Jason Isbell's Struggle for Self-Knowledge
Jason Isbell's Struggle for Self-Knowledge
A new HBO documentary dives deep into the music, marriage, and psyche of the gifted songwriter
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A final note for the newbies: Most of the time when I write an “Above the Fray” post on a Friday, I include a “Great Song Suggestion” in a final section at the end. Those are usually kept behind the paywall, though today I’ve made it available to all because it’s a song by the artist I’m writing about in the main essay, and I’d like to give all readers a chance to listen to his music.
I heard a few months ago that HBO had a Jason Isbell documentary in the works, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting it. I watched it last weekend, and I wasn’t disappointed. For fans of his music (like me), “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed” is a real treat. It brings us into the studio for the recording of Isbell’s 2020 album Reunions. We see him stroll into the studio, play new songs live for his producer (Dave Cobb) and members of his band (The 400 Unit), discuss arrangements, work through takes with the other musicians, and perform stripped-down versions of a few songs in different settings. All good stuff. Very enjoyable.
But as most of the reviews of the documentary have pointed out, the film is about much more than music. Or rather, the music is embedded in and emerges from out of the marriage that’s placed center stage throughout the 98-minute doc. That’s the marriage between Isbell and Amanda Shires, the talented musician who plays fiddle and sings vocal harmonies in the 400 Unit when she isn’t performing her own songs in a solo career. (Shires’ seventh studio album was released last year.)
They say every marriage is a world unto itself, and that’s certainly true here. Early on we see Isbell introducing his band for the first time to the song that gives the documentary its title. When he’s done playing it on acoustic guitar with the other musicians listening intently, some taking notes, Shires moves next to him on the couch and begins putting the lyrics through a final, exacting edit. Over the next couple of minutes, we watch them debate the subtle shifts of meaning that follow from choosing one preposition over another in a single line.
It’s a fascinating glimpse of their relationship: Respectful, intimate, and collaborative, but also tense, skating constantly on the edge of an explosion. There’s anger and defensiveness in Isbell, just beneath the surface. He talks and acts like a man wound up tight—maybe too tight. Shires, meanwhile, clearly loves her husband and is devoted to his art. But she’s a tough critic (with an MA in creative writing), and she clearly finds Isbell’s various, imperfect means of coping with his churning, volatile emotions more than a little exasperating. She understands him very well. Maybe too well for a professional and creative crucible like a recording studio. As Isbell remarks at one point, they live and raise a young daughter together, and then they work together all day long on music, at least when recording an album, and then return home together at the end of the day. It’s a lot.
Over the next hour or so of the documentary, we learn just how much.
Isbell’s Odyssey
The facts aren’t that unusual—almost a country-music or rock-n-roll cliché. Isbell was born in a small town in rural north Alabama near the Tennessee border. His father was 18 and his mother 16 when she became pregnant with him (and an identical twin brother who isn’t even mentioned in the documentary). Biblical literalism suffused their world, teaching the chubby, bookish child to view life through the anxiety-smudged lenses of shame, guilt, and fear of eternal damnation.
Before they divorced, Jason’s parents fought constantly and viciously in their small house. Jason learned he could use music to drown out their attempts to deploy him as a pawn in their arguments—first by listening to it, then by playing it on an amplified electric guitar. At the age of 22, in 2001, he was invited to join the up-and-coming country-rock band Drive-By Truckers, and his career as a musician and songwriter immediately took off.
Then came the booze and the drugs and the endless string of one-night stands that ended with Isbell being fired from the band after having made decisive contributions to three albums (while also marrying and divorcing its bassist Shonna Tucker). That was followed by five years of binge drinking as Isbell wrestled with his demons and struggled to establish himself as an independent artist.
That’s when Shires enters the picture, admiring and attracted to Isbell’s intensity and talent, but also wary of his self-destructiveness and tendency to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. Only after Isbell had successfully tamed his appetites, dried out, and completed rehab did she agree to marry him. The ceremony took place in February 2013, two days after they finished recording Southeastern, the album that indisputably established Isbell as one of our greatest songwriters. It’s a brilliant record of searing emotional honesty. Its lead-off track, “Cover Me Up,” is an anguished tribute to Shires’ love and its role in saving him from a life of loneliness, despair, and self-loathing. He’s been sober ever since.
It sounds like a happy ending, but it’s just the beginning of a turbulent story. Isbell and Shires both talk about him no longer being broken, and he’s obviously in much better shape than he was before he swore off drinking. But Isbell puts enormous pressure on himself when making an album that will have his name emblazoned on the cover and be judged by the quality of his latest batch of songs. More than anything, he wants to look like he’s got it together, especially with a film crew’s cameras always lurking close by.
Shires understands that, but it also annoys her, because she recognizes it as a form of denial that is likely to end with him lashing out at her, turning her into (as she puts it) his “whipping girl.” When that happens, she withdraws, and he reciprocates, refusing to answer phone calls, emails, and texts, and spending a night in a hotel instead of going home to face another night of fighting.
That’s not the end of the story either—they commit to couples therapy and reconcile before long—but one gets the sense it’s a snapshot of their ongoing marital reality.
