Jason Isbell on Resisting the Mythos of Sobriety

of our time. Jason's won four Grammy Awards. You may have heard his hit song cover Me Up from his blockbuster album Southeastern. Over the years, Jason has been open about his struggles with alcohol, all in drugs, and what it's taken for him to become sober. His recovery has involved revisiting some core assumptions about who he was then and who he is today, and one way he gained a better understanding of himself is through his music. There was a huge shift in the reason I wrote songs

around that period of time. Up until that point, I had been writing for an external audience. You know, this is my family, this is my father, this is the place where I grew up. But then I sort of, you know, unconsciously started writing songs where I was looking at myself and I was trying to make some sort of estimation of who I was and if I was doing okay. On today's show, Why Jason Isbull believes you don't have to reject your past in order to live

a better future. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. I love Jason Isbel's music not only because he writes beautiful, stirring melodies, but because of how he approaches storytelling. He captures life's challenges, like navigating addiction and recovery in their full complexity. Jason and I began our conversation by talking

about his childhood and musical influences. He grew up in Alabama and was exposed to a wide range of music from an early age. We're talking gospel, blue grass, and country. His grandfather, a Pentecostal preacher, played instruments like the banjo and guitar and would often invite Jason to join him. And the thing that really got me hooked from early on. If I would play rhythm guitar for him, he would play like a lead instrument like mandolina or banjo or fiddle.

And if I would make it through a couple of hours of playing rhythm guitar, he would reward me by laying the guitar in his lap and tuning it to an open tuning and playing blues music with his pocket knife. Would he would use his pocket knife as a slide, And that was my reward, and that was the thing

that I really loved the most. So you continue playing the guitar well into your teenage years, and there's this one day where you're waiting tables at a local restaurant and a co worker ass if you'd like to open for him at an upcoming show at a at a coffee shop, and he says to you that you're going to need to perform thirty minutes of original music the following day, so the next day, which you don't actually have, right, But what was your response? Yeah, I told him that's

no problem. I got all kinds of songs easy, you know. And then I thought I got to go home and write some songs. So that's what I did. I set up all night I remember I was drinking Gatorade and Ever Clear, and I stayed up and wrote like half an hour's worth of songs. I remember just flipping back and forth through the notebook, adding something here, go back, add something here, and take something out here, and then played it all back and looked at my watch and saw, okay,

that's about thirty minutes, so that'll do. And you know, I wrote all those at once, just as quickly as I could, and that wound up being the first songs of mine that anybody heard. And it was also kind of I think when you're working on that kind of a deadline, or when you're just in this sort of like manic output period, sometimes it turns off the critic in your brain, you know, because you don't have time to judge what you're doing. You're just being creative. So

there's something I think beneficial to that. Sometimes, you know, you say it's so nonchalantly, Jason, a matter of fact, like, yeah, so I told him, Oh, yeah, that's no problem, I got it. But what what gave you the confidence in that moment to say, yeah, I'm going to be able to generate thirty minutes of original music tonight, Like did you always have this feeling that there was that there was so much you wanted to say. Yes, I don't know if you have noticed this, but I'm a white

man and that is what gave me that confidence. I love that. Yeah. Sorry, I'm completely unfamiliar with what you're just It may be pixelated here, but I am a white man. The confidence is built in, you know. If I don't have the confidence, that's my own damn fault. But also, I was lucky enough to have a family who had encouraged me and my creative pursuits, and so

I thought, well, what's the worst that can happen? You know, I don't write thirty minutes worth of good songs and the ten people in the coffee shop don't like what I'm doing, Fine, I can handle that. And the reason I felt that way because I knew there were people who cared about me in the world. And also I knew that any amount of embarrassment that I felt would go away soon because I would have other opportunities just because of my station in life. You know, I didn't

have any money at the time. My parents didn't have any money, and their parents didn't have any money. But we had a lot of encouragement, and we had very little resistance. And I did feel sort of cushioned in a certain way, like you know. And this is not going to end terribly. Nobody's going to beat me up over this. I'm just gonna see what I can do. Yeah, And you obviously believe that you had creative potential, right, I mean, it's not enough to just feel cushioned, right.

