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Jason Isbell on the road, hummingbirds, fan requests and critical thinking in America
Updated: Sep. 10, 2021, 8:11 a.m. | Published: Sep. 10, 2021, 8:10 a.m.
By Ben Flanagan | bflana✧✧✧@a✧.c✧✧
Jason Isbell doesn’t much worry about any backlash over the COVID restrictions at his shows, not when a bunch of hummingbirds buzz through his porch. He can’t be bothered, not when he strives to live in the moment and remain grateful for what he has, hummingbirds and the chance to get back on the road and do what he loves after a year off.
The Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and guitarist from Green Hill, Ala., made headlines for requiring proof of vaccination or proof of a recent negative COVID test to attend his concerts.
Touring on their 2020 album release “Reunions,” Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit will perform with Brothers Osborne and Jay Oladokun at Oak Mountain Amphitheatre in Pelham, Alabama, on Saturday, September 11th.
He’ll return to Alabama for ShoalsFest in Florence Oct. 2-3, and on Oct. 7 at the Saenger Theatre in Mobile with Rob Aldridge.
AL.com spoke to Isbell about losing sleep over COVID, finally hitting the road to play live shows again, hearing fans scream requests from the front row and playing in his home state.
You are visible and vocal about COVID, specifically slowing the spread of the virus at your shows by requiring proof of vaccination and negative test. You even dropped out of the Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion because they decided against implementing those restrictions. Do you remember the moment you decided this was the right thing to do, and why was it so critical to implement these restrictions at your shows?
Jason Isbell: Yeah, I remember. I was having a hard time sleeping. I had booked some shows, and I was worried because I thought we’re not offering people medical care. It’s not a hospital or a clinic or grocery store. It’s a concert. People don’t have to come to a concert. I know they enjoy it. Probably nobody enjoys it as much as I do, but it’s not a necessity for survival. And because of that, I felt like we should make it something that’s as safe as it can possibly be. It was keeping me up at night. And I thought if I’m going to get any rest, I’m going to have to do something about this. It just seemed like the right thing to do because I don’t want to spend my time on stage worried about if I’m making people sick.
You said recently, “I don’t want to put more restrictions on my audience, but I also don’t want them to die,” that not getting sick at one of your shows is more important than jumping through a few hoops to do so safely. Have you found that your audience and the venues have generally accepted your stance on this?
Oh yeah, for the most part they definitely have. Maybe that’s because of my audience and the type of audience that I have. I don’t know. But yeah. We’ve only had one show so far that we’ve had to cancel and weren’t able to move to a different venue, and that was the Houston show. Everything else, even the Bristol show, we dropped out of that but were able to book a show in Athens, Georgia, for the same night. For the most part, people have said “OK, we’ll do whatever we need to do” because the venues want to keep working. They want to stay open. The crews at these venues have been grateful, my own traveling crew has been grateful. There will likely will be some breakthrough cases in our team, but to this point we haven’t had any. I hired a nurse last week to come out with us. Her first show with us was in Montgomery. She travels with the band and tests everybody in the band and crew and makes sure the venues are going by the protocols.
It sucks to have to do all this. It sucks for them to have to provide a negative test or proof of vaccination to come to a show. It also sucks for me to have to hire new people and pay them to do things we never had to do before. And it sucks for me to not be able to go out after the show and hang out with my band somewhere and talk to people and have a good time. That sucks. I go straight back to the bus, I watch some Netflix and go to sleep. That’s not what I signed up for as a touring musician, but I’m willing to do it because that’s how we stay busy. That’s how we keep working. That’s how we keep our industry going.
You said if you hadn’t put these kinds of restrictions in place and you didn’t hold the line on it, you would feel like you were taking advantage of people while you were doing your job. How difficult has it been to hold the line? Or is this easy and a black-and-white issue for you? I know you put a lot of thought into it, especially considering the economic element of paying the touring crew, factoring in the venue staffs needing work, all those components people’s livelihoods depend on during touring. You’ve said you think you work with people who measure risk versus reward, but how tough was that internal discussion with you and your touring family?
