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In HBO’s Jason Isbell doc, he and fellow singer-songwriter Amanda Shires seem to court marital disaster debating the best word for a lyric (spoiler: their union survives). Writing is high stakes for Isbell. “If I was makin’ people dance, I wouldn’t sit there and waste my time,” he says, laughing cautiously. “But they’renotout there dancin’ — I gotta get those prepositions right.”
He does onWeathervanes, his brutally beautiful ninth studio album. Its songs tremble with anger, desperation, and fear; characters wrestle with regret and unhealthy appetites, struggling to cut losses in the wake of bad choices and cascading consequences. Isbell’s stories glint with memoir and headlines as they put human faces on head-count epidemics: mass shootings, opioid addiction, Covid-19. Even the love songs are bruised and weary, chilled by cold truth. Inextricable from all this is the 400 Unit, as essential here as Crazy Horse or the Heartbreakers to Neil Young or Tom Petty’s great moments. As a group document, Shires and her fiddle included, it’s Isbell’s strongest album to date.
What’s crazy is how, in these grim times, this is effectively feel-good music. In “Death Wish,” the chillingly seductive slow-burn single about a hell-bent partner, Isbell observes “it takes a whole lotta medicine to feel like a little kid.” Have the snares and lures of addiction — a topicIsbell knows well— ever been nailed so precisely? The balancing act between light and dark continues on “King of Oklahoma,” where a hardscrabble dude with a habit to feed plans a scrap-metal heist and a prescription forgery after treatment for a workplace injury leaves him with little more than “a pocket full of pills.” The pretty “Cast Iron Skillet” builds its chilling narrative in forensic snapshots: flowers on a grave, a brutal stabbing, a boyfriend “with smiling eyes and dark skin,” an “old man at the Quickstop/Lying to the county cops.”
Isbell has an activist streak — hewas quick to callMorgan Wallen onhis racially-insensitive bullshit,anddonated royalties he’d earned from Wallen’s version of his “Cover Me Up” to the NAACP— and in song, Isbell does didactic well. His 2017 “White Man’s World” deserves a place in Florida’s high-school curriculum (shout out to Ron DeSantis). DittoWeathervanes’ “Save the World,” which addresses school shootings via collateral trauma.
But the strongest songs here have the fewest answers. “Miles” shows how family dysfunction happens with the best of intentions, as the 400 Unit flash its classic rock bonafides, with the guitars echoing both latter-day Beatles and Young’s tender murder ballad “Down by the River.” The nostalgic prettiness might strike some as a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. But you take your healing where you can get it.
