By Don Allred
After the Drive-By Truckers reached a creative peak, 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, they got even sharper in some ways. Especially with the arrival of a couple of young ’uns, singer-songwriter-lead-guitarist Jason Isbell, and Isbell’s then-wife, ace bassist-vocalist Shonna Tucker. But, no matter who writes them, Truckers songs are usually monologues, usually aiming for drama. Lesser Truckers songs just end like they begin, with situations, stances traced and done, son, stick a fork in it---and a guitar, with predictability racing excitement. In real life, of course, the more things (especially bad ones) stay the same, the worse they can get: in ways all too obvious, hard to trace, or somehow both.
Better Truckers songs tap that insidious process without falling in. On 2003’s Decoration Day, Isbell’s title track is about a kid who’s born and bred for a deadly feud with another family, and he also wrote “Outfit,” a father’s searching, moving, often funny, sometimes wisely selective advice to his son. While it definitely doesn’t bring the doom of “Decoration Day,” the quiet urgency of “Outfit“ ‘s “Don’t give yourself away” is what the father’s remembered theme keeps coming down to. The way Isbell writes and sings it seemingly suggests the kind of protective coloration and reflexive isolation that family life, and life in a band (and a land) can enforce. Especially when you’re
overshadowed by older, more experienced songwriters---with whom you share a shade or two of resemblance, in writing and sound---like founding Truckers Mike Cooley, and Patterson Hood, the prolific one. Hood’s own songs tell even more about family life than they mean to: not only can the good songs resemble the bad ones, they can sometimes be too easily mistaken for each other.
Isbell hasn’t dropped any duds yet, but on DBT’s 2004 The Dirty South, a fresh breath of bad air, he asks himself how far he wants to take his emulation of “Danko/Manuel, “ two accomplished, self-immolated embers and members of The Band. “When you’ve found another home, you have to leave,” he’s already deciding. But still, “Danko/Manuel” ‘s restless, elliptically elegant reverie keeps trailing Neil Young’s “Cowgirl In The Sand,” and the cathartic “Goddamn Lonely Love” can’t quite blast away reminders of Little Feat’s “Long Distance Love.” Yet by 2006, when the Truckers’ aptly-stamped A Blessing And A Curse appeared, with some songs ending so abruptly that they echoed slammed doors and illin’ irresolution, Isbell called as far as he needed to, to reach his own breakthrough, “Daylight.” And then, like the older Truckers did after Southern Rock Opera, he kept going.
Isbell’s 2007 solo debut, Sirens Of The Ditch, was recorded while he was still in the Truckers, and most of them play on it. As do their regular guests, including two Muscle Shoals session greats, keyboardist Spooner Oldham (also a writer, with Dan Penn, of “Dark End of the Street,” among other fluid, shadowy tracks that Isbell sounds like he knows well), and bassist David Hood (Patterson’s father, Isbell’s early mentor). Small world… and Sirens (with influences now more consistently atmospheric than specific) sheds, sometimes shreds distinctive, sometimes brilliant, always careful outdoor and indoor light on all sorts of security issues, family and otherwise. Including current aspects of National Security, like the soldier’s funeral in “Dress Blues,” and the sadly unnecessary disclosure that “The Devil Is My Running Mate.” “Down In A Hole” ’s small-town resident stays in shape, by doing some country-soul loping all around a hole he knows too well. He keeps spotting “Trouble---but ain’t we all.” It’s a perspective that might benefit the violent paranoid who must “Try”: is this guy breaking out of something, or breaking further in? Either way, he’s doing his blues-metal damndest. Another concerned citizen blissfully proposes to an abandoned mother-to-be that they run away together, so that they can be brought back to a “Shotgun Wedding,” thus rescued by the girl’s (rich) daddy. “In A Razor Town” is made of the beautiful tangles that can’t help but attract razors, and slide guitars. Even they can only cut so far, just enough to spell out a loving and well-earned “Goodbye.” Don Allred
Jason Isbell will play at The Basement Thursday.
(For more on The Dirty South, see http://https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2004/07/drive-by-truckers-dirty-southrelease.html and http://https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2004/07/re-following-drive-by-truckers-i-was.html For more on Sirens of the Ditch, my Voice piece, see http://https://myvil.blogspot.com/2016/06/sirens-of-ditch.html For Brighter Than Creation’s Dark: http://https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2021/05/ichabods-nashville-scene-2008-releases.html
For my Voice take on Southern Rock Opera:
http://https://myvil.blogspot.com/2005/12/gimme-three-stepsisters.html)
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