It wasn’t hard at all for me. Once I had heard all the opinions that I thought there were out there, it was an easy decision to make and stick by. That’s kind of how I am -- I’m pretty stubborn. If I make a decision where I feel like I’m well-informed beforehand, I’m gonna usually stick by it. Sometimes that’s not the best way to be. I know that drives my wife crazy sometimes around the house. But in a situation like this, I don’t feel bad about the choice that I made. Any of the negative pushback that I have received, that doesn’t bother me at all, because I made my decision and I knew at the time it was the right thing, and I still know it’s the right thing. I have a pretty solid foundation of right and wrong for myself.
I don’t want to focus on negative pushback, but you you were asked in a recent interview if you were firing a shot across the bow at country music fans. You said yes, but that you were kind of used to that. What do you mean you’re used to it?
Well, somehow I wind up in the country music conversation a lot, but I don’t think I’m necessarily a country artist. And I think the people who listen to my music realize that. But I think people who don’t know really anything about me just sort of think I’m a country artist. So sometimes there’s this faux outrage when I say something political or something that is important to me that might be a progressive idea or something someone would view as liberal, I think a lot of country outlets and fans get all riled up. But I don’t make pop country music, and I’ve never been interested in that in the least. I think because I’m from Alabama and I have a Southern accent, people assume I’m a country singer. But I don’t really feel that way. And country music has a lot of right-wing, conservative, white fans, and they always have because they have aimed their music at those people, so that’s what you get.
Jason, I know you’re not a doctor, but you did speak to one people know recently. Dr. Fauci said you should consider booking more outdoor venues to help keep people safe as an entertainer. Your tour combines both outdoor and indoor venues. Did you at any point consider postponing, relocating or cancelling the indoor shows, or do you feel the restrictions you’ve implemented create a safe enough environment for the fans and the artists on stage?
Well I think it would be safest to play all outdoor shows, I agree with that. But I also think that the weather sucks right now. And it’s not supposed to suck right now. If this had happened 20 years ago, it would be much easier for us to play all of our shows outdoors, even on up into November or December. But the climate is different now than it was then. They couldn’t have Bonnaroo because of the weather. It didn’t have anything to do with COVID. I would love to be able to book all the shows outside, but that’s not going to meet my bottom line, psychologically or financially, because we’re gonna have to stop doing that pretty soon. And a good number of the shows that webook will be canceled because of the weather because we keep having storms. It’s flooding in Pennsylvania and New York. That’s not something that typically happens this time of year.
You said playing on the show “Billions” was the first time you’d played indoors in a year. That is a pretty unique way to do it, but did the setting for the return matter? Was playing in front of people indoors something you’d planned in your head before it actually happened
Not really, no. I had to play the same song like 15 times because were making a TV show, but once I was in there playing it did occur to me how much I love playing inside. It just sounds different. The lights are always good. There’s something about it. I think I prefer playing indoors all else being equal just because it is, for lack of a better term, more intimate. There aren’t as many distractions. Why look at the guy on stage when you can look at the sky, you know?
When I saw you in Tuscaloosa back in 2015, you said to play a show back home means even more. Why is performing in Alabama important to you?
Now it’s important because I didn’t know if I was going to get to do it or not. I didn’t know if the venues in Alabama were going to go along with the COVID restrictions, so I’m very pleasantly surprised and proud in this particular instance, because that didn’t happen in Mississippi and in one of our Tennessee and Texas venues. So that made me real happy. But also I get to see a lot of people from home. When we played in Montgomery over the weekend, Rob Aldridge opened for us. He’s from North Alabama. I’ve known him and his band for a long time. Rob Malone was playing guitar with him, and Rob was the guy who was in the Drive-By Truckers before I was. I don’t get to see hose folks very often, so it was really nice. Mike Cooley’s wife and son came to the show in Montgomery, and we hung out. They’re going to come see us in Birmingham also. It makes me feel like I get to be closer to people who I haven’t seen in a good long time.
