Album Review: Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free

As Jason Isbell began belting the first verse of Cover Me Up just several songs into an opening set for Todd Snider at The Barrymore Theater in Madison, WI in the spring of 2013, I sunk several inches in my chair and began wiping water from my eyes, unable to ignore the revelatory nature of the moment.  The poignant and graceful songwriting on Southeastern about recovery, redemption, and the human condition deeply connected with listeners like few records in recent memory.  Southeastern went on to garner Isbell critical acclaim, a larger fan base, and serious accolades in the music industry.  Jason Isbell had arrived as an adult voice, leaving behind the days of youthful indulgence and rock and roll escapism. 

On Isbell’s new record, Something More than Free, we find our hero “hell-bent on growing up”, settling into adulthood, with no delusions of how difficult the road ahead lies.  On the opening If It Takes a Lifetime, Isbell deliberately reminds us that the struggle is ongoing.  The narrator defines a man “as a product of / all the people that he ever loved,” highlighting that the true measure of a man is how he can face adulthood head on, provide best for those closest around him, and live satisfied with that.    The familiar themes of fate, growing up, personal compromise, and sacrifice that fill Isbell’s past work take on a heightened, prominent role this time around.

The lynch-pin of the record, Children of Children, showcases these themes front and center and ranks among the best songs in Isbell has ever wrote.  Based on the experience of his own mother, Isbell slays listeners with his portrait of a young woman grappling with the struggles of growing up and sacrificing her own desires in order to raise a child.  The song builds to a climax-filled guitar solo as fierce and powerful as any piece of music we are likely to hear this year.  Children of Children suggests Jason Isbell may be the closest artist this generation has to a Neil Young.  

Like Isbell’s own story, Something More Than Free provides us with a roadmap of how to stare down regret and grow into adulthood with dignity and grace.  The down and out castaways in songs like Streetlights and Alabama Pines that permeate Isbell’s back catalog have given way to a set of older protagonists mulling regret for newfound wisdom.  The songs 24 Frames, Flagship, How to Forget, and The Life You Chose, all offer up reflections of the past and sermons for the future.  Even the songs Palmetto Rose and To the Band that I Loved, which may seem like thematic outliers on the record, harken to the past to look to the future. 

In Something More Than Free, Jason Isbell shows us that he is not only a musical artist but a professional craftsman of songwriting in the highest degree.  Isbell’s focus on human relationships and the compromises we must make in order to find happiness as we age, mirrors the struggle many of us must go through.  In an era where singles continue to dominate the musical landscape out of Nashville, Isbell seems hell-bent on putting out albums that stand up to the standards of another era and carrying the flag as one of the greatest songwriters of our time.  

-w.u.

Album Review: Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think & Sometimes I Just Sit

Good God. Me too, Courtney. Me too. 

Courtney Barnett opens her debut full length with the urgent and immediately shared worry over Oliver Paul's thick head of hair and the probability of its eventual baldness, and also how "he's dropping soy linseed vegemite crumbs everywhere." He is our champion before he's finished his breakfast. When the time comes - and it comes sooner than we expect - we tear our ties from our necks and we raise them with Oliver, singing "I'm not going to work today/gonna count the minutes that the trains run late!" (Because, shit, every dream's a good dream, right John Darnielle?) 

That first song ends on a rooftop, our hero imagining street life as Sim City and otherwise gaining perception and clarity when the second track interrupts, blistering with guitars and the album's best fist-chant warning about places like rooftops: "Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you!" Courtney Barnett has a talent for bending and stretching and screaming and ignoring a phrase all at the same time. Like she's daring us to be disappointed. One track later it's same dare, but lonelier, hung through with the probing-sluggish way we talk when we lay awake at three, blinking at minutiae. We're thinking of you too. 

***

That dare is what makes "DePreston" so immediate; such arresting first impression/depression. Suddenly we're ensconced in the minutiae of house-hunting with a too-specific financial discussion obscuring the fact it wasn't our idea to look out further. That percolator is saving us $23 a week. Oliver Paul probably worries about the same things when he steps down from the roof. We retreat to brass tacks:

CB: And it's going pretty cheap you say?

RE Agent: Well it's a deceased est-ay-ay-ate.

RE Agent: Aren't the pressed metal ceilings great?

"Deceased est-ay-ay-ayte" is the only line Courtney Barnett arches on the entire album. It sounds like an eye-roll, at least in part because who gives a shit about pressed metal ceilings? People lived here with a handrail in the shower and old kitchenwares "and a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam." And it's so stupid but it's hard not to wonder something about who they were and how they lived and with what beyond that handrail for support. "I wonder what she bought it for?" It's not the thing we want to ask; it's the thing we know how to ask. Inquiry and Oliver, idling insignificantly.

Guitars spread across the landscape and then they look out further. There is life in this home that we are poorly equipped to discover. Maybe there is too much of it. 

If you've got a 

spare half a million 

you could knock it down and start rebuilding.