Jason Isbell: Deep Cuts
More from the Q&A session at Super Ocho
Jason Isbell has been recording and playing his songs for more than two decades, first with the Drive by Truckers, solo, and with his longtime band The 400 Unit. Digging into his deep catalog to decide what to play in concert can be a challenge, he says.
“I forget a lot of the songs. I forget they exist,” he said, responding to a question during a fan gathering at Super Ocho in Mexico City last month. “Somebody will come to me and say, ‘We should play this one again.’ Or a friend will say, ‘I just heard this song,’ and I’ll realize, ‘I guess I did write and record that one’.”
The question was one of 15 that Isbell answered during the fan gathering, which also featured two concerts by the Grammy Award winning artist, one solo and one with his band, the 400 Unit. Several of the heavier questions — about sobriety, songwriting, and growing up in the South — were addressed in a piece that appeared last week on my Substack, but there were a number of lighter moments as well that are captured here.
For example, Isbell was asked whether he would trade “Red Eye,” the 1959 Les Paul guitar that once belonged to Ed King of Lynyrd Skynyrd, for an Atlanta Braves World Series win. Isbell, a huge Braves fan and even bigger gear head, reportedly spent more than $500,000 on the guitar following King’s death in 2018.
“I wouldn’t do that if I owned the Braves,” he said. “If everything goes to shit, I’ll be out in a tent in the middle of the field with that guitar. I’ll eat beans out of a can before I’ll sell that guitar.”
Love for Centro-matic
Isbell’s love and enthusiasm for Centro-matic, the band led by current 400 Unit member Will Johnson, is equal to his loyalty to “Red Eye.” He went on the road with the Denton, Texas-based group in the mid 2000s, got the band to reunite for its first performance in seven years at 2021’s ShoalsFest, and brought them together again for Super Ocho.
“Having those guys reunite for this is a big, big deal for me,” Isbell said before Centro-matic opened the 400 Unit’s show the next evening. “There’s nobody I would rather have play this thing with us because I still listen to their songs religiously.”
Centro-matic played a 10-song opening set at Super Ocho. The final song, a cover of The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl” with Isbell and 400 Unit member Sadler Vaden contributing on guitar, was released on Bandcamp earlier this month. The song was part of a compilation, available for one day only, that benefitted victims of the fires in Los Angeles.
Isbell, who sat in for the majority of Centro-matic’s sets at both ShoalsFest and SuperOcho, told a funny story at the Q&A about the day he met Johnson and piano/violinist Scott Danbom in Denton. It was the fall of 2001, and he had just joined the Drive-by Truckers for their “Southern Rock Opera” tour.
Before a show that night at Dan’s Bar — a Denton staple (now Dan’s Silver Leaf) that the Truckers played numerous times — co-founder Patterson Hood booked the group to play at an afternoon homecoming pre-game gig at the University of North Texas.
“Patterson was still booking the Trucker shows himself, so if he could find a show that paid $400, $500, or more we took it,” Isbell said. “There were parents, kids in cheerleader costumes and face paint. It was a big family situation. Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Drive-by Truckers, but that’s not the most appropriate music for this.”
Hood told the group to open with the song “Buttholeville,” Isbell recalled to laughs from the audience.
“I was terrified,” he said, not knowing that the group had done the same thing several years earlier. “We were hungover, drunk again, and it was 2 in the afternoon. It was early for me. I’d just joined the band, so I didn’t look up for the first couple of songs because I was trying to figure out if I was playing the guitar. And I look up and see Will and Scott from Centro-matic. That’s when we met.”
Centro-matic opened that night for DBT, and Isbell was instantly hooked on the group’s music. “We listened to it in the Truckers van going down the road for months at a time,” he said. “Getting to know them as people was extra special because they’re all so lovely.”
At various points when Isbell “was having a hard time at home,” he would randomly tour with the group. “Sometimes I called Will and was like, ‘Can I just be in your band for a couple of weeks? I’ll bring my own weed and get my own hotel room.’ And he let me do that. That was very very special to me.”
Johnson, a prolific solo musician and artist who has been in a number of groups (Monsters of Folk, South San Gabriel), joined the 400 Unit when Isbell wanted to beef up his live sound for the “Weathervanes” tour in 2023.
“It’s just been a real joy,” Isbell said of having Johnson in the group.
In the Groove
Johnson’s arrival came as the 400 Unit faced its first major changes in more than a decade. Bass player Jimbo Hart, who had been with Isbell since he left the Truckers, left after the recording of “Weathervanes” and was replaced by Anna Butterss. Soon after the album was released, Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, separated; Shires, an acclaimed songwriter in her own right, played violin with the 400 Unit for almost a decade.
That leaves keyboardist Derry deBorja and drummer Chad Gamble as the two longest-serving members of the 400 Unit, which was formed in 2007-08. (Guitarist Sadler Vaden joined in 2013.) Isbell has known Gamble, who also is from the Muscle Shoals area, the longest; deBorja is a Baltimore native who started his career with Son Volt.
As soon as Isbell heard Gamble play, he knew he wanted to hire him.
“It's groove. It's all groove,” Isbell said. “Groove just leads everything for me because that's how it's supposed to work. The bass and drums are supposed to dance around the beat and set in a really good way.”
“My problem with a lot of recorded roots music, Americana music, is that it's just straight as an arrow — boom, pop, boom, pop,” Isbell said. “Everything's at a 114 beats per minute. It's all in G, and it's all just cruising right along, and there's no swing. Nobody wants to dance to Americana music, but Chad puts something in there.”
Isbell noted that Gamble can’t “sit still while he's playing.”
“If you notice his left foot is always moving on the high hat, whether you can hear it or not. He reminds me of Levon Helm and the way that his shoulders are always moving. And he internalizes the tempo, so he doesn't have to stay right on top of it and makes everything sort of swing.
“And he can drive. He can drive for a long time,” Isbell joked. “He could see real well and his braking was pretty clean. That was big in the early days.”
‘Loud, Quiet, Loud’
The 400 Unit is taking a break for a few months, but Isbell left Mexico City and went to Europe for a solo tour that returns to the U.S. later this month. The tour is to promote his first solo album in a decade, “Foxes in the Snow,” which will be released March 7.
Over the years, he has balanced the slower acoustic material in mini-sets with the harder edged, guitar driven songs he plays with the 400 Unit. Responding to the question about choosing songs from his catalog, he said the setlist influences what he plays in a full band show.
“I used to write a lot of slow, sad songs. I still write a lot of slow, sad songs,” he said. But I don’t want to everybody to have a slow, sad night. When I’m making a set list, I go by the old Pixies ‘loud, quiet, loud’ thing. I’m just trying to keep everybody awake, you know.”
He compared his relationship with his catalog to running into a friend from the past.
“You see them out somewhere and think, ‘I need to hang out with this person again. It’s been too long’,” Isbell said. “Sometimes you wind up hanging out once a week for the next 10 years, and then sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, I see why I haven’t been hanging out with this person.
“Songs are kind of the same way. Sometimes you’ll get to the second verse and realize you didn’t nail that. But there’s still quite a few that hold up that I forget about.”
Thank you Glenn! So fun to relive the CDMX experience!
Jealous! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on a thoughtful artist. Glad you got some outstanding memorabilia to bring home!