Jason Isbell is Keeping His Night Job

Melinda Sue Gordon

We find a corner table and order lunch. He came to Los Angeles to play at a Robbie Robertson tribute concert, and now he’s got a day off and time to kill while he waits for a flight out of here. Sporting a sharp denim jacket and brand new teeth, 44-year-old Jason Isbell looks Hollywood enough for where we are—the restaurant at the Chateau Marmont—but he doesn’t really act like he belongs here. He speaks low and chooses his words carefully, almost like he’s in church. He’s transparent: “I’ll talk about absolutely anything.” My pastor called it being “the same on both sides of the fence.” This makes it seem obnoxious, even grotesque, that a guy at the next table is hollering about being friends with Elon Musk and going skydiving with Richard Branson.

Meanwhile, at our table, Isbell is talking to me softly in the thickest Alabama accent I have ever heard in this town, one that draws “I” out to three gentle, downward-sloping syllables but condenses the entirety of “Lyle Lovett” to just one curlicue. And he knows it. When he went up to Memphis—which, he points out, was “not much more metropolitan” than the North Alabama of his youth—for college, he called home and his mom was furious.

“Why are you talking like that?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” he replied, confused.

“Talk like you talk,” she said, half-joking. “You come home talking like that, I’m gonna whoop your ass.”

From then on he held onto that accent for dear life. “It’s an advantage,” he says. “If you say things people aren’t used to hearing in this accent, then you can catch their attention. A lot of people automatically classify you as something if you have a Southern accent, and I love not being that thing.”

Weathervanes, Isbell’s ninth and most recent album with his band The 400 Unit, is one of his best: unflinching, emotive, literary work by a songwriter still looking for, and finding, new mountains to climb. Hell of an accomplishment for a dude who writes music like he’s been doing this for, conservatively, 50 years longer than he has. (Two of the songs he wrote when he was with the Drive-By Truckers in the early aughts, “The Day John Henry Died” and “Goddamn Lonely Love,” sound like the work of an old folk master, or at least a soulful middle-aged troubadour with an expansive and magnanimous view of human foibles. He was 25.)

This new one is a remarkable piece of work, a collection of snapshots and meditations on opioid addiction, being a parent in a country where people shoot up schools all the time for no reason, loneliness, alienation, religion, tradition, southern domesticity, and the blinding terror of being alive at all. It’s a miracle it exists because it’s a miracle he’s sitting next to me. This is a version of Jason Isbell who didn’t die in 2012, the version of Jason Isbell who won the war against the alcoholism that very nearly killed him, the one who made it to the other side.

But it’s one thing to be alive, and another thing entirely to be alive with this level of discipline and commitment to craft. He makes music because he cares about the art, the process of being an artist, and the hard-fought love and compassion that asks of you. It’s not something you can stop, it’s something you breathe, something you do until the minute that the wheels come off.

Weathervanes dropped this past June and propelled him into what’s become his biggest year yet. He’s up for three Grammys next month. He got those new teeth (more on that later, and it’s a bigger deal than you’d think). He was the subject of the HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, an unflinching, sometimes uncomfortable close-up on his work-life balance with his wife, musician Amanda Shires.

“The documentary was a pain in the ass for me. I’ll never go back and watch it again,” he says, flat and careful. “But we told people the truth, and it was good they saw that, because that’s the job.”

Let’s be real, though—most of these achievements are logical next steps, if you’re in Isbell’s position and the stars align. Actually acting in a movie, a Martin Scorsese movie, is like going from a trampoline to skydiving. And it’s not just any Martin Scorsese movie, it’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a late-career masterpiece from a great auteur and arguably the best movie of 2023. (As of today, it’s now streaming on Apple TV+, which means you can pause it, so you’re out of excuses not to see it.)

A bona fide western epic—3 hours and 26 minutes, with a $200 million budget and a cast of dozens, Killers is the sort of big movie they don’t make anymore, a serious grown-up story about the contract killings of Osage tribal members in the 1920s. It flays open the brutal, inevitable civic corruption you’d expect to stem from oil being found on Native land in the early 20th century. Fundamentally, it’s the story of the original sin of the American west: how naked, unapologetic greed chose genocide as its tool for self-propagation. Blood sacrifice as a business decision.