You recently joked that one way to slow the spread of COVID is for fans to stop yelling out requests. How mapped out are your set lists? Are you pretty stringent with sticking to the plan, or is there ever room or an urge to honor those folks screaming “Play ‘Outfit!’” from the front row?
You know, I don’t really listen to the folks who are yelling it in the audience. But I do change things sometimes. I added a song into the set the other night. Last tour I had my dad with me, so I played “Outfit” almost every night just because he was there. Sometimes I’ll change it at the last second, but for the most part it’s pretty solid because we have a big lighting rig and I have a bunch of guitars. I like to play the right guitar for the right song, so it throws a bunch of people off if I add another song to the set list. I’ll look on Twitter, though, before the show and see if there’s something that somebody wants to hear and they have a good reason for it, then usually I’ll put that in the set list for that night. But the deadline on that is usually two hours before the show because that’s when I turn the set list in.
Is there anything you missed about performing but you didn’t know it? Maybe something you took for granted until you hit the road and played for people again?
That’s a good question. Most of it, I very actively thought about while I was sitting at home for a year. Most of it, I knew what I was missing. Let’s see. Something that I didn’t realize. You know, OK, I missed opening acts. I missed going out and standing in the wings and watching the opener. And that’s something I didn’t really think about while I was stuck at home. I was thinking about being on stage with my band. But we had Brittney Spencer open quite a few shows, and we had Rob Aldridge this past weekend. I walk out into the wings with my daughter, who’s been on the road with me quite a bit lately, and we watch the set, and that’s a whole lot of fun. And it’s also a really good way to get comfortable with the room and sort of loosened up psychologically for your own set. So I miss that. That one snuck up on me.
Can I ask you about the principle of process? Last year you said you were trying to stay in the moment and live one day at a time during the pandemic, that it turned out that was a good way to live through something like COVID. Did that hold true, and how does the principle of process change between being cooped up at home during isolation and getting back out on the road where you would often yearn to be?
It doesn’t change. For me, it’s the way. Staying in the moment. When I was in rehab, they would say keep your head and your ass in the same place. But yeah, that’s how you increase your own awareness. And when you increase your awareness of what’s going on around you, usually you increase your gratitude. Because if you’re in the moment and you’re aware, then you realize how much you have to be grateful for. It’s hard to get too far down and too awfully depressed when you spend all your time being grateful for the things that are around you in the moment, at least from my own personal experience.
I’m not a depressive person, but I certainly can get very sad. I’m sure anybody that’s heard my music would know that. A good way to keep myself from just being pulled down with the tide with all the dark, sad stuff that’s happening in the world right now is just be where I am and be aware. And out of that comes this sort of natural appreciation for it. Like right now, I’ve got hummingbirds everywhere. I’m sitting on my porch, and there are multiple hummingbirds, and they’re zooming past my face really, really fast. And I could be thinking about what I have to do after this interview, but really I’m thinking about thesehummingbirds. And to get to sit and watch this is a pretty incredible thing.
More than a year ago, you said you thought it might be about a year or so until you started writing music about that particular time, but in the meantime you were just trying to get through it. Some felt “Reunions” was perhaps a bit prescient in reflecting similar thoughts and anxieties many felt during the pandemic, That obviously wasn’t your intention because you didn’t know a pandemic was coming, but do you see or hear the album any differently through a lens of COVID at all, and have you entered that songwriting space more than a year later like you predicted?
Yeah I have started writing some new songs, and a lot of them have to do with where I was for the last year-and-a-half because I’m always documenting my life. As for the songs on “Reunions,” I think performing them live in front of people gives them a little bit of a different context now, certainly the title of the album but also a lot of those themes. Originally it was about reuniting with your past and with the ghosts of people you used to know and people you used to be, and clearly that translates into our current situation in a whole lot of ways. But I think we knew there was something coming. The collective unconscious knew that something was going to happen because I felt like we were reaching this fever pitch. We didn’t know it was going to be this,but something was up. And still, something is coming. Something related to either the climate or the political climate.
