A lot of artists fear sobriety will zap them of their creative potency. A lot of them would be right. Take Aerosmith, for example. No disrespect to the venerable Boston rockers, but their sober resurgence in the late ’80s didn’t exactly find the Toxic Twins firing on the same coked-up creative cylinders they had in the ’70s. Give me “Toys in the Attic” over “Janie’s Got a Gun” any day of the week. But perhaps it depends on what kind of artist you are.
For Jason Isbell, getting sober had a different result. It yielded the 34-year-old Alabaman the best record of his career, the recently released Southeastern. But unlike Aerosmith, Isbell isn’t a songwriter with a lot of interest in hard-rock grooves or double entendres. Rather than “Sweet Emotion,” it’s genuine emotion he’s after, and sobriety has brought him closer to it—or perhaps brought the emotions closer to him.
Isbell got famous when he joined the Drive-By Truckers as a 22-year-old in 2001, a collaboration that lasted only five years before he left the band just as his marriage to their bass player was fizzling. His songwriting contributions remain, however, with the trio of albums he recorded with DBT widely considered their strongest, even if he was too cloudy to remember writing much of them.
“I sobered up and I swore off that stuff, forever this time,” Isbell sings on “Cover Me Up,” the opening track of Southeastern. After his new wife (musician Amanda Shires, who will open this show), his manager, and fellow singer/songwriter Ryan Adams convinced him to get clean, Isbell agreed. And the resulting album is a stunner—a dozen tracks that reveal a man at a crossroads, simultaneously grieving his past and imagining his future.
“Elephant” is particularly emotional, a heartbreaking tale of a man grappling with the death of a close friend. “When she was drunk she made cancer jokes/She made up her own doctor’s notes/Surrounded by her family I saw that she was dying alone.”
But there’s hopefulness too. “I know every town worth passing through,” he sings on “Traveling Alone,” an ode to his new love. “But what good does knowing do/With no one to show it to/I’ve grown tired of traveling alone.” Or maybe the song is simply about finding the other part of himself.
Isbell, touring with his band the 400 Unit, will play some Truckers compositions tonight alongside highlights from his solo catalog. Should you attend, you may want to think twice about busting out your cell phone to record your favorite song, however. Isbell hates that.
“I’m not performing for documentation’s sake,” he told The New York Times recently. “I’m performing for people’s ears and their eyeballs.” Though he understands that fans enjoy having a souvenir to help remember the show, Isbell is simply grateful to remember, period. “I don’t remember a lot of the good times from my days with the Truckers,” he said. “This time I want to remember it all.”
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JASON ISBELL With Amanda Shires. Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, neumos.com. $17. 8 p.m. Tues., Sept. 10.
