album review: 'weathervanes' by jason isbell & the 400 unit

The conversation about Jason Isbell has always been complicated if you were willing to read between the lines, but after 2020, it wasn’t difficult to see the cracks.

And that is not referring to his music’s quality, at least on the surface - I went back to Reunions expecting to be underwhelmed or that the album had aged weirdly in the context of that year of lockdown, but no, it’s held up ridiculously well and joins the acclaimed run that may have started earlier but was certainly cemented by 2013’s Southeastern - and while many consider that an indie country classic, I still think 2015’s Something More Than Free is better! But you can argue that the run of albums produced by Dave Cobb from 2013 to 2020 was top-tier among any singer-songwriter working today - the closest competitor in my books is Lori McKenna, but at that point I’m splitting hairs among giants.

But on Reunions, you couldn’t help but hear the anxiety, the darker, brittle tinges that highlighted a deeper, unsettling fracture. It certainly fit the times, especially as his political side grew ever more charged while never losing its universality, but that wasn’t what sparked the most concern. No, that was the flickers of instability in his marriage to Amanda Shires, who played fiddle on the album and was a counterweight that if you were aware, you couldn’t ignore. It grew all the more pronounced two years later when Shires herself released the album Take It Like A Man with Isbell playing guitar, and there were more than a few songs on that project that felt like the Lemonade to Isbell’s 4:44, and the tension was undeniable. More interesting was what it seemed to do to Isbell’s public image, of which I’ve always felt is a little distorted from the reality of his music. His humanity and flaws, from the struggle of sobriety to the constant struggle to be a better man while aware of the political weight he carries, to me did not place him on a pedestal but for a lot of folks it did, of which Isbell was not comfortable, which led to the music documentary this year Running With Our Eyes Closed, which highlighted the worst possible sides of him and his relationship in the creation of Reunions, putting to video exactly everything that had crept out in the press run of the time. It’s not a comfortable watch mostly because like the best music documentaries it forces you to confront your idols at their messiest, but it felt like a necessary one, if a bit delayed from an earlier release probably because of the pandemic.

All of this placed Weathervanes in an interesting context - departing from work with Dave Cobb and Isbell assuming production duties himself, for a considerably longer album, I knew this was going to be great but I had reservations. I knew there was probably going to be continuations of themes from Reunions and Take It Like A Man, but I was most concerned about production - Isbell has produced before, including one of the best American Aquarium albums with burn.flicker.die, but for as much as many were claiming this was his best since Southeastern, I wanted to take this in properly, fully digest it… so what did we get?

…so some of you might be surprised that this review is as late as it is - given how much I’m an obvious fan of Isbell for the past decade, you’d think I’d have everything ready to go much earlier. But after my first few listens - which took a while, this is a long album - I knew I had to give this time so I was sure on my opinion. I knew I needed to let this sink in, let the songwriting marinate, really give this one some sober thoughts and then some not-so-sober thoughts; Isbell is one of the greats of capturing the best of both. And having done so… this is the album to beat in 2023, and I don’t think it’s particularly close, a jawdropping, diverse thematic culmination that recognizes its roots while digging around them to some of the most emotionally raw setpieces Isbell has ever crafted. Moreover, it’s the sort of album that I could pitch to damn near anyone - the country and southern rock fans would easily get onboard, but I know enough metalheads who would hear the vivid detail of his storytelling and gravitate to this instantly. Even pop fans… look, in the week ahead the top two songs of the Hot 100 are from Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs, Zach Bryan is charting hits, the crossover is in the marketplace of ideas, I don’t see why it couldn’t work!