We’re in a period of very big change, and I think that manifests itself in some really difficult ways. So the songs that you write now, they might be very specifically about the time that you spent in your house during the pandemic. But five years from now, they’re also going to be about whatever crazy, crazy s--t we’re dealing with five years from now. That’s just the way it works when you’re in this long-term period of change and you’re documenting it as an artist. It winds up lining up. On “Hope the High Road,” I wrote that line that, “Last year was a son of a bitch,” and dammit if it doesn’t get more true every single year. Every single time I sing it, it’s truer than it was the year that I wrote it.
You are an artist who has long had a reputation for making art that connects with the common man or woman, telling stories and exploring themes that clearly mean a lot to your audience in the South, more specifically your home state. We’ve tried to understand why Alabama has been so stubborn about getting vaccinated, with so many pointing out that people in Alabama don’t like being told what to do. Do you think that’s true, and what do you think it will take to change the hearts of people here to help bring this to an end?
Well I don’t think anybody likes being told what to do. I don’t think that’s something that’s necessarily a bigger deal in Alabama than it is anywhere else. A lot of the problem comes back to how we’re educated, and critical thinking skills are developed through education. The education system in the South has been neglected for a long time, and now we’re sort of seeing the effects of that. If the population is undereducated, it’s really hard to figure out who to trust. So you can’t necessarily blame it on the individuals, not entirely. But I think the system that’s been in place when it comes to educating children in America has been lagging behind everywhere, but especially some of the more rural areas.And that’s not just something that applies to Alabama or the South, but I think the rural areas all over the country because nobody’s out there watching. Nobody sees what you’re teaching your kids and how you’re teaching you’re kids, and a lot of those folks get left behind. It might not become obvious when you’re 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9-years-old and they’re hanging around with a bunch of people who are their equals. But when they get to adulthood and it’s time to take a vaccine and they don’t know who to trust, then it becomes obvious that their critical thinking skills aren’t necessarily what they should be. I grew up in a public school system in North Alabama. I was lucky enough to have people in my family and certain teachers and people around me who wentabove and beyond what the state required of them. So I got very fortunate in that way. But I think at the heart of it all is justeducating people more, doing a better job of teaching our kids how to think critically. And that’s it, that’s all of it to me.
Finally and maybe most importantly...does Alabama repeat this year in football?
Yeah. Yeah, they are. They definitely are. That’s the easiest question you’ve asked me the whole time. That man, Bryce Young...he’s just not concerned. It’s amazing. It looks like he’s playing a pick-up game with his buddies. And the offensive line is really good, and he’s got a lot of time to make decisions. And I just don’t think anybody’s going to be able to stop him. And even if he doesn’t stay healthy, if he gets hurt, they’ve got Bear
Bryant’s grandson back there? It’s gonna be fine, yeah.
― dow, Friday, 1 October 2021 21:10 (two years ago) link
October 15, 2021---Jason Isbell and his band the 400 Unit’s new benefit album, Georgia Blue, is out today with all proceeds supporting three non-profit organizations: Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight and Georgia STAND-UP.
GEORGIA BLUE TRACK LIST
1. “Nightswimming” feat. Béla Fleck and Chris Thile (originally performed by R.E.M.)
2. “Honeysuckle Blue” feat. Sadler Vaden (originally performed by Drivin’ N’ Cryin’)
3. “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” feat. Brittney Spencer (originally performed by
James Brown)
4. “Cross Bones Style” feat. Amanda Shires (originally performed by Cat Power)
5. “The Truth” feat. Adia Victoria (originally performed by Precious Bryant)
6. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” (originally performed by Otis Redding)
7. “Sometimes Salvation” feat. Steve Gorman (originally performed by The Black Crowes)
8. “Kid Fears” feat. Julien Baker and Brandi Carlile (originally performed by Indigo Girls)
9. “Reverse” (originally performed by Now It’s Overhead)
10. “Midnight Train To Georgia” feat. Brittney Spencer and John Paul White (originally performed by Gladys Knight & The Pips)
11. “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” feat. Peter Levin (originally performed by The Allman
Brothers Band)
12. “I’m Through” (originally performed by Vic Chesnutt)
13. “Driver 8” feat. John Paul White (originally performed by R.E.M.)
