narrator’s voice: a south Tennessean of the early 1900s could have said exactly those words. The owner of most of a creative writing degree from the University of Memphis, Isbell’s literature comes from phrases that could be overheard in a bar, a truck stop, a diner, or, as in the title of one of his more rocking songs, a Super 8 motel.
The last few years have seen a dip in the quality of Isbell’s output. He achieved his success in a whirlwind few months in 2013—getting sober, getting married, and writing, recording and releasing his now-classic album, Southeastern. He followed up Southeastern with an at least equally great set of songs on Something More Than Free. Since then, however, he has had his moments, but has been distracted by the most dangerous character in any writer’s work: himself. He drifted away from a process he once described as to “create characters and follow them around,” and the songs suffered. That is, until his 2023 release, Weathervanes.
Isbell’s true work both here and at all the finest moments of his career is to show real life, in all its beauty and all its disappointment.
On Weathervanes, with few exceptions, Isbell is back to telling stories. The first song, and the album’s first single, “Death Wish,” finds its narrator watching his partner “climbing on the rooftop, higher than a kite, dead of winter in a tank top” and “in the moonlight digging up the garden bed.” This macabre opening might lead to listeners assuming yet another pandemic mental health recording—and the album does include that theme. However, Isbell’s true work both here and at all the finest moments of his career is to show real life, in all its beauty and all its disappointment. Like McCarthy, he does tend toward the disappointments, emphasizing humanity’s fallen nature, but he focuses on the dark moments of life because that is where he sees the most interesting stories, the greatest opportunity to see who these characters really are. Isbell knows darkness better than most, having followed the roads of substance abuse for around a decade. But he also knows the redemption of sobriety and the defiant hope it can bring. This personal experience influences what he looks for and listens to in his characters and what parts of their lives he decides to show in his songs.
One of the most complete stories on Weathervanes comes in the track “Volunteer.” The song, taking its title from the Tennessee state nickname, follows a young man trying to reckon with life after both his parents overdosed “at the Shell by the Gunbarrel mall.” (Isbell did his research: there is a Shell station in front of a strip mall on Gunbarrel Road in Chattanooga.) The young man “gets lost” in the foster system until he eventually runs away, and Isbell finds him at a KoA campground with a girl who “says she’s from Chattanooga but [he] thinks she grew up out West.” Isbell uses the song’s chorus to inhabit this character. “Take me away from here, no I never belonged to this place,” Isbell sings, “Take me away from here, no I don’t want to fight for the rest of my life. I ain’t your volunteer.” This chorus lifts the acute, mundane detail of the verses—a Scout truckbed camper, a fight with the neighbor—and expresses it with this soaring existentialism. “I never belonged to this place” is humanity’s cry as we find ourselves at the bottom of a pit. But that very cry shows a hopeful defiance. This young man dreams of something better. “Some nights I dream that the ghost of my mama is holding me tight in her arms,” Isbell sings. There’s no certainty of redemption here—as we leave the boy and the girl, “she’s licking the blade of a ten dollar knife,” a vague yet disturbing image. But like all the tracks on Weathervanes, this character recognizes the brokenness of his situation and wants something else. Isbell builds the emotional core of the album around these small triumphs of hope: the very fact that a character can still acknowledge the pain means they can still find their way out.
The title of Weathervanes provides an image to put to this idea of hope in the face of brokenness. A weathervane, now usually seen as an ornamental rooster perched on the turret of a cape cod, served a vital role in the lives of rural people not too long ago. The ancestors of the characters on this album—mostly sharecroppers and tenant farmers, folks who never had it easy—would look to a weathervane to see from which direction the wind was blowing. This practice couldn’t tell them how strong the wind was or what the wind was bringing, but it allowed them to look up towards the future. They could look in the direction of the wind and try to predict the weather, perhaps brace themselves, but the only purpose of the weathervane was to tell them that there was wind blowing something else in. That act of looking towards the future is the very foundation of hope.
On Weathervanes, Isbell follows his characters into their darkest hours and waits, listening for the moment when they demand something better, declare with defiance that they didn’t sign up for this, that they’re not a volunteer for a broken existence. This defiant hope is what brings these characters to life and what makes Weathervanes a remarkable effort. That hope makes these songs worthwhile, necessary even, and certainly worthy of association with the great Mr. McCarthy.
Joseph Collum is a 2022 graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Philadelphia where he is teaching high school English. He is also working towards his Master’s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph’s University.
Weathervanes was released by Southeastern Records on June 9, 2023. You can listen to it on a variety of streaming services, or purchase a copy of it from the artist here.
