August 2017

Former Drive-By Trucker and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Jason Isbell hooks up with The 400 Unit to bring us a fresh take on The Nashville Sound. In the spring, Jason Isbell marked an anniversary with a quietly contented post on social media. “This week marks 10 years since I parted ways with the Drive-By Truckers,” he wrote. “I weigh one pound less than I did then. Pretty proud of that.” As we meet in London, he laughs when I bring it up. “Yeah, at 38 I weigh less than I did at 28,” he says in his usual soft tones. “For an American, that’s tough, because we all just balloon. I guess the point of that is I’m in better shape than I was then, and I feel younger than I felt 10 years ago.” The statistic is a measure of how low Isbell’s life had dipped, during his days with the esteemed southern rockers of Athens, Georgia. But it also delineates his personal recovery and professional evolution ever since. His unceasingly admirable new album The Nashville Sound, the first since 2011 on which he shares the billing with his band the 400 Unit, comes shimmering into the long glow cast by two colossal predecessors, 2013’s Southeastern and the double Grammy-winning Something More Than Free in 2015. The Nashville Sound is produced, like those two forerunners, by the apparently omnipresent (and quite possibly omniscient) Dave Cobb. Just as he has done with Chris Stapleton, A Thousand Horses and others, he encouraged a vibe of spontaneity on what is at times a more muscular, yet still reflective, body of work. “A lot of this is live, even vocals,” confirms Isbell. “Dave’s got me doing that and I like it once it’s done. It’s kind of nerve-wracking as it’s going along, because I used to take two or three days to sing everything and try to get it perfect. I think that sucked some of the soul out of it. So Dave cajoled me into keeping some live vocals, and it works good, because then I don’t have to go back and sing a bunch of crap at the end of the sessions.” Isbell is on a roll, and he is cautiously but undeniably upbeat about it, acknowledging the accelerated awareness that now greets his excursions to the very core of modern-day Americana. “It started with Southeastern, and then Something More Than Free carried that forward,” he says. “That’s great, that’s what you want. It takes some adjusting, but all the problems are good ones. “The rooms got nicer, the audiences got bigger and I was able to buy better guitars and hear myself every night. All the things you dream about. Having a private bathroom before the show. You’d be amazed how far that goes towards your happiness on a day to day basis,” he adds drily. “So now, if I’ve got my family with me, I can tour. However long they want me to tour, I’ll tour, as long as my family’s around, and that’s a great thing.” It’s a Family Affair Isbell married fellow musician Amanda Shires in 2013, and their baby daughter Mercy Rose celebrates her second birthday in September. We’re speaking during a brief London sojourn to talk up his new album and, far more importantly, for him to meet up with Amanda as she opens on tour for John Prine. The year Shires was pregnant, and then gave birth to Mercy Rose, Jason stayed home all year. The work-life balance is in good order, which is way more than you could say about his hard-living past. Born in Green Hill, Alabama, to teenage parents, he emerged from a church-drilled upbringing to bust out of college and get a publishing deal at Muscle Shoals’ celebrated soul headquarters, FAME Studios. Having befriended its resident bass-playing figurehead David Hood, Isbell got to know his son Patterson, leading Jason to join the already-admired band that Hood Jr had co-founded, southern alt-rockers Drive-By Truckers. Isbell was with them between 2001 to 2007 and appeared on albums such as Decoration Day, The Dirty South and A Blessing And A Curse, he gradually established himself among their writing team, and as Hood’s co-vocalist, with songs of bloodied rawness that reflected his own increasing reliance on chemical and alcoholic recreation. Have a listen to Never Gonna Change, for example, on 2004’s The Dirty South, for a tale of black-eyed peas and shotgun shells that tastes like a mouthful of southern grit, and which reflected an unswerving hedonism. “You can throw me in the Colbert County jailhouse, you can throw me off the Wilson Dam,” he wrote. “But there ain’t much difference in the man I wanna be and the man I really am,” he added, with the confidence of Cash and the defiance of Haggard. “I’m really happy that I was in that band and I’m proud of the work that we did,” he says as he casts a thought on his old behaviour. “I have a really good memory, and I’ve recently discovered that it can be traced to certain traumatic events in my childhood. “I needed to remember very specific details, for reasons I won’t go into, but I trained myself to have a very strong memory. I’ve played those [Truckers] songs so much and toured so much, that the ones that I still perform, I try to put myself in that place every night, because I don’t ever want to go through the motions. “So I still remember what the whisky tasted like, I still remember the hangovers. They’re interesting to me now,” he says, with an almost scholarly diversion, “because if you’d never had anything to drink and you woke up feeling like that, you would think you were dying. You would go to the emergency room immediately. But when you’re hungover, you’re like ‘I deserve this.’ That’s pretty incredible.” Such is the learned reflectiveness of the older Isbell. “But I still remember all those things, and I’m glad that