JASON ISBELL & THE 400 UNIT CONFIRMED TOUR DATES
BOLD on-sale next Friday, October 22 at 10:00am local time
October 15—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium^ (SOLD OUT)
October 16—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium§ (SOLD OUT)
October 17—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium° (SOLD OUT)
October 19—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium%
October 20—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium**
October 22—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium†† (SOLD OUT)
October 23—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium+ (SOLD OUT)
October 24—Nashville, TN—Ryman Auditorium‡‡
November 19—Port Chester, NY—The Capitol Theatre‡
November 26—Durham, NC—Durham Performing Arts Center§§
November 27—Durham, NC—Durham Performing Arts Center§§
November 28—Greenville, SC—The Peace Center‡
November 30—St. Louis, MO—Stifel Theatre++
December 1—Minneapolis, MN—The Armory++
December 2—Milwaukee, WI—Riverside Theater++
December 4—East Moline, IL—The Rust Belt++
December 5—Owensboro, KY—Owensboro Sportscenter‡
December 7—Moon, PA—UPMC Events Center++
December 8—Akron, OH—Akron Civic Theatre##
December 10—Cincinnati, OH—Andrew J Brady ICON Music Center^^
December 11—Cincinnati, OH—Andrew J Brady ICON Music Center^^
December 12—Pikeville, KY—Appalachian Wireless Arena°°
December 16—Atlanta, GA—The Tabernacle§
December 17—Atlanta, GA—The Tabernacle%%
December 18—Atlanta, GA—The Tabernacle‡
December 19—Atlanta, GA—The Tabernacle°°
January 8—Knoxville, TN—Tennessee Theatre*
January 9—Knoxville, TN—Tennessee Theatre*
January 11—Asheville, NC—Thomas Wolfe Auditorium at Harrah’s
Cherokee Center*
January 12—Asheville, NC—Thomas Wolfe Auditorium at Harrah’s
Cherokee Center*
January 14—Louisville, KY—Louisville Palace Theatre*
January 15—Louisville, KY—Louisville Palace Theatre*
January 16—Columbus, OH—Palace Theatre*
January 19—Wilmington, NC—Wilson Center*
January 21—Charlotte, NC—Ovens Auditorium*
January 22—Charlotte, NC—Ovens Auditorium*
January 23—Augusta, GA—Bell Auditorium*
February 22—Los Angeles, CA—The Orpheum Theatre~
February 24—San Francisco, CA—The Warfield Theatre~
February 25—San Francisco, CA—The Warfield Theatre~
February 26—Santa Barbara, CA—The Arlington Theatre~
March 1—Vancouver, Canada—The Orpheum~
March 2—Seattle, WA—Paramount Theatre~
March 3—Bellingham, WA—Mount Baker Theatre~
March 4—Portland, OR—Keller Auditorium~
March 6—Las Vegas, NV—The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas~
June 18—Williamsburg, VA—Williamsburg Live at DeWitt Museum
August 26-28—Martha’s Vineyard, MA—Beach Road Weekend
‡with special guest S.G. Goodman
§with special guest Brittney Spencer
+with special guest Joy Oladokun
^with special guest Amanda Shires
°with special guest Mickey Guyton
%with special guest Amythyst Kiah
**with special guest Shemekia Copeland
††with special guest Allison Russell
‡‡with special guest Adia Victoria
§§with special guest Hiss Golden Messenger
++with special guest Strand of Oaks
##with special guest Molly Tuttle
^^with special guest Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives
°°with special guest Morgan Wade
%%with special guest Gabe Lee
*with special guest Adia Victoria
~with special guest Shawn Colvin
― dow, Friday, 15 October 2021 17:16 (two years ago) link