I have been trying to like Jason Isbell for probably ten years. Maybe more than that? I don’t know, a long time. When I lived in Tennessee, I knew a lot of people who loved him, when he was still with the Drive-by Truckers and then by himself, and they also liked other musicians that sounded like him, like the Avett Brothers and the Civil Wars. I was just getting into country, didn’t know very much about it, and generally preferred older stuff, like George Strait, and the Trio, and Chet Atkins. The newer Nashville sound was just too jangly for me, and too emotional. I think I thought it was corny. Maybe I thought I was too cool for it? A hilarious premise; I am not too cool for anything. The belief that almost everything can be interesting, even if — and maybe because! — it’s terrible is one of my life’s main drivers; it’s the reason that I’m a socialist (I want a world where more people have time to make their weird terrible great art and also enjoy others’); and it makes every day, even the bad ones, worth living. Who’s corny now?
Even though I didn’t like his music, I knew Jason Isbell was good because people I respected, and who were making music I liked, loved him. I just couldn’t get into it. I tried to, repeatedly. I think I even saw him play live once, though that might be a false memory, and maybe it was someone else. The point is that I really tried. I wanted to like him; it just wasn’t working. I felt sort of stupid for not liking his music, like there was a point I was missing. On top of that, I couldn’t even articulate why I didn’t like it, which made me feel extra stupid.
I gave up for a time. I was living in the Bay Area by then, and most people around me were definitely not listening to new country. I figured Jason would find me if/when the time was right, because I have a general belief that art finds you when you need it, as long as you stay open to it, which is a big, fat, “if” — when all of our tried-and-true favorites are just one click away, and it feels like every day it’s harder to accidentally be exposed to new stuff.
When I started getting really into music, I guess now almost two decades ago, I would use Pandora for this. It would show me musicians I’d never heard of, classics and new, unknown bands in the same stream, and I would be exposed to lots of stuff, all the time, and eventually develop an opinion about each genre or song or artist, which in aggregate I think is what people call “taste.” I try to use the Spotify radio feature now to the same effect, but I think its algorithm works differently. Bandcamp is good for finding new music, too, though you have to have a pretty generous amount of patience and an appetite for adventure. Still, I think the default effect of most of these platforms is to lock us into the sounds we already like.
So, mostly, I count on other people to show me things I haven’t seen before. Last year, my friend John tweeted that Jason Isbell was gonna make him buy a Stratocaster (lol), and I asked him to suggest some songs to listen to if I wanted to get into him because I’d been trying for so long and was unable to. My friend Chuck — whose newsletter makes me cry almost without fail every Wednesday — chimed in on the thread, suggesting I listen to “Only Children” from Isbell’s 2020 album Reunions, recorded with his band The 400 Unit.
One day, I put on “Only Children” while I walked to the library, excited to pick up a copy of Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, which had been recommended to me by someone who was helping me rediscover my blind love for music and music writing. I was filled with the kind of bright energy you get right before you plunge into something new. I was also on the way out of a relationship, so I had a sharp, incipient sadness about me under all the excitement. I remember turning the corner onto the alley down the street from the apartment where I lived at the time, as Isbell sang “do the dead believe in ghosts?” and holding my mouth like “what the hell just happened,” and then crying a little, and then listening to it again walking north on Union Ave., and then again on the sidewalk in front the Boys & Girls Club on Emerald St. before I crossed the street onto the library.
The sadness in Isbell’s lyrics felt familiar and comforting, but the imagery was jolting. I felt like I was hearing old ideas in a new language. I felt like he had finally found me at the right time.
I said something about how the song had made me cry in the Twitter thread with John and Chuck, and then Chuck told me that if I was into it “for the crying” — yes, of course, I’m into everything “for the crying” — I should also listen to the live recording of “Elephant” from Isbell’s 2018 live album recorded at the Ryman. I have a generally skeptical attitude toward live albums, but the audience and the band both feel genuinely, astonishingly present in this one. When Jason sings about quitting drinking — “I sobered up, I swore off that stuff / forever this time” — in “Cover Me Up,” the audience lets out a roaring cheer. It’s captivating.
If I was already on the way to liking Jason Isbell, what sealed the deal is the version of “If We Were Vampires” on that live album. “Vampires” is a song about how the fact that he and his wife are both going to die some day makes Jason want to love her as much as he can now:
Maybe time running out is a gift
And I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift
To give you every second I can find
And hope it isn't me who's left behind
Knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
Or one day you'll be gone
Immediately, the imagery in the song made me think of one of my favorite love stories, that of poets Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall. 19 years apart in age — 25 and 44 when they married — Kenyon and Hall worried for years, and in fact almost reneged on getting together despite their love because of this worry, that Jane would spend decades alone after Donald died of old age. Donald died of old age in 2018, aged 89. Jane died of leukemia in 1995, aged 47. Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone.
It’s all a soup, I think, the things we like. Eventually, if you try enough times, some things end up clicking. Many years before I heard “If We Were Vampires,” I’d read Donald Hall’s essay “The Third Thing,” shown to me by my friend and life sister Melissa, which details parts of his relationship with Jane and the life they built together. The irony, the tragedy, but above all the sheer miracle that they ever met at all, and then that they had enough faith in their love to commit to it despite everything else, stuck with me. I reread it at least once a year, when it calls to me. By now, this essay feels like a part of me. Because it’s a part of me, I can understand “If We Were Vampires.” And because I can understand “If We Were Vampires,” I have a doorway into Jason Isbell’s whole deal. I like him now.