Critical Mass

Isbell’s candid, literate voice lifts Free’s ‘everydayness’

Jason Isbell’s "Something More Than Free" is an album of character-driven songs delivered with a candid, literate and compassionate voice.
Jason Isbell’s "Something More Than Free" is an album of character-driven songs delivered with a candid, literate and compassionate voice.

A picture appeared in my Twitter feed of Jason Isbell holding an old Stratocaster, the one Bob Dylan used to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival 50 years ago. The caption said that nobody had played it since Dylan laid it down. Whether or not you quite believe that (and I don’t, because at some point in the intervening decades someone was left alone in a room with the Fender and simply had to have at least lightly grazed the strings just to feel the ghosts tremble), it’s a fraught image: The New Hope caressing Excalibur.

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"Something More Than Free" by Jason Isbell

But I don’t want to say Jason Isbell is any kind of Dylan, new or otherwise. We ought to be careful not to traffic in the sort of hype and puffery that people associate with writings about pop music, which after all isn’t rocketry or first responding.

Though on the other hand I’d submit that sometimes a record might save your life, or at least get you through a difficult evening. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be that good of a record.

But Isbell’s latest, the David Cobb-produced Something More Than Free (Southeastern Records), is a good record. It’s even better than 2012’s Southeastern, which was the breakthrough and the one that drew the comparisons to Springsteen. It made Isbell the darling of a thriving Americana scene. (It seems that it will inevitably be a better selling record — early sales projections have Isbell fighting it out for the week’s top-selling country release.)

No doubt there will be critical backlash this time, now that Isbell’s story of recovery is familiar (he quit drinking and found true love) and he’s established as an important artist to whom attention must be paid. That’s OK; I’m not sure artists benefit from being told they’re special, that they see things we don’t or have been touched by the gods.

All I know is I liked Southeastern, but I love the low-watt shimmer of Something More Than Free. It is an album about following through and showing up, of facing the quotidian horror of what Walker Percy called “everydayness.” It’s more muted, arguably as introspective as Southeastern but more uplifting with, as Isbell told Rolling Stone, “not as heavy a body count.” After the relatively sparse mood of Southeastern, he brought his band, 400 Unit, back into the picture, along with the yearnful fiddle of his wife, Amanda Shires.

And if Southeastern was all about breaking up with bad habits, this album’s all about process, about how one goes about centering oneself in the world while doing as little damage as possible to the soft beings around us. It sounds honest, the way that country music ought to, in that it considers the difficulties of ordinary people. It sounds warm, as though Isbell actually likes the sort of people he’s singing about.

At the moment, my favorite track is “24 Frames,” which I guess is the first single (if terms like “single” mean anything anymore). It’s a deceptively simple song built around the idea of doing the right thing for the people you care about in the moment. It feels a little like an early ’90s R.E.M. cut, with chiming guitars and a melody line that’s a little too interesting for pop country. In the chorus, there’s a remarkable drop-in:

You thought God was an architect, now you know/He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow.

This is what a great song does — it breaks in on the hummably familiar and slams us against the wall. It comes out of nowhere, like Cato Fong stalking Inspector Clouseau. You stop thinking about how nice it is to remember to be kind and decent and suddenly remember that all the pretty and dear things you’ve collected are provisional, that your happiness is subject to being revoked at any time by forces too large, hard and random to contemplate. One second (the amount of time it takes 24 frames to pass in a movie) you’re humming along with the former guitarist for the Drive-By Truckers as he talks about the importance of calling mom every once in a while; the next you wanna throw your arms around your beloved and hold on.

There are other moments like this on Something More Than Free; I haven’t discovered them all yet. The opening lines of the title track — When I get home from work, I’ll call up all my friends/And we’ll go bust up something beautiful, we’ll have to build again — catch something pitiful and true about the way young working-class American men often act in ways that run counter to their own self-interest. But the narrator is resigned and “grateful for the work” that occupies his time and keeps him out of trouble even as it delivers him exhausted to the end of the week.