You need to believe that you know fundamentally that you have what it takes to write. Yes, I'm coming at this from someone who played music for a long time, but my composition sucked and so I you know, I don't want to understate how that's a very distinct skill set that one needs to call to. But it seems like it came rather naturally for you. I think so. And I don't know why exactly. I mean, at the root of it, I don't know why. You know, I didn't have a lot of friends that would come over

and play guitar with me or anything like that. Mostly I was just sitting alone in my room with a guitar, playing and making sounds. And I think out of that, and then the fact that I really liked to read, you know, my Mom started me reading really early, and I really enjoyed that. I think that combination is sort

of what led me to becoming a songwriter. So I love to focus on Shortly after this this coffee gig, you end up joining the band, the Drive By Truckers, and you hit the road for a fairly intense life of touring, right, I mean, you had hundreds of shows a year. What was that transition like for you? It was a very intense touring life. I mean we were always gone, you know, and we're always in a van, and we were sleeping on people's floors, and if we got a hotel, we would get one room and all

of us would sleep in the one room. But most of the time we were staying with friends for that first year or so, so there was not a lot of rest. There was a whole lot of excitement because I was twenty one years old and playing music for people, and the people in the audience were extremely happy to be there. And it was you know, the venues were small,

but the emotions were big, you know. It was it was a rock and roll show, and it was very loud, and we were just the band was just at that point where things start happening, you know where you I call it, where the hell did all these people come from? Moment?

You know where you've been touring and playing and touring and playing, and then all of a sudden, there are people who are in the parking lot who know they're not going to get into the show because it's sold out, but they're still staying in the parking lot just to hear it through the doors, through the windows. But as far as like the experience that I was having, you know, it was really exciting because I'd never been anywhere. I didn't notice so much how difficult it was physically, because

yeah it was. I don't know if I could handle it now. I probably couldn't do it now. Yeah, at some point you start to drink excessively and you end up doing drugs. Yeah, I wanted to see what that was like, you know, just what it felt like to do those drugs or to get that drunk, or you know.

I call it the sling shot effect because in the small towns, when you're raising a sheltered kid, you're kind of slowly pulling the sling shot back for eighteen years, and then all of a sudden you let it go and I had lived in such a mundane existence, in such a cloistered kind of place, that when I got out and saw the world, I wanted to take everything in, you know, metaphorically and literally. And also, yeah, the physical aspects of it had a lot to do with it.

I mean, you know, you ride six or eight hours in a van and then you get out and you have to be in a good mood, and you know, get up on stage and perform, and then load all your stuff back into the van and go sleep for three or four hours on somebody's floor and then get up and do it all again about three hundred times a year. So yeah, that definitely had a part to play.

But I think, really, now that I've got some hindsight, it seems to me like they were just unresolved issues from my childhood that kept it from being recreational, you know, and that took me from a user to an abuser as far as drugs and alcohol went. And what do you think some of those unresolved childhood issues were. You know, my parents were very young when I was born. My mom was seventeen, my dad was nineteen, and they did a good job. They were very present in my life.

And attentive, but still, you know, with parents that young, nobody knows what the hell they're doing. And there was a lot of religious guilt and a lot of my dad's family, the Pentecostal side of the family, they were it was pretty close to a cult, very much fundamentalist religious sect, to put it politely, and so they were very close to their family. They were you know, very loving, very caring people. But also for a kid, you know,

growing up in this situation. You know, when I was five, six, seven years old, I was because because out of love, they thought that that was the way they could love me the best. You know, I was put in a situation where, you know, that sort of conservative Christian viewpoint was bored into my brain and I don't know if this was voluntary on their part, but made to feel like anything outside of that structure was a horrible transgression.

And so I was, you know, a little kid walking around feeling all this guilt and all this shame, and God's going to get mad at me and send me to hell, and you know, the vengeful God and the angry God, and that was pretty heavy. That was a pretty heavy thing. Yeah, And I guess you felt it was so imprinted that even when you're a twenty something touring you're still feeling some of those feelings of guilt and shame. Yes, and it was one of those things

that sort of cycled. I feel like there was a part of me in my twenties that was saying, Okay, let's see what happens. Let's see what happens if you do all these things that you weren't supposed to be doing that you were told that you would go to hell for. Let's just see what happens when you do those things. Because I'm the kind of person who if I'm afraid of something, my instinct is to do it immediately,

you know, to conquer that fear. And none of those were healthy responses, so they all just kind of kept the snowball got bigger and bigger, until finally I had no control over my life. I mean, it got so bad at a certain point that your bandmates, you know, they recognize you have a problem, They try to get you to go to rehab, and you end up refusing. Tell me more about how bad it was, like, how is that expressing itself? What kind of effects were having

on others? You know, I was drinking about a fifth a day, about a fifth a Jack Daniels a day, so a big old glass bottle of it. You know, what you would buy at the store that should last you for a couple of months. I was drinking one of those every day, and you know, if there were drugs around, I would do the drugs. You know, everything that I did was essentially in service of drinking more, because that was the thing that worked for me, that