It’s heavy stuff, an impossibly intimidating assignment. This is a guy whose biggest acting credit this time last year was a recurring voiceover gig on the Adult Swim cartoon Squidbillies. Almost preposterous.

He agrees. But it wasn’t stunt-casting. He didn’t know a guy who knew a guy. (A fair assumption, for a film that features several other alt-country stars in key roles). It just happened to be the beginning of COVID lockdown. He couldn’t tour, but he knew he wanted to keep telling stories, and he wound up getting the role the old fashioned way: by repeatedly auditioning. When he got it, he was shocked and excited.

“Oh man, I jumped up and down,” he says, describing the day he got the part. “But when I got the financial offer, I thought, hey, is there supposed to be another zero on this? I made about as much doing that whole movie as I do playing one show. But it was like, There is no way they’re gonna let your redneck ass in a Martin Scorsese movie.”

It’s hard not to imagine that excitement not giving way to terror. Oh shit, I’m going to be acting against Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Two of the best actors alive. Maybe the best director alive. And I’m gonna call him “Marty.”

“Yeah, I was terrified,” he says. But that was the best part of it at the beginning, not knowing if I could do it or not. And how often, at age 42, do you get to try doing something that genuinely terrifies you?

“This could go way wrong. And I loved that,” Isbell says. “It’s something I try to do. Anytime I see that opportunity, I take it. Being sober all this time, I’m a big advocate for making decisions before they make themselves. For challenging yourself and testing your awareness of your own abilities.”

The shoot was grueling—but maybe less so for someone accustomed to playing 300 gigs a year. Isbell spent three months on location in Bartlesville, Oklahoma back in 2021. He brought some guitars (he plays guitar constantly) and used the downtime to write most of what became Weathervanes, reverting to only-child instincts: “I like being alone, man. I really like it.”

Before his first day on set, Isbell says, "I got my hair cut and did a wardrobe fitting, then I went to [dialect coach] Tim Monich. And he said ‘I don’t have any notes for you. Talk the way you normally talk.’”

But this didn’t cure his trepidation. Was he going to look like he belonged here? Luckily, the costumes did a lot of that work for him, put him at ease. “When I got to set, I thought, am I gonna look right for the part?” he recalls. “But with those costumes”—lavish yet lived-in, thanks to costume designer Jacqueline West— “I felt like I looked great. Not only did I look like my character, but I looked good. It was great just to walk around in those clothes all day.

“I didn’t have any acting lessons or anything like that”—later, he realized he was doing a blend of Dwight Yoakam in Sling Blade and a dirtbag contractor—“but I wanted to try to wrap my mind around the place and the time and the people as much as I possibly could. Coping for me is working.

“First rehearsal, Marty introduced me to De Niro. I said, ‘I’m really excited to be here. I can’t wait to watch you guys work.”

De Niro looked at him like something was growing out of his head. “You know, the De Niro who-the-fuck-are-you face? And I thought, oh no, he’s not nice. Damn it. But finally he realized this is how I actually talk.” Like maybe he thought Isbell was on some Method bullshit. What’s this kid doing, acting like he’s from Oklahoma? ”When he figured it out, he was very friendly, but it took a few days.”

One last story about the wardrobe. He tells me he stole his hat when the shoot wrapped. “I just snuck it up under my hoodie and took it to my car. I got all the way home with it. Then Jacqueline calls me.”

“I think you have mistakenly taken your hat.”

“No ma’am, I have not. I have intentionally taken my hat.”

“You can’t keep the hat. We need it for post-production.”

“Then I saw her a couple nights ago. ‘We’re still working on getting your hat. You’ll eventually get your hat.’” But he still hasn’t.

I tell him I’ve noticed touring musicians have either seen two movies or all of them. Turns out he’s in the latter camp. “I watch a whole lot of movies.” He rattles off The Great Beauty, Magnolia, and The Deer Hunter as hall-of-fame favorites. In 2023, he was floored by Celine Song’s debut Past Lives. He was seated next to her at dinner last night, and was in fanboy mode the whole time.