“Something More Than Free” is a slightly darker take on the album’s lead-off track, the loping “If It Takes a Lifetime,” which sounds a little like one of those songs Springsteen would give to Gary “U.S.” Bonds to record. (It’s as hummable as “Born in the U.S.A.” and, like the Boss’ broadside, perhaps a little too easily misconstrued.) If it matters to anyone anymore, “Lifetime” is maybe the most radio-friendly song on the record, with a shiny twang and a sticky fiddle hook and lyrics that belie the track’s sonic sunniness:

I’m learning how to live alone/Fall asleep with the TV on/And I fight the urge to live inside my telephone.

Acclimating to a dead-end job and hoping to find “happiness by and by” might strike us as dangerously low expectations, but it’s probably a realistic goal for most of us.

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Yet as finely crafted a work as the opener is, it pales beside what’s to follow, and by the time you get to the end you might wonder if it even belongs with the others. Like James McMurtry, Isbell doesn’t write story songs so much as character sketches — his narrators have already made their decisions and they’re trying to talk themselves into sticking with them.

“Flagship,” set in a faded once grand hotel, is a stark, clear-eyed meditation on the nature of an enduring relationship and the work implicit in keeping love alive:

You gotta try and keep yourself naive/In spite of all the evidence believe/And volunteer to lose touch with the world/And focus on one solitary girl

Then we swing into “How to Forget,” a post-breakup song written from the point of view of a survivor who has found someone who gives him reason to love; “Children of Children” is a rolling soundscape evoking Dorothea Lange faces, blasted rural childhoods and interrupted youth. “The Life You Chose” is a detail-rich, medium tempo number addressed to an old lover that teases the possibilities of escape as he wonders where she might be now.

The devastating “Speed Trap Town” sounds remarkably like an outtake from Springsteen’s Nebraska — only it’s impossible to imagine this miracle of compression being left off anyone’s album. It also features a perfect verse summarizing the concerns of little towns all across the South:

Well it’s a Thursday night but there’s a high school game/Sneak a bottle up the bleachers and forget my name/These 5A bastards run a shallow cross/It’s a boy’s last dream and a man’s first loss

Look, either you see beauty in this sort of thing or you don’t. A taste for acoustic guitars and lyrics that aspire to genuine insight into the human condition is just another thing you can like. It doesn’t make you better than you are. Most people see music as a utility, something in the air that’s available for their use. Mostly the music business is about marketing.

But let’s not say music is worse now, or that it was better then. To do that is churlish, and it dismisses everything that you don’t want to understand. Besides, it’s boring.

Maybe it’s 1962 again, and the Beatles aren’t even a rumor this side of the divide. Pop stars are teen idols, and producers run the game, commanding sound factories that create products unto which an artist’s name is slapped like a brand. That in itself doesn’t make it junk. The best songs are glorious sugar bombs, nutritionally empty perhaps, but occasionally experienced on an atomic level. You don’t have to hate on Taylor Swift to prove your bona fides.

But recognize that’s not all there is.

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Part of the reason Something More Than Free feels so important is that it comes at a time when questions of Southern identity and character are very much in the wind — when all you need to do to find a Lost Causer who’ll tell you that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery is open a Facebook account. It comes at a time when most mainstream country music is vapid and loud and phony as pro wrasslin’.

I’m not saying Isbell is the new Dylan. For one thing, he’s not all that new, and a lot of people have been paying attention to him for a decade or so. But I am saying he has made a great album in an age when albums are all but beside the point. I have no doubt that Something More Than Free will become part of my interior furniture, something I’ll return to again and again.

Going forward, it will be as important to me as Blood on the Tracks or Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. I recognize something worth modeling in Isbell’s candid, literate and compassionate voice. I don’t know that real art has to have any real utility to justify its existence, but I suspect that records like Something More Than Free can make us better people.

To echo one of Isbell’s characters, I’m just grateful for the work.

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