It’s the kind of song that the lyric lends itself to that kind of frustration gathering and you get more desperate and more desperate until you go off. Once we got the whole thing put together it worked really well, but it was difficult because it was so counterintuitive. But at first we didn’t know they were gonna work because we were hitting the kick drum on the two. So Chad would go in and play half the drum beat on a smaller kit that we had set up in the booth and then he would go out in the big recording room and play the other half of the same drum lick on the big kit, and they fit together nicely. Me, him and Chad started working on this drum beat that was half one kit and half another kit. He’d come over from Texas to help us get some drum sounds and stuff. And Matt Pence was in the studio with us. To make that work in the studio, you really need to add things at the right time and you have to build from the ground up. I like a rock song that’s, like, four minutes long that has verses and chorus and a bridge, but sometimes I like things that just sort of wonder and grow until the kind of devolve at the end. Honestly, until just now I hadn’t thought about the similarities between the two songs.īut that’s something I like. There are two repeated phrases in that song and it just builds and builds and builds and builds until you get that relief. Like Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl.” That song has a similar vibe. There is a lot of repetition in that song. Jason Isbell: As a producer and arranger, it was a challenge, because the song that I had written was just the same chords over and over. How did you get to the shape of that song?
I’d like to start with “Deathwish.” It has an unusual structure as a song. Justin Barney: Let’s talk about Weathervanes. The one absolute truth is the way the music makes you feel. Which seems to be on brand for Jason Isbell. It’s an album that questions it’s own motives, storytelling and reason for being. He shows that he knows a thing or two, but throughout the album, he’s skeptical of people who think they are wise. Like in “Strawberry Woman,” where he notes that a young man in a cowboy hat wouldn’t last five minutes on the pedal steel, because of his square tip boots. He’s laid witness to many stories and he’s been paying attention to the details. That’s one of Isbell’s many strengths as a songwriter, and of Weathervanes as an album. “That’s what the song is about.” Hearing Isbell talk about it, I am not even sure if he knows who is wrong or right. “You can’t really trust his motivations,” Isbell says, seemingly still try to figure out who is right in the song, even as he tells me about it. He thinks he’s doing what’s right for his daughter, but who knows if he is right or wrong? In the new song “This Ain’t It,” a father stands in front of a crowd at his daughters wedding and tells her not to go through with it. But in Weathervanes, his latest album, he injects it into the characters in his songs, who are proud and strong-willed, but who are also flawed and complicated. Isbell has been doing that for years with his music, and online presence, and in-person presence. My camera is off for the interview, but Isbell’s is on, and I can see him staring into the distance and thinking: “I like to set the audience up for one thing and then twist it a little bit.”
Isbell is talking about the song “Cast Iron Skillet,” in which he delivers bits of folk wisdom over acoustic guitar, before giving dark details that counter the presumption of authority in an old saying.
“If we hear some old adage or southern euphemism, we expect it to be honest and valuable to us, but sometimes it’s really not,” Jason Isbell tells me as we sit in two different places in middle Tennessee, connected by Zoom.
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