In his six years rounding out the three-guitar attack of the
Drive-By Truckers, Jason Isbell wrote all of eight songs. Despite such
limited output it came as a shock to fans everywhere when earlier this
year Isbell up and left DBT, along with leaving the band’s bassist,
Shonna Tucker, his then-wife (the couple has since divorced). DBT was
left without their most vivid songwriter, who, along with ragged
frontman Patterson Hood, personified the hard-living, Southern-loving,
blue-collar charm of the band.
Now on his lonesome and armed with a debut solo effort, Sirens of
the Ditch, Isbell takes a long leisurely stroll from the reckless
DBT legacy. Three years in the making, and co-produced by Hood,
Sirens is what every solo debut album should be. Confident and
assured, yet not too distant from his former band, Isbell plays his
hand close to his chest, never letting on which material is
autobiographical and which is another Dixie-spun work of fiction.
Isbell, fresh off a 26-hour drive, talks about the change in
songwriting, “It’s another side to what I do. I probably write stories
more often than not because I’m drawn to them, but I write all kinds of
different songs.”
The album’s finest track, “Dress Blues,” is a personal, if not
inadvertently political, look at the harm caused in the wake of our
country’s wars. “There’s a guy I went to high school with, his name was
Matthew Connolly, and he wound up dying overseas in that conflict they
don’t call a war anymore.” The song itself is a stunning look at how
the small details of a death—especially when it’s one that looms
large as part of a greater, and often unspoken, issue—feel the
most tragic.
Isbell sings, “You’d turn 22 and we’d celebrate you in a bar or a
tent by the creek/Your baby would just about be here/Your very last
tour would be up, but you won’t be back/They’re all dressing in black,
drinking sweet tea in styrofoam cups.” While anti-war songs are a
staple in the post-American Idiot pop music world, they feel
vapid and empty compared to the emotional weight of “Dress Blues.”
“Obviously, I don’t know what it’s like from the soldier’s view. But
I do know what it’s like from the point of view of people who are back
home in a small town and are dealing with the loss of somebody who
everybody in town knew.”
The rest of Sirens is less dire, although the bluesy
“Hurricanes and Hand Grenades,” finds Isbell mercilessly drowning his
sorrows in a whiskey river, where he confesses that, “I cried on her
shoulder/All the things that I told her/Guess I didn’t say enough about
me.”
If there is anything that can be said about Isbell, it’s that the
man is deliberate. From the handful of songs harvested from his stint
in DBT, to a solo record gradually perfected over the years, the man
takes his sweet time. Since the result of this is an album as beautiful
as Sirens—a tribute to the benefits of quality over
quantity (you hear that, Ryan Adams?)—the man can take as much
time as he needs.
Jason Isbell plays Friday, August 3 at Music Millennium NW (6 pm)
and Dante’s (9:30 pm).