hooked me. And you know, most of the time I wasn't angry, especially not at first, not for the first few years of drinking that heavily. I was a funny, happy drunk. And then it just started shifting. You know, when you pile those layers of exhaustion on type of each other and takes more and more alcohol to get what you feel like, it's the same buzz that you

used to get. You know, you start to get more angry and more aggressive, and you know, I wasn't like a physically aggressive person, but I can be emotionally and psychologically aggressive in a way that is very vicious and very harmful. I was just a mean bastard. I would say mean things to people and it would hurt their feelings and you know, I wasn't loyal to my first wife.

I broke some promises and the bottom line, you know, you don't do that, you don't bring promises and um, and I don't want to say this is because I was an addict, because it wasn't. The truth is it wasn't. It just the addiction just gave me something else to blame for it. So, you know, addiction was a scapegoat for me because it's so easy to say I did those things because I'm drunk. People do it all the time now still in these half ass fake apologies online,

you know. But there's a line in one of the old Drive By Trucker's songs that my friend Mike Cooley wrote. He says, the liquor don't make you do the thing, It just lets you. And I always loved that line. It just allows you to be the asshole that you wanted to be. So you know, you eventually leave the band. I mean, folks ask you to leave for a break, and then it becomes a lot extended break and um, and you keep drinking, right, I mean, it doesn't it

doesn't immediately stop the problem. And I'm wondering what finally led you to acknowledge that you had a problem and that you actually wanted to make changes. You know, I fell in love with somebody who had her shit together, and I did not think that she was going to

stick around unless I got my shit together. And so I got sober and I wrote letters from rehab, and I begged and I pleaded, and I gave her proof that I wasn't going to fall back into my old ways, and I started doing the work and I started going to therapy. And you know, now ten years later, I'm still sober, and I'm much more effective as a person. And this situation is complicated for me now because what I did to her at that point I would not

do to someone now. You know, I put a lot of weight, a lot of pressure, and a lot of responsibility for my own redemption, for lack of a better word, on to another person, and in my selfish brain, it looked like I have to do whatever it takes to win the heart of this person that I'm in love with. And now I see that that was not a fair thing, but at the time it looked like a love story

to me. Yeah, were you worried at the time, or maybe it didn't hit you because again you were in the throes of love, but that a dependency was forming, and so there was a fragility to your sobriety journey because the minute your wife Amanda left the scene, maybe you would go back to your old ways, Like your journey was inextricably linked to her existence, and you're wanting her love right right right. At first, I think I

felt like they were linked in that way. But after just a few months there were other rewards, you know, and it became for me. You know, you might get a different answer to that question if you asked her. Yeah, and that's part of what I did to her. That was not fair. But I would never link somebody else to the responsibility of my survival or my growth as an individual, Like I would never do that. But I don't think I even knew what codependent meant ten years ago.

I don't think i'd even gotten far enough to begin to understand that I was just a mess. You know. Your song Live Oak alludes to your concerns that in giving up alcohol and drugs, it wouldn't just be the bad stuff that left you, that there might be some good stuff too that you lost in the process. Do you mind singing some of the opening of that song for us and then sharing more about about the nature of this worry? Sure, yeah, no problem. Let me get

my guitar. Oh sure, and sounds okay, yeah, that's great. All right. Here's a man who walks beside me. He is who I used to be, and I wonder if she sees him and infuses him with me? And I wonder who she's buying for all nights I'm not around? Could it be the man get the Things day? So there's the intro of that song. I think that's probably

enough to to explain what we're talking about. But yeah, so it really is kind of a murder ballad about this guy who's trying to redeem himself after being an outlaw and sometime in the deep past, and you know, he doesn't succeed, and then he he wonders if you know what version of himself was really the better version? I think for me, as time passed, I came to terms with the idea that there were good things and bad things about the person that I used to be.

But at first it was really hard to do because there was a danger at every turn. I was looking for ways to keep myself from backsliding. So I didn't want to romanticize what my life had been for years after getting sober, I just looked at it with this that was bad and this is good, sort of you know, binary judgment there. Yeah. And would that make you hesitant to revisit your past in your music? Yes, that need

to create psychological distance between you and your former former self. Yes, or it would reduce the work to something less complex than it should have been. Oh, because you were you were painting a very simplelistic model of past Jason exactly. Past Jason was just awful, the worst. This is what I used to be. Doesn't that suck? Isn't that terrible?