Now that’s a loaded assertion, and the immediate question that comes out of this is ‘well, can I get onboard with this album or do I need to go back through Isbell’s catalog?’ Of course I’d recommend that, but I wouldn’t say it’s essential - this is an album that feels like the natural continuation of his growth and arc for the past decade, but the callbacks are in the details that won’t reveal themselves on first listen, and the hooks are considerably more immediate. I chalk this up to the pivot from Dave Cobb… where in retrospect, it might have been exactly what Isbell needed to inject a surge of vibrant colour back into his mixes - there’s less refinement in the mixing because nobody mics a fiddle better, but that’s balanced out by Isbell bringing a diversity of acoustic and electric tones to the guitars, complimenting Amanda Shires’ fiddle with accordion and piano and organ, and finally giving his songs some tangible muscle in the grooves! This is easily Jason Isbell’s most energetic, expansive, and, well, driving album since his days with the Drive-By Truckers, and that southern rock DNA rears its head a number of times… but always with thematic purpose, and that’s where this album picks up so much added resonance.

Take, for example, the opening track ‘Death Wish’, which… fuck, if you’ve ever dated someone with depression, it’s built to wreck you right out of the damn gate. But it’s also a necessary transition from the Dave Cobb-era of production to… well, the rest of Weathervanes - it’s brittle, it’s haunted and jagged, the pickups are borderline post-punk, where the slightly raw vocal pickups fit someone anxiously on the brink, an in media res opening that if you’ve heard Reunions and Take It Like A Man you know where it’s coming from, but it’s so gripping and gothic that it demands your attention to where he’ll go next. It also establishes themes very starkly: just how much Jason Isbell can’t control. If Southeastern was the album built out of personal recovery and Something More Than Free was an attempt to close the door on his past, only for The Nashville Sound to highlight how that was never fully going to happen, and Reunions show him attempt to muscle through it all and cling to his own self-righteousness, this is the album that shows the stark limitations of that power, especially amidst forces that are and will always be beyond his control. It’s about living within those systems and seeing the consequences of those systems changing or being stretched to the brink…

And one realization comes to the forefront quickly: men, especially men like Jason Isbell, who were raised to be the strong silent Southern man, with an entrenched set of values placed all the more in focus by attaining power, they don’t handle these sorts of changes or stretches well, and their ignorance of others in the same frame can trigger consequences they don’t see coming. A really good example of how this manifests is how Isbell uses southern rock on this album that calls back to the 1970s and acts like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd - the guitars are warm, the grooves are gentle, the progressions are allowed to meander and build, the sort of material that’s had many guys - especially sportswriters - love to put music of this type on for the barbeque… but midway through the song you realize that lack of consideration has led those warm comforting moments to be not so comforting to everyone else. The most stark, early example is ‘Middle Of The Morning’, a song written from lockdown in the middle of tensions in his marriage and a world spiraling beyond what he can control, where amidst a comforting, sandy atmosphere lines like ‘I know you’re scared of me’ ring out. Or take ‘This Ain’t It’, pure southern rock full of extended jamming and organ, written from the perspective of an absentee father trying to re-enter his wayward daughter’s life and give her some well-meaning advice, and it reads as nothing more than Isbell writing his own ‘Buddy’s Rendezvous’, framed positively until you recognize just how irrelevant and pathetic it can feel.

Because one thing I find very interesting is that while I thought some of Isbell’s conservative critics highlighting hubris on Reunions was misguided to put it lightly, it’s clear that he took at some of it to heart, and Weathervanes is trying to dig into both his own state and what shaped him to be like this, and that sort of systemic introspection isn’t easy especially when there are plenty who are running short on patience to grapple with his consequences. ‘If You Insist’ is an intentional follow-up to ‘Chaos & Clothes’ on The Nashville Sound, especially in its watery guitars balanced with the fiddle, but where that song was trying to be more conciliatory to someone who did not deserve it, here there is no breakthrough and the passage of time leaves him all the more stranded in attempting to reach out. ‘When We Were Close’ falls into a similar vein with a fellow star who died of his addictions, with the chunkier riffs a deliberate callback to his sound, where Isbell wonders why it wasn’t him to succumb - he’s not a better man than his old friend, and an earlier song like ‘King Of Oklahoma’ with its aching electric snarl and interweaving solos where he lives out the life of someone ravaged by opiate addiction who sees his marriage and prospects implode and he’s only blearily realizing the horrifying impact on those around him… but at that point at the bottom, he can’t feel anything at all. And on ‘Vestavia Hills’ it becomes explicitly self-critical, written from the perspective of a roadie who has been trying to prop up an artist who is falling apart at the seams, trying to maintain his power… and then throwing the double bird and realizing he could and should find a better life elsewhere! But that’s the point: this is an album that’s not designed to reinforce power structures but critique them, and wonder on what moral authority does he have to say anything at all. That takes us to the two songs most openly about his home state of Alabama and old stories growing up, and it’s a complex lens - ‘Cast Iron Skillet’ is soft-spoken and acoustic, but it’s all about puncturing that folksy wisdom that’s not really rooted in anything and only served to cover up systemic rot that touches on racism and violence, but then there’s ‘Volunteer’, which takes a first person narrative peeling through misty strings and guitars as he tries to sketch a hometown narrative for the kids who don’t get out, and how easily he could have fallen between the cracks in the same way. He can’t be nostalgic for home, even if he might want to.