I ask him what he gets up to when he’s in Los Angeles, as somebody who has thoroughly rejected the rock lifestyle.

“I walk. A lot. I walk many, many miles. The other day I walked from the Beverly Wilshire to UCLA. Almost walked to Santa Monica.” Nobody does this. He tells me he trespassed at the Los Angeles Country Club to piss in the shrubs. “I didn’t get arrested, so it was a success,” says the man currently up for three Grammys.

As for the Chateau Marmont, Sunset Strip hallowed ground, he’s over it. He’s over rock and roll hotels, period. In our periphery, a woman bundled in a hoodie is escorted across the room for a photo shoot, and I hear gawkers whisper Dua Lipa. He sighs a bit, pauses to reflect on his surroundings; you can tell it’s not his speed. “It’s a party hotel, and there was a time when it would have been great fun. But now I like old businessman hotels. I like hot water, soft beds, good gyms, and quick room service.” And air conditioning. Rock and roll people don’t get hot, he tells me, because they weigh 110 pounds but wear leather jackets all year. I’m surprised by this. He’s from Alabama. Don’t you develop a tolerance?

“He-e-ell no. You don’t ever get used to that. I think I hate it more now because I grew up in it.”

Isbell isn’t pouting. He’s a professional: he’s here to do a job, and do it right, and do it on time. The opposite of the archetypal party-hotel guest. It’s almost intimidating, his level of professionalism: this is a guy who doesn’t know how to stop working.

Then he shares a story about being beaten at his own game on the Killers set.

“So one night, after I'd done a couple scenes and been kind of anxious and stressed about it, we got to the scene where my character [Bill Smith] and Leo’s character [Ernest Burkhart] were in the house. My biggest scene in the movie. We're sort of talking shit to each other, and our wives and sisters are at the dining room table, and it keeps cutting back and forth between the two of them and me and him.

"We did that scene for three or four hours, and we kept riffing and getting more intense. And sometimes I would hear Marty laugh from the other room because I was just being like a redneck getting in a fight.

"And at one point we're standing up, in each other's faces. He's telling me he's gonna shoot me. Blow my fucking head off. And it's dead quiet. There's about 30 crew people in the room. And it's a tiny house.”

He leans in closer. His voice gets low and somber, like he’s about to reveal a secret to his FBI handler.

“And somebody on the crew farts, and it's very loud. And it's particularly funny because you could tell that whoever did it had lost a great battle trying not to fart. You could just hear in the pitch of it, that they were doing everything they could possibly do. And then because everybody in there is the best in the world at their job, nobody laughed. Nobody stood.

"And immediately, I thought of Farticus. You know, Spartacus, but I am Farticus. Leo and I start laughing at the fart. It's funny. Having never done a movie before, I think we're just gonna laugh for a minute and start over.

"But somewhere in that laugh, Leo folds it into his character. All of a sudden, it's Ernest laughing at Bill. And in that moment, I thought, this is why one of us has an Oscar, and one of us is me because I just got outgunned; I was laughing like an idiot. I was no longer a character, but he was still Ernest. It taught me about taking acting seriously, because he never even left character. He was laughing in character. It was impressive.”

Back to Marty. “I’ll tell you something. There might be ten or fifteen Martys in the world. And I don’t mean movies. I mean in general. People who have that level of mastery, and that level of love for the craft. He just wants to make movies and talk about movies. He’s not scared of dying, he just never wants to stop making movies. And that’s the purest form of an artist you could ever get: how much do you love doing this? Marty was out there every day. It’s 95 degrees. He’s not a young man. It was beautiful.”

He tells me a story about what it was like to find his sea legs as an actor on Marty’s set. “There’s a scene where I cocked my pistol. It’s just me, I come out the front door, they put my dog on my step. The dog’s dead. And I look around to see if anybody’s still there.

“It was just me and Marty in the house. I thought, I’m just gonna go for this. So the first thing I did was say the gun should be loaded, to get the weight right, so if the camera hits it from the barrel, you’ll see there’s something in the chamber."

He recounts both sides of the conversation.

