Album from 2013
I went looking for a 2013 album this week. I didn't have one in mind really until I got to Jack's Music Shoppe in Red Bank, NJ, which is one of my go-to spots. For some reason, once I got there, I really wanted to get Jason Isbell's "Southeastern." They didn't have it. So I went to the rest of my regular spots, places in and around Asbury Park, the Howell Record Store, and even a couple of places further away that I know carry new albums. It wasn't anywhere. I know it wasn't an especially popular album or anything, especially around here, but I was still a little surprised that I couldn't find it anywhere. Whatever...anyway, I ordered it from Amazon (for $14, not bad). Now, I don't expect to be writing about things that I set out looking for a lot. I expect to browse and find something from each year, but it's a little bit harder with much newer albums, since they haven't circulated much and found time to end up in used stacks.
For those who don't know who Jason Isbell is, he's a country/folk/alt-country singer/songwriter and a former member of the Drive-By Truckers. For those of you who don't know who Drive-By Truckers are, don't worry, we'll talk about it.
Led by Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, Drive-By Truckers, or as they will heretofore be referred to, DBT, are an alt-country/Southern rock band, or at least that's what wikipedia classifies them as. That's a pretty good classification, I'd say. They are one of the seminal bands in the alt-country scene, if one of the late bloomers, not releasing their first album, "Gangstabilly" until 1998, and their first album on a major label until "Decoration Day" in 2003. Their "Southern Rock Opera" (2001) is one of the best albums of the genre, and is an epic and ambitious love letter to country music consisting of 20 songs and two "acts." I really hate that phrase ("love letter to") but it really applies here, as many of the songs are directly about country music history, specifically songs like "Ronnie and Neil" about the supposed rivalry between Ronnie Van Zant and Neil Young, "Cassie's Brother" about Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie of Lynryd Skynryd, and "Shut Up and Get on the Plane," about the Skynryd plane crash.
Now, I'm not even a Skynryd fan, but this is a really great album. Besides the great writing, the album shines in the spots where you can feel the love and respect these guys have for their predecessors. Their next album, "Decoration Day," is just as fantastic. It made Rolling Stone's "Critics' Top 10" of the year, and, much more importantly, made No Depression's "40 Best Alt. Country Albums" of the year. DBT have 10 albums under their belt now, and before "Southeastern," Isbell had three of his own.
I am confident in saying that "Southeastern" is not only Isbell's best album, but that it's better than any DBT album. And it was only after realizing this that I noticed that Ibell's time with DBT coincided with their three best albums, the two I mentioned above and 2004's "The Dirty South."
This was also all before I even got this vinyl copy of the album. Now, as I've been told, the difference between a CD/MP3 and a vinyl record is the difference between analog and digital recordings. An MP3 takes the sounds and records them and transfers them to digital files, which means that it's not exactly getting every single thing. Now, by no means am I one of those "old-fashioned" guys, obsessed with when everything was older and better and, you know, that whole Luddite b.s., but there is just something more full about the sound of this album when I drop a needle on it rather than use a touchscreen to find it. It's sort of like a picture on Facebook and a polaroid that you hold in your hand.
I'm going to do a quick track-by-track of the album, as I feel that this is probably the best album of last year, and each song deserves at least a passing mention, even if there's only a couple words on each. I know that last week I talked about cohesion in albums, and said that "Somewhere Under Wonderland" was one of those cohesive albums, but "Southeastern" is that and more. It's an album where every song is a fantastic song. There's really nothing bad to say about any of them.
That said, "Southeastern" is also an incredibly depressing and dark piece of art, so if you find yourself in a bad place mentally, that isn't exactly the time to give this a first listen.