But for as much as Isbell is a storyteller, where the tension is at its highest is within the family, and these are some of the most gripping moments here. I’ve already mentioned ‘Death Wish’, but a brighter and no less complicated love song is ‘Strawberry Woman’, one of my personal favourites with the warmer guitars and that striking acoustic solo at the end, the sentiment at its roots is a tough one - that if you and your partner both grow and mature where codependence is no longer required, you start seriously questioning what keeps you together, the expectations of love that shift beneath your feet - and as ‘Middle Of The Morning’ will show, when you’re pushed even good men and women stumble, or overlook something they really shouldn’t. One of the more harrowing songs on the back half is ‘White Beretta’, where Isbell describes being a younger man taking a partner to get an abortion, and it’s not a regret for lost fatherhood so much as just not even contextualizing what that would mean for a young woman growing up in a deeply religious and conservative environment, where the strictures and stigmas were very different. And then there’s ‘Save The World’, with its cycling, anxious guitarline and organ that blazes uncomfortably bright as Isbell writes in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting, not as someone making a statement on gun control but as a parent with the paralyzing feel nestling in his gut and the desperate hope that someone will be able to fix the broken system. And that’s the tragedy of so much of Weathervanes - so much of this is beyond one man you might put on a pedestal, where you have more power to damage than heal or change people, and either way you’re not beating time, be it those who are set in their path or charting anew. The final song ‘Miles’, like ‘Letting You Go’ on Reunions, is about the inevitability of his daughter growing up and leaving, but the mood is very different - ‘Letting You Go’ is a great father-daughter ballad but it’s easier and settled. ‘Miles’ is a 70s Paul McCartney song by way of vintage Neil Young, complete with multiple tempo changes as Isbell flexes his prog side, where like his own lineage has shaped his world, he has shaped hers… and it hasn’t always been for the better because he’s not perfect and no parent is, especially given the tension he had with her mother. It’s a difficult conclusion and one that feels ultimately hopeful, but less certain…

And that makes sense too - Weathervanes is the perfect title because they can trace where the wind might be blowing, but never for sure, and never for long, and never how fast it blows, and they sure as hell can’t stop it. This is an album that questions direction in a very empathetic and human way, with a breadth that can finally see for miles - rarely has an album that feels so deliberate and well-crafted showcase so much deep-seated acknowledgement of what we don’t know and can’t control. It’s an album that deals in systems but never shies away from the heart and the turns of phrase that make Isbell one of the best writers working today. The only concern I would have for crossover is that it can be very heavy and adult in moments, and with a decidedly masculine focus in its framing - it’s one of the reasons it resonates so strongly for me, but that sort of detail and moral complexity can be a tough sell, even if it can still dream of hope. Coupled with a breadth of sound and depth of writing that shows Isbell and his band at their best… folks, I don’t give scores anymore, but if I did, this is a 10. Best album I’ve heard in years, one where at any given time any one song could be my favourite, absolutely the one to beat in 2023. If you haven’t heard it, give yourself an hour to listen and another few hours to process it - that’s a lot, I’ll admit… but it’s worth it.

Have to admit, it’s nice knowing where the wind is blowing.