“Marty, I think that I would cock this pistol.”

“You think you should cock it?”

“Yeah, it’s a single-action, 1924, and you have to cock it to fire it. Otherwise it’s not gonna do me any good. The people who put the dog there might still be in my yard. First thing I should do is cock it in case I need to fire it.

“He said All right—let’s shoot it. That might be my proudest moment of the whole thing because that was the one time I stepped up and said Marty, we should do this. And he went for it. There’s something in there that’s just brilliant to me. He had no qualms about listening, truly listening to everybody.”

I notice something I never notice: he’s smiling wide, and often. Those new teeth look fantastic, and he’s proud of them. Proud to smile, and proud to show them off. “It’s made it much easier for me to sing. I had a really good dental surgeon. The best I could possibly find. He made everything line up in a way that didn’t affect my pronunciation. But I had a ton of infection, so I had to have, like, bone grafting. And they spent hours cleaning the infection.”

It was a close call. His old teeth were falling out, rotting, and if he’d waited any longer to fix them, he would have been canceling shows. He’d be doomed. So when he got a gig to sing at a Michael J. Fox benefit in New York, he was thrilled. “It was amazing. I was like, Oh, that’s easy now. What the fuck is going on?”

His teeth had been more than a cosmetic concern. He’s open about his alcoholism, how he used to do shows when he could barely stand. Whatever you think “drunk” is, he was at a place beyond it. He’d down a fifth of liquor before going up at a sold-out club. Sometimes he’d drink a whole bottle of NyQuil. “You could be firing flaming arrows at me and I could probably still do the show. As long as you didn’t hit me.” In a state like that, you don’t exactly prioritize brushing and flossing when you finally roll back to the hotel. When he tells me about the new teeth, his relief is palpable. He’s finally erased a huge reminder of the days where he was running entirely on a death drive.

I get the sense that this post-recovery frankness and openness is how he gets through life: no bullshitting anybody, including himself. I ask him how that attitude impacts his relationship with his audience, and how it feels to be a full-throated leftist in the Nashville music scene, how he contends with the conservative bent of the establishment and fans. Turns out he’s perfectly happy to shed the right wing contingent of his fanbase. “My audience isn’t half and half. No way I’m gonna alienate too many. Maybe a tenth, but that’s worth it. The rub is, some people call things art that aren’t art.”

“Sometimes it’s just entertainment, and that’s fine. It’s not a lesser calling. But if you wanna be an entertainer, keep your fucking mouth shut because you’ll have all kinds of people in your crowd. But to be an artist, you have to say what you believe. That is the point.” I think of his lyrics from “Be Afraid”:

We don’t take requests

We won’t shut up and sing

Tell the truth enough

You’ll find it rhymes with everything

And also:

And if your words add up to nothing, then you’re making a choice

To sing a cover when we need a battle cry

Isbell’s very active on Twitter, where he’s constantly saying exactly what he believes. And it creates a bizarre political issue. For lack of a better word, lots of MAGA chuds have a parasocial relationship with him, jumping in just to say they don’t like his music, they don’t believe in the vaccine, they won’t go to a show again (see also: 30-50 feral hogs). Why is that?

“Because I grew up in Alabama. I remind them of themselves. That pisses them off more than a coastal elite who went to an Ivy League school. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and it’s a mystery how I got here from there. We started in the same spot, the same hospital. Our cribs were next to each other. And now we’re very far apart.”

Maybe they think he’s a traitor. “Yeah. It’s the bucket of crabs. You don’t have to put a lid on a bucket of crabs if you’re a crab fisher because as soon as one climbs out of the bucket, the rest grab him and pull him back in. But if there’s just one crab in the bucket, you gotta put a lid on there. He’ll climb right out.”

Our time’s up. We shuffle out, exiting the perpetual polished-mahogany twilight of the Chateau for the blinding West Hollywood curb. He discreetly vapes as he waits for an SUV to spirit him off to the airport, back to the road, back to the job, his calling, the job he’ll be doing for the rest of his life, and I think about “Be Afraid” again: Be afraid, be very afraid, but do it anyway.

Originally Appeared on GQ