1. Cover Me Up kicks off the album in the best way possible. Isbell had set out to make this album as a personal, solo, acoustic album, and did not intend for his backing band, The 400 Unit, to play on it at all. He ended up using them in certain places, and "Cover Me Up" really walks the line here. When I think about the album, I was thinking of this song as one of the rockers, one that I could send to a friend to get them to pay attention and not bore them immediately. But when I put the vinyl on while I was making dinner, I realized that it's almost the opposite. It's really just his fantastic vocals during the chorus make the song so memorable, not to mention the actual poetry of the varying choruses:
"So, girl, leave your boots by the bed
We ain't leavin' this room
'til someone needs medical help
Or the magnolias bloom
It's cold in this house
And I ain't going out to chop wood
So cover me up and
Know you're enough to use me for good"
2. Stockholm is sort of the song that stealthily makes this album so dark and depressing. There are others that are personal, quiet songs about disturbing things, violence, drugs, and disease, but "Stockholm" sounds happy. Jason's vocals jump in sounding joyful with his wife, Amanda Shires, backing him up. And that's part of what makes this song so amazing; it's about a victim of Stockholm Syndrome (from wikipedia: a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with them), where the victim sounds genuinely happy. The first chorus really kicks in and just makes you want to sing along with it:
"Lock me up tight in these shackles I wear
Tied up the keys in the folds of your hair
And the difference with me is I used to not care"
As my girlfriend said, it sounds like the kind of song that might have been used in Dawson's Creek. The narrator just wants to go home, but at the same time, by the time the next chorus comes around, Isbell ends it a little bit differently:
"Ships in the harbor and birds on the bluff
Don't move an inch when their anchor goes up
And the difference with me is I've fallen in love"
It's sort of the thing that you'd expect every victim of Stockholm Syndrome to say; "No, really, it's different in this case. I really do love him." Now, I doubt that Jason has actually been kidnapped and fallen in love with his captor, and while it's certainly possible that this is simply a fictional song with fictional characters and fictional feelings, I get the feeling that he came up with this idea because of how he feels shackled to certain things that he can't escape and lies to himself about loving them. Jason is a former addict, having problems both with cocaine and alcohol, and he recorded this album immediately after leaving rehab.
3. Traveling Alone both blends into the album beautifully and stands out on its own very well. I know that after popping this album in for the first time and listening to it without, you know, actually paying attention to it, this was one of the two that I remembered specifically after it was over.
Perhaps it's because the chorus is a mostly simple one, something that cries out in distress, a hopeless plea, the way one feels when there is really nothing you can do about the way you feel but beg for someone to do something, anything, about it. It makes me think of my aunt, who has a freshman in college right now who is struggling a little bit with the adjustment, and seems miserable at school. The feeling my aunt must get when she thinks about her daughter, depressed and alone, miles and miles away, and there's absolutely nothing she can do about it but hope something changes, hope something happens, hope it all works out, seems, to me in a way, similar to Jason calling out endlessly, "I've grown tired of traveling alone."
Besides the feelings that the chorus evokes, there are plenty of great lines in this song, real thinkers:
"I know every town worth passing through, but what good does knowing do, with no one to show it to."
"So high the street girls wouldn't take my pay, they said come see me on a better day, she just danced away."
"Painting the outside lane, I'm tired of answering to myself."
PS. That's Jason's wife and former DBT-member Amanda Shires singing almost all of this song with Jason. She also appears in other songs, both vocals and fiddle.
4. Elephant makes you stop and take notice. It's not that it calls much attention to itself, but it's one of those songs where his voice just takes so much precedence over everything else in the song. It's blunt without being subtle. It doesn't hide the fact that it's about cancer much, dropping the word about halfway (actually almost exactly halfway, 1:49/3:38), and instead speaking plainly about a friend of the narrator that's sick, and his relationship with her. There's no clever metaphor, although a metaphor slash idiom gives the song its name - ignore the elephant in the room - and there's nothing grand to say about life or sickness or friendship or death. Perhaps there's: "No one dies with dignity," but other than that, it's mostly just playing cards and singing songs together, making jokes and small observations about each other.
