An Evening with Jason Isbell

Jason Isbell has established himself as one of the most respected and celebrated songwriters of his generation. The North Alabama native possesses an incredible penchant for identifying and articulating some of the deepest, yet simplest, human emotions, and turning them into beautiful poetry through song. Isbell sings of the everyday human condition with thoughtful, heartfelt, and sometimes brutal honesty. Isbell broke through in 2013 with the release of Southeastern. His next two albums, Something More Than Free (2015) and The Nashville Sound (2017), won Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album & Best American Roots Song. Isbell's song "Maybe It's Time" was featured in the 2019 reboot of A Star Is Born.

Isbell’s 2020 full-length, Reunions, is a critically-acclaimed collection of ten songs that showcases an artist at the height of his powers and a band fully charged with creativity and confidence. The creation of the album and the period around it is the subject of a full-length documentary from Sam Jones, Running With Our Eyes Closed.

Isbell and his band the 400 Unit released their next album Weathervanes during the summer of 2023. Weathervanes was produced by Isbell. The record is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption. With Weathervanes, Isbell has added to his collection of Grammys, winning Best Americana Album and Best American Roots song for “Cast Iron Skillet.”

On October 4th, just ahead of his latest Ryman residency, Isbell released Live From The Ryman Vol. 2, a collection of recordings from four of the last six years of sold-out shows at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium.

Isbell also appears as Bill Smith in the Oscar-nominated Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which received the 2024 SAG Award for Cast in a Motion Picture. Isbell’s time on set with Scorsese informed Weathervanes. He watched the great director work, saw the relationship between a clear vision and its execution, and perhaps most important, saw how even someone as decorated as Scorsese sought out and used his co-workers’ opinions.

“It definitely helped when I got into the studio,” Isbell says. “I had this reinvigorated sense of collaboration. You can have an idea and you can execute it and not compromise -- and still listen to the other people in the room.”