From underground punk to authentic country outlaw via the biggest band on the planet, Chris Shiflett gets back to his roots. Having rocked some of the biggest stages on the planet, including a recent triumphant headlining performance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, Chris Shiflett’s day job as guitarist in Foo Fighters is a pretty sweet gig… but just how many of the devoted Foos followers are aware that while Shiflett riffs out the solos to some of the world’s biggest and most recognisable anthems, they are also watching a devotee of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens? The native of Santa Barbara, California a full-time Foo Fighter since the turn of the century, came to the renowned rockers via the much-missed punk outfit No Use For A Name. Projects outside The Foos in recent years include two albums with his band the Dead Peasants, which dropped subtle hints of Shiflett’s fondness for country and rockabilly. But on his rather splendid new release, West Coast Town, Shiflett dons the Stetson and heads down to Nashville to make a record with über-producer Dave Cobb. A couple of weeks before The Foos’ blistering Glasto headline slot, Chris stopped-off in London for a couple of one-man acoustic shows. As he played selections from the solo venture at his Water Rats gig, his outlaw country credentials were seen by all to be entirely authentic, especially when opening guest Sam Palladio joined him for a turn at Waylon’s Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way. West Coast Town is country with the edges frayed, with an ultra-traditional twang alongside an indie-rock edge. “When I was a kid I had older brothers that had great record collections,” he says. “So in my house growing up that was all we did, listen to music, talk about music, play music. My oldest brother Mike gravitated towards The Stones, The Beatles and Elvis, then as time went on Sabbath, Kiss and Aerosmith. We were a total classic rock family. I didn’t even have to buy records much until I was a teenager and my tastes started to diverge from my older brother’s.” Country was there, in the corner of Chris’ eye, but not the mainstream version. “For me, it kind of started through rockabilly,” says Shiflett. “The Stray Cats were a big deal with me when they first came out, then through that, people like Robert Gordon, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and Johnny Burnette. So I really viewed it like that was what started me listening to older music that had that twang to it.” Then the influence of a storied California punk band took a hand. Chris said: “Somewhere around my late teens, Social Distortion started to draw from some of that, and I was, I am, a huge Social Distortion fan. When they started throwing old country covers into their set — and there was a certain look, they would rock that old-fashioned style with the pomade hair and all that – that was really appealing to me, I started going down that road. “Probably like most people, I just started with the obvious stuff, Johnny Cash and people like that. Then when I was in No Use For A Name, Tony Sly [frontman] was really into all the alt-country stuff that was kicking off. To me those bands like Son Volt and that early Wilco stuff, and Ol’ 97s, they were drawing from a lot of that Stonesy rock’n’roll thing, which is totally in my wheelhouse anyway. It made sense to me musically and appealed. So that’s what really led me back.” What If I Say I’m Not Like The Others It was the scenic route, but Shiflett has planted a flag where all those genres intersect, even if he’s pretty sure that his bandmates in the Foos don’t fully empathise. “I would say most definitely not,” he chuckles. “Everybody in the band, just like all musicians, has a pretty wide range of musical tastes, and it’s all different. But no, I don’t think I have any comrades in the twangy country department. “When I first started going down this road, I remember I was out at 606, our studio. I was recording something and a pedal steel player I know was laying down a track. Dave [Grohl] stopped by for something and he walks into the control room, and I’ll never forget the look on his face was classic. He looks at me and goes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He’s not going to be putting his cowboy hat on and joining with the country band with me at any point.” Nevertheless, that sense of musical inquisitiveness is a prerequisite to be part of the enduring rock institution that Foo Fighters have become. Shiflett has that to spare, not just in his music, but via his excellent, fortnightly interview podcast series Walking The Floor, of which he’s now made some 90 episodes. As you’d expect from his résumé, the shows have Shiflett jumping with ease from one touchstone to the next, but recent guests have included time-honoured country frontiersmen like Rodney Crowell and Marty Stuart as well as emerging Americana flag-bearers such as Sam Outlaw, Courtney Marie Andrews and Jaime Wyatt. Indeed, it was via that series that he met Dave Cobb (the man behind records by Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, A Thousand Horses and so many more), who would give his album its final coat of Nashville bona fides. “I just cold-called him,” says Shiflett, “because so many of the records I’d listened to over the years were records he produced, and I had this trip planned out to Nashville, because my podcast is pretty much country-Americana, alt-country, roots music-themed. I’m on the west coast and sometimes it’s hard to connect with those artists. “He was one of the interviews we’d lined up and he was like ‘Totally man, come on by, no worries.’ He’s a pretty laid back guy, that’s one of his qualities in the studio, you never felt