And that's what makes this song both possibly the most beautiful on the album, and the one that I have the least to say about. It's beauty lies in its simplicity, both in the situation described and the lack of a comment on that situation, and in the quiet strumming behind Isbell's straining voice, an almost inaudible guitar. The straightforwardness of the lyrics even go so far as to say, almost shockingly, "If I fucked her before she got sick, I'd never hear the end of it," displaying the playful relationship, the seriousness of the disease, the blunt speak, and their relationship all in one fell swoop. But this all sort of lacks what's really great about the song, and that's the sound that the needle gives it, making it feel like Jason is sitting next to my hospital bed, cross-legged on a barstool, singing to me and me only. What I'm trying to get at is, if you listen to any one song on this album, listen to this one, because my words are never going to give you a full idea of what it's actually like.
5. Flying Over Water moves the record along, coming in hard after the dulcet ending of "Elephant" and keeping that up throughout the song, as the narrator consoles his flying partner, who cries when they fly over water. And while she has her anxiety over something perfectly understandable, something that makes sense as I'm sitting at my desk and just thinking about being thousands of feet in the air over the ocean, he commiserates over something of his own, something less visceral but more personal. To me, it seems like he is trying to reconcile his love for the south and his hatred for the south. Jason actually seems to be doing this a lot over the course of his career (and I of course don't mean to suggest that he hates the south, just that there are things about his home that he doesn't like, and things from his past that fucked him up). Once they're not over water anymore, now it's his turn to feel anxious, as he sees the organization of what I've assumed to be some sort of farm or plantation, with "walls that make up barricades and graves," that he calls "Daddy's little empire built by hands and built by slaves."
For a while, I thought that the chorus seemed a little bit backwards. He says:
"Take my hand, baby, we're over land,
I know flying over water makes you cry,"
and I thought, well shouldn't she have been holding his hand when they were over water, and now that they're safe and over the land, she'll be fine. But eventually I realized that it's because he needs someone's hand to hold now, as he frets over his life in the land that they are passing over. He sees the highway, "a string pulled tight from home to Tennessee," and says that "those ditches took the better part of me."
And there is the anxiety that they both have, the feeling as they fly through the air from one place to another, that they left something behind, specifically their love, their passion for each other, their original feelings. Whether he feels that this is a possibility because where they were represented their love, or if it's something that has been growing (or decreasing) for a while, and now this airplane flight is the final straw sort of thing, I don't know.
6. Different Days is a pleasant song, it's pleasing to the ear, at least. I love that thing that artists do where they use one line repeatedly, but because they set it up differently each time, it comes to have a different meanings, (Dawes does this a lot, or Meat Loaf in "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)").
This song does that thing, and it's message here is a little bit less pleasing than the actual calming sound of the song. It's almost like it's calm because the singer is resigned and given up. Each time he says something different about ten years ago, and each time it gets worse and worse. Ten years ago, he would have offered up his help, but those were different days. He would have stuck around for another night, but those were different days. He didn't have the right to say the things an outlaw wouldn't say, but those were different days.
Standout line:
"Even if you did [run away], what you got to run away to?
Just another drunk daddy with a white man's point of view."
7. Live Oak is this album's runaway outlaw song, which is sort of a classic in the genre, from the Grateful Dead's cover of "El Paso," Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried," and half of Johnny Cash's catalog, to Josh Ritter's "Folk Bloodbath," Blitzen Trapper's "Black River Killer," and the Old 97's cover of the Grateful Dead's "El Paso."
"Live Oak" certainly continues on in the tradition of those songs, describing his journey from place to place, all the while with "ole sheriff on [his] back." Where the song adds a little fresh life is that he's currently settled somewhere, possibly changed his ways, and seemingly trying to court a girl, who eventually hears of his past, which consists of "robbing a Great Lakes freighter" and killing "a couple men aboard."
He seems to regret his past, as the chorus states: "There's a man who walks beside me, it is who I used to be/And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me."