Aren't we all glad? I'm not that anymore? Yeah? I see reductionist, yes, yes, and that itself is a lie, you know, is a revisionist personal history and the way that it's just not even true anymore. So, you know, and I understand all of the past. It's a concept and it's all filtered through the way we process information. However, I think part of the creative journey and the creative struggle is to try to see how close we can get, try to remove our own processing systems from the past

and see it as clearly as possible. And that took a long time. It took a really long time for me. We'll hear more from Jason about his life and recovery after the break. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. What if you realized Jason has stayed intact about you through your transition from from alcoholic to someone you know who is now ten years sober. And I think part of my question is you were concerned at one point like did they really like that guy?

Like the old you know, the drunk Jason, And I'm wondering, you know, as you straddled these two identities, right, these two very distinct psychological states. If you realize now that there are some fundamental parts of you that we're there then, and are there now that the people around you in your life really cherish, Yes, all of it is still there. It's all still there. That was me and this is me only now he gets to make more decisions, you know, rather than look up and think how did I wind

up here? You know, and I don't always make the right decision, you know. I like to think my average is going up as time goes on. But I'm just able to make the decision because I don't have to choose to get another drink or to find whatever drug I was doing, or to be around people because they have access to that or because they think it's okay for me to behave that way. Like I just simply get to make the choices for myself, Like the choice to be loyal to my wife and to my family,

I get to make that choice, you know. Yeah, and what time I go to bed, what time I get up in the morning. You know how much time I devote to my art every day. These are things that

I get to decide for myself. Now, Yeah, I'd love to dig into the role songwriting has played in your sobriety, because you know, it strikes me that as a songwriter, you're kind of getting this constant pulse of where you're at emotionally right based on based on what you're expressing in your music or what you're finding yourself incapable of

expressing right. You're getting signals in both directions, and I think very few of us have a profession that serves as a mirror of sorts that that's constantly reflecting our emotional states back to us. Well, there was a huge shift in the reason I wrote songs around that period of time. So when I got sober, I was very you know, raw, like like emotionally sunburned. You know, up until that point, I had been writing for an external audience. I had really been writing songs to show people what

my experience was. You know, this is my family, this is my father, this is the place where I grew up. But then I sort of, you know, unconsciously started writing songs, you know, where I was looking at myself and I was trying to make some sort of estimation of who I was and if I was doing okay. Yeah, And that shift happened right then. And you know, I hate the term like confessional songwriter, because I think that's very

limiting and sort of derogatory. But I think I went from trying to communicate with the outside world to trying to communicate with myself and trying to reflect on myself

and understand myself. Once I started doing that, that became very addictive in itself, you know, and the reward of that was such that I wanted to continue to do it, and so it turned off the part of my brain that is judging and just opened up the part of my brain that is curious, and it just flew out, you know, for a couple of albums after that, it

just flew out. It kind of still does. There's another song on one of your albums called it gets Easier, and you sing, you know, it gets easier, but it never gets easy. It's easier, it never gets swallow. Keep its easy. First of all, I think that resonates with so many people, not even just those navigating addiction, but just navigating life and the challenges of life. I think

that I found so much resonance in those lyrics. And you know, I think this touches upon some of the themes that we've already talked about, which is about you know, villainizing past self and maybe glorifying present self because you're trying to create as much distance as possible between those two, right. I mean, it's easy to tell yourself that, oh, I

fixed it. You know it's fixed, it's solved, to go on that kind of cruise control and think, well, I haven't had a drink today, so I can't hurt anybody too bad, or I can't do anything too terrible, and you know that can stunt your growth as an adult by saying this one big issue, like like, it's a version of romanticizing addiction, and not necessarily in a positive way.

But if you look at it as this huge, all encompassing beast that's in control of your life completely, well, then you know that means the inverse of that must also be true, you know, so you assume that, like, if addiction is this big, huge monster that has been in charge of your whole life, then once you've conquered that quote unquote, you assume that the inverse is also true. That you know, now I've solved my problem, and as we all know, it is never as simple as I

have one problem. Yeah, having gone through you know, very arduous time when you were you know, so often under the influence and then and then navigating sobriety, what's the biggest thing you learned about yourself? What's the biggest thing that changed in terms of your self perception, your understanding of who you are. When I got sober, I had no idea how far I was from actually being a satisfied and contributing member of society. I thought that, you know,

I've got a job, I entertain people. I'm able to get in the van and rid of these shows and plays. These should people like me. I'm funny, I have enough money to pay my bills. You know, I'm doing great.