Where once Isbell drowned and obscured his emotions in drink, now he’s committed to using the therapeutic tools he’s acquired in rehab and other forms of counseling down through the years to (as we like to say these days) work on himself. That makes him a consummate modern man enacting a new model of masculinity.
The Inward Turn
Early on in the documentary, Isbell explains that his band is named after what locals in his part of Alabama called the psych ward of the local hospital. In the South growing up, he tells us, there were only two options: people were either “fine” or “crazy.” But Isbell felt like he resided somewhere between those extremes. Music became a language for writing about that intermediate place.
Therapy is sometimes derided for replacing fixed standards and (properly) harsh moral judgments with an easy liberation of the individual, who is taught to excuse his behavior by reducing it to the acting out of various forms of trauma and abuse. But Isbell’s story—like his art—reminds us that therapy at its best is a form of self-mastery rooted in an arduous effort to achieve self-understanding. In this respect, it’s a modern, democratic expression of the old Socratic imperative: Know thyself.
Does Isbell know himself? Not fully. But then, does anyone? As he puts it in one of the songs we see the band working on in the documentary, “It gets easier, but it never gets easy.” He’s talking there about the temptation to drink, but it also applies to the broader project of self-improvement and self-transparency we see him and Shires continually wrestling with on camera.
Western culture likes stark binaries in talking about enlightenment. I was lost, but now I’m found. I was a sinner, but now I’m reborn. I lived in a cave, but now I bathe in the light of the sun. Yet life usually isn’t like that. It’s more like a walk through a dark forest with occasional sun-dappled clearings of partial self-understanding.
When Isbell reaches one of those clearings, he feels the urge to tell the world about the experience. For a moment he sees, and from out of that clarity and insight about himself—and through it, all of us—he writes a song that illuminates the reality of our lives. Then he moves on, once again into the shadows. (The final third of the documentary shows how hard the isolation and entropy of the pandemic were for Isbell, his family, and band, as it was for so many of us.) The clarity and insight don’t disappear, though they do sometimes fade—at least until the next clearing is reached and another song or two can be born.
“Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed” shows us how one man and woman have chosen to make their way in the world, trying to be good to one another (and their adorable daughter), enacting love as best they can, sometimes failing at the effort, striving to become better and achieve greater self-awareness, and sharing that process with the wider world through words of human wisdom set to music. As the credits rolled, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude for Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires, and wishing them both the very best in their art and their personal struggles—which are our struggles, too.
Great Song Suggestion
It took me a couple of hours to decide which Jason Isbell song to recommend to go along with my review of the HBO documentary. I could have chosen any one of the songs on his 2013 album Southeastern, which is a genuine masterpiece. But all the albums he’s done since then, solo projects and with the 400 Unit, are filled with beautifully rendered still lifes and vignettes. Then there’s my aspiration to pick a YouTube video with something interesting to look at or a live performance that adds something to the studio version of the song. There was a lot to sort through; hence the (very pleasant) couple of hours.
In the end, I went with “If We Were Vampires,” which originally appeared on Isbell’s 2017 album with the 400 Unit, The Nashville Sound, and plays over the closing credits of the HBO documentary. Musically it’s quite simple—a delicate acoustic ballad with a repeating rising and falling melodic figure through both verses and an alternative one in the chorus, with no bridge and just a minimalist instrumental section.
It’s lyrically simple, too, in the sense that it works through and develops a single idea. But the idea may well be the most deeply human one there is: We love and we die. Those two facts are deeply intertwined. Philosophical treatises, novels, poems, paintings, plays, films, symphonies, and operas have been written on the theme, and this is Isbell’s modest contribution to that civilizational conversation. I’m tempted to describe it as an existentialist love song. But then, isn’t it the case that the best (most honest) love songs could all be described that way?
Well, maybe our finitude isn’t usually quite as central to the message as it is here. Listening to this live version of the song from Austin City Limits after watching “Running With Our Eyes Closed,” with Isbell and Shires harmonizing together and casting glances at each other as they sing, I was moved nearly to tears.
The marital struggles captured in the documentary are real, but these two people are genuinely devoted to each other. When Isbell sings about the reality that at some point in the future, “One day I’ll be gone / Or one day you’ll be gone,” there is real heartbreak in the words and in his voice. It’s the shattering sadness that wends its way through the human condition and touches every couple who’s known the closeness and intimacy of a lifetime of love lived out in the shadow of oblivion. I hope you like the song and are inspired to delve more deeply into Jason Isbell’s remarkable catalogue after listening to it.
“If We Were Vampires”
Artist: Jason Isbell
Songwriter: Jason Isbell
It's not the long, flowing dress that you're in
Or the light coming off of your skin
The fragile heart you protected for so long
Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong
It's not your hands searching slow in the dark
Or your nails leaving love's watermark
It's not the way you talk me off the roof
Your questions like directions to the truth
It's knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
Or one day you'll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn't me who's left behind
It's knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
Or one day you'll be gone
It's knowing that this can't go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we'll get forty years together
But one day I'll be gone
One day you'll be gone
“If We Were Vampires” lyrics © Downtown Music Publishing
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