8. Songs That She Sang in the Shower is the other one that I remembered after just one listen. The premise of the song is just so genius. "The songs that she sang in the shower are all stuck in my head." It's that simple. That single line establishes the setting of a failed relationship, and how he feels about it since then. While the song meanders (in a good way) through the verses, as he softly sings quick, short lines, reminiscent of the quick, short sentences of a man recently heartbroken, it's really all hinging on that one premise, that one piece of poetry that we get in the very title of the song.
9. New South Wales still confounds me in some ways. It's a beautiful song, with a surface interpretation concluding that he's singing about touring in Australia, where the tequila is bad and the cocaine is worse. It's a beautiful song in many ways, but it's also sort of impenetrable. In some ways it seems to be a friendship/brotherhood song, as he speaks to a friend sitting across the table from him about the things they've done and the things they're doing; "drinking fire, and spitting sawdust, trying to teach ourselves to breathe."
10. Super 8 is the song that Jason has been closing out live sets with since "Southeastern" came out. It's the albums true rocker, detailing drunken escapades throughout a single night, from the end of a show all the way through who-the-hell knows what, until he finds himself telling us that it would all "make a great story" if he ever "could remember it right." There's a fungo bat in there somewhere, the only song me and my father could think of with such a mention, mentions of waking up on a still-made bed, guts, glory, and pity for the maid.
This song kicks ass, basically.
11. Yvette is another that took multiples listens for me to figure it out. I love hearing it on the player now that I'm not analyzing the lyrics, which are about a young boy in class who notices a classmate of his who is being abused at home. She stays completely covered up in school so that no one will see the marks, and her mother won't say anything.
The little boy maybe has a little bit of a savior/hero-streak in him - which to me isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially at such a young age - and claims in the chorus that, "I might not be a man yet, but that bastard will never be." He's cleaning his gun, or his Weatherby, which I had to look up, not being a gun person myself, and waiting for the chance.
It's a song, in some ways, about comparing two people, and just because one is older than the other one, not assuming anything about either one. This was something that I used to love when I was a teenager/college-aged kid, and I would coach or attend my younger brother's sports games, I fancied myself a person who understood right and wrong, and I used to love outclassing the obnoxious dads and coaches and stuff, of which there are always plenty, as you can imagine. Anyway, I always hated that certain people acted like adults should always be respected by children no matter what, even when that adult is a complete and utter asshole. Which in this case, the man is, and this boy in his daughter's class not only knows better than him, but he knows that he knows better.
12. Relatively Easy probably took the longest to grow on me. That's most likely because it's at the end of the album and I don't always have time to listen to the entire thing. Plus the beginning of the album is so good that when I'm listening to it on a CD or something, I just want it to start over again. But eventually, I came to realize that this was just as fantastic as the rest of the album. It was the clincher for me; it was when it went from a good album with a bunch of great songs to a truly great album.
It's a song about putting things into perspective. When he sings in the chorus, "You should know compared to people on a global scale, our kind has had it relatively easy," I don't know if he's talking about Americans, males, or white people. I get the idea that it's kind of a first-world thing, where he gives us little pieces of different peoples lives, people who've had a "long day," whose wives "took the kids," who "may not have a friend left in the world," or who "broke the law," but then he puts it all on a global scale and remarks that its all still relatively easy when compared with the worst.
Standout line: "Is your brother on a church kick? Seems like just a different kind of dope sick."
Random aside: This song's themes remind me a lot of the song "Lucky Guy" by Belle Brigade. It's a very similar thing, about how the singer's mother died in childbirth, and he gets depressed sometimes, but in the end, he's a "pretty lucky guy." Check it out.
That whole thing about skipping ahead back to the beginning of the album wasn't a problem here. When I listen to a vinyl, it really forces me to hear each song. Of course, by this point, I've already listened to all of these songs multiple times, but it almost makes me wish that all of those multiple times were here, next to my record player, trying to make some dinner.
Last Week's: Somewhere Under Wonderland by Counting Crows
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