By K.D. Norris
When summer 2020 live music schedules were being made out early this year, one concert on many people’s “must buy” ticket list was Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s June 24 stop at Grand Rapids’ DeVos Performance Hall.
Not only does the alt-country/true country singer/songwriter extraordinaire and his tight band always bring it, they would be bringing along new music from his scheduled May release of Reunions.
Then came March and the pandemic and the spate of sometimes-good, sometimes-not “concerts from home” by every musical artist trying to keep their names and music in mind.
Still, while Isbell’s DeVos concert is a “postponement waiting to happen” at this point — Yes, websites still say you can buy tickets, but, no, it ain’t happening — Reunions was released as planned.
And intentionally or by fate, Isbell’s latest collection of music is bluntly reflective not only for our current times (of varying degrees of isolation and social unrest) but for our pending times (of more social unrest and political trials).
Even the album cover speaks of isolation.
And the first single off the release, “Be Afraid”, is a straight-ahead rocker that seems to speak directly to our trying times.
“We’ve been testing you … And you failed … To see how long that you could sit with the truth, but you bailed … I don’t think you even recognize the loss of control … I don’t think you even see it in yourself.”
Read that anyway you want. A fragile society and our place in it? A broken political system the we may have only one last chance to fix? A racial divide that each of us carry some blame for? You call it.
The artist on his music
Well before Mr. George Floyd’s killing and the ensuing social unrest, Isbell seemed to be speaking to issue: “I’m trying to encourage people to be themselves as loudly as possible,” Isbell said about “Be Afraid”. “I don’t know if I’m in any position to do that but I think if we’re going to make any progress as a society then people have to be brave enough to say what they feel.”
But Isbell, and his Reunions work with the 400 Unit, is much more than cryptic lyrics you can read into and a country/rock blur of music that often sounds like nothing else available on the download.
Following in the wake of his recent string of astoundingly accessible yet personal solo work after burning out with the Drive-by Truckers, starting with 2013’s Southeastern, either Isbell’s solo guitar sound or his Big Unit sound has carried him and his audience far. (From not selling out a Meijer Gardens summer concert to filling up the DeVos, for example.)
And while Reunions does revisit some old ghosts — personal trials, relationship failures, surviving at all costs — some of it sounds a bit bigger, a bit more stadium rock; but without losing the small-town perspective driven by a solitary voice and his guitar.
“I felt like we had made a statement with Southeastern, Something More Than Free, and The Nashville Sound. Those albums are looking at what happens post happy ending,” Isbell said in supplied material. “They’re saying “I survived—now what?” So I wanted to make something different. … This record probably gets closer to the music I actually like to listen to than anything I’ve done in the past.”
Reunions is Isbell’s seventh full-length studio album and the fourth released with his band, the 400 Unit, a tight, seasoned group which now also includes his wife and mother of his child, fiddler and singer Amanda Shires — yes, of recent fame by forming the country music supergroup “The Highwomen” alongside Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris and Natalie Hemby. The new album also includes several special background vocals from special guests including David Crosby.
A tour of the track list of Reunions, similar to his other recent releases, finds Isbell sliding like a pedal steal riff from anthem rock to ballad to country love song to hymn. And rarely are they not worth the walk.
My favorites — outside of the in-your-face “Be Afraid” and personally introspectiveness of “It Gets Easier” — include the troubadour storytelling of “Overseas”, the gentle touch of “River” and “St. Peter’s Autograph”, and the twangy country sound of “Letting You Go”, which explores his newfound job of father.
“It was a challenge to write about something that is so important to me but that’s my wheelhouse,” Isbell said. “I like writing songs about things that could get maudlin, but pulling back before they do. … I feel like my job as a parent is not so much to protect as to prepare. I think it’s easier said than done because our instinct is to protect at all costs but I feel it more important to prepare her for the world. It’s hard to let them go.”
And Reunions is as much about a past that is still in the shadows as it is about working through the present and into the future.
“There are a lot of ghosts on this album,” Isbell said in supplied material. “Sometimes the songs are about the ghosts of people who aren’t around anymore, but they’re also about who I used to be, the ghost of myself. I found myself writing songs that I wanted to write fifteen years ago, but in those days, I hadn’t written enough songs to know how to do it yet. … In that sense it’s a reunion with the me I was back then.”
After getting Reunions, all we can do now is wait for better days and another summer concert season.
Reunions is available for download at the usual suspects, but please give some business to local record stores such as Grandville’s Corner Record Shop.
