Unusual country for Nashville star Jason Isbell

Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell doesn’t fit the typical mould.

Jason Isbell

In a dressing-room at the Ryman Auditorium — the grand late 19th-century hall in Nashville that’s home to the country music institution the Grand Ole Opry — Jason Isbell is reflecting on whether his confessional, heartfelt, chart-topping music counts as country. Isbell won two awards at the Grammys last month, but neither was in a country category: his 24 Frames won for best American roots song, while Something More Than Free was named best Americana album. Where does he fit in?

“I’m from Green Hill, Alabama, which is most definitely in the country,” says 37-year-old Isbell, whose lugubrious demeanour and polite, considered diction are reminiscent of an old southern gentleman. “It’s a small town with no traffic lights, no post office. We had to borrow the one in the next town along. Saturday night consisted of sitting under a tree and setting things on fire. There were cows everywhere.”

Did Isbell indulge in that fabled pastime of rural youth, tipping cows? “We did tip over some cows, yes sir,” he says. “It’s not a myth: they do sleep standing up. We had fainting goats, too. You make a loud noise and their legs go stiff and they fall over.”

In a few hours’ time, Isbell will play the first of four sold-out concerts at the Ryman — the first artist to do a four-night run at the venue — where he’ll be greeted with a standing ovation before he starts to play.

In the US, his album Something More Than Free beat country superstar Alan Jackson to the No 1 spot last year, while being genre-busting enough to top the rock, folk and independent charts, too.

The remarkable thing about Isbell’s rising status as the saviour of country music is that it has happened entirely outside the Nashville establishment. Country music is the biggest selling genre in the US, but the style dominating US radio deals in a Dukes of Hazzard-style fantasy of good ol’ boys at truck stops and “purdy” girls in cut-off jeans, most of it written and produced by songwriting teams for photogenic stars. Taylor Swift emerged from Nashville’s pop country scene. Adele is a fan: Need You Now by pop-country cheesemongers Lady Antebellum inspired her Don’t You Remember?

But Isbell, who is signed to the independent Nashville label Thirty Tigers, is from another world. He writes in novelistic detail about all the subjects — alcoholism, domestic violence, cheap motels, general despair — from which pop country runs a mile.

“I write narrative fiction through my own experience,” says Isbell. “There’s always a little bit of my own life in there. And the more details you put in, the more the listener can feel you know what it’s like to be them.”

Isbell, it turns out, has plenty of experience to draw on. He was born to a 17-year-old mother and a 19-year-old father, who are the subjects of his song Children of Children. The title track on Something More Than Free is also about his father, a carpenter who works Monday to Saturday and finds himself “too tired to go to church”.

“That came from a conversation with my dad about whether he goes with my teenage stepsister to church or not. He said he didn’t because, after working six days, he couldn’t get up on Sunday mornings,” Isbell says. “I thought, man, what a place to be — to work so hard that you can’t afford to take the time to be grateful for that work in public.”

Isbell’s breakthrough album — he was 34 at the time — was Southeastern in 2013. Praised by songwriting royalty from Bruce Springsteen to John Prine, it came in the wake of the alcoholism that almost killed him.

Isbell was 21 when, having spent a childhood dreaming of life in a band after growing up on his father’s ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin and Bad Company albums, he joined southern rockers Drive-By Truckers. Spending your 20s in a hard-touring band is likely to involve a fair degree of drinking, but Isbell’s boozing reached uncontrollable levels after he drafted his then wife, Shonna Tucker, into the band on bass, which proved to be a problem given he was splitting up with her at the time.

“Eventually the guys suggested I take some time off the road, which was a passive-aggressive way of firing me,” he recalls.

In retrospect, his way of dealing with the problem — launching a solo career from a bar in Sheffield, Alabama, which he lived above — wasn’t the best solution. After he hooked up with Amanda Shires (now his wife and the mother of his two-month-old daughter) and told her he really did want to quit, she staged an intervention with his manager in 2012 and packed Isbell off to rehab. He hasn’t touched a drop since.

Southeastern was the result, a sobriety album from the other side of the bottle. One song, Super 8, details wild nights in America’s sleaziest hotel franchise (“It’s the bottom rung every city has, although some places do have a Super 6”), while Cover Me Up is a love letter to Shires and a thank you for straightening him out.

At the Ryman later that night, when Isbell sings Cover Me Up’s line “I sobered up and I swore off that stuff / Forever this time”, the audience erupts into cheers, although the sea of beer cans raised heavenwards suggests they may have misinterpreted the words somewhat.

“Sobriety took some getting used to,” he says. “I had to learn how to be in a room full of people and not feel isolated unless I was hammered, to learn how to make relationships work for the first time, but it was better in every way.

“I could hear myself on stage. I could tell an actual joke rather than a half-joke with a slur in the middle. You get to make decisions that used to make themselves, like getting some rest after a show rather than going to a bar and trying to pick someone up.

“And everything I told myself previously about needing a drink to go on stage, to come off stage and all points between, turned out to be bullshit.”

Isbell is not alone in giving country music a reality check. His fellow Nashville residents Kacey Musgraves and Sturgill Simpson have been ploughing a similar furrow, albeit in different directions, but Isbell is the most unlikely success story among them: a Leonard Cohen-like songwriter-poet using country music as his framework, who has become a hero for, judging by the audience at the Ryman, working-class men and women who feel he is speaking directly to them.

“I am a country person,” he says, on why he has struck a chord with everyday people as opposed to hipsters. “My accent and my interests are from the country. But I don’t feel connected in any way with commercial country music beyond the fact that those people live a few minutes away, here in Nashville.

“When we listen to an album at home, we play it three or four times and then we talk about it. With commercial country there’s not much to dig into beyond a catchphrase or two, something that sounds good at a sports game.”

An artist informed by alcoholic regret, late-blooming success, family buses, tipping cows and trips to the zoo. What could be more country than that?

The Times

Jason Isbell’s Australian tour begins on March 27 in Tallarook, Victoria, then moves to Byron Bay, Melbourne, Bendigo, Adelaide and Sydney.