I'm doing a good job, you know. But I had no clue how many millions of miles away I was from being a satisfied and self actualized person, how much more I had to learn about myself, because I had just been putting that off for so long, and so aggressively stunting my own growth because it hurts so much to learn that I wasn't perfect. And as a flip side to that, I didn't realize how much I would

really enjoy the process of learning those things. I mean going to therapy, you know, and also just searching on my own, going into every situation thinking how do I handle this as somebody who knows myself and loves myself? And you know, that process has been really challenging in the best possible way for me, and it makes me feel like at the end of every day, I attempted to make myself better. Therefore I have attempted to make

the world better. It's so interesting what I'm hearing, and this is reminding me of something you said earlier in the interview. Is that the very same personality trait that leads you to fear something that immediately want to do it,

like you did with alcohol. So the thing that got you to become an alcoholic, which is you feared that whole scene and then you jumped right in, is maybe the very same instinct that led you to try and reach self actualization, which is I imagine you were filled with fear, Like what will I discover if I go deep? What will I discover if I open this brain of mine and try and probe? Maybe I'll just jump right in? Yeah, Like, is that kind of a similar pattern that you have

that actually just conferred benefits in this case? Yeah, I think it's the exact same thing I do. I think that's a I don't know if anybody's made that. I don't think anybody's made that point to me before, So I appreciate that, but it is it is the same exact thing. And I think some of us are the kind of people who, you know, stand at the edge of Niagara Falls and think, I wonder what would happen if I jumped in? And I don't do that. You know. So there's a few of us are the kind of

people who do jump in. That's you don't want to be that kind either. And there's I don't even for what it's worth. I don't even go to the edge of the thing to look over. I'm like, yeah, behind the guardrails some you know, fifty feet away. All right, that's probably that's probably the healthiest way to handle the whole situation. Like, somebody go take a picture of that and bring it back in the show or too. I'll just I'll just google it diagraphall's image. Okay, great, done,

I'll get a T shirt. I was doing. But some of us have to go right up to the edge, you know. And I am that person. I have to go right up to the edge. And um, I've always been that person and that's just how I am. And so you know, I just I like to test all those boundaries. And you know, luckily there are healthy ways for an artist to do that. I mean, that's probably

why I'm an artist, you know. Yeah. I love when I love when we can reinterpret what we initially code in our lives as being liabilities and weaknesses, and then you start to think, well, what are the flip sides of it, like what are the benefits? And it seems like in your case, Jason, that it would have been so easy to say, Oh, I have this really frustrating habit where when I fear something, I jump right in and I can't wait to just rid myself of that instinct.

And yet here you are, in a later stage of your life, learning that there's there's an upside and that when you channel some of those very same instincts in the right direction, you can you can have beautiful changes that emerge. Right, Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. I'm wondering if you can close us out with um the song cover Me Up, which is a beautiful ode to

your to your wife Amanda. And yeah, I would love to say that that this is purely because it's constant with the show's theme, But the reality is that I'm not going to not take advantage of the fact that I can get serenaded by bass and isbel and so all you slight changers listening. This is also a selfish desire of mine. Would you see here one of my favorite songs sung by one of my favorite musicians. All right, I will do my best. Let me put my microphone

a little closer, and I'll in the guitar here. Let me take one of my earboats out. Can you still hear me? Yeah? Okay, yeah, but it's the end of the day and my voice is warmed up and I can but I'll do it now. Indeed, hard on girl keep saying, hand on gone. You can't trust anymore. I was so sure what I needed this morning, try to shoot out sun. The day is when weird. We've such damn what I was. Man, Hey, thanks for listening. Join me next week when I talked with Norah McInerney, host

to the podcast Terrible, Thanks for asking. Nora lost her husband to brain cancer in twenty fourteen, and in the months and years following his death, Norah found comfort and meaning and helping others navigate their grief. People started to see her as a grief duela of sorts. Over time, these responsibilities began to mount, and Norah felt overwhelmed, but she didn't think she had a way out. Are you

allowed to quit anything? Winners number quarters, number win Although it wasn't going to win the Best Widow Award, I don't know. I felt. I think in a lot of ways like I had inadvertently built this identity that had become a cage for me. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker.

The Slight Change Family includes our senior producer Tyler Greene, our producer and fact checker Emily Rosteck, our editors Kate Parkinson Morgan and Jen Guera, and our sound engineers Ben holliday In Andrew Veastola. Louis Gara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped to range the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a Slight

Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week, Cover me up? No use? Is it good? Was it okay? Oh my god? It was beautiful? Okay? Thank you? Life is made everyone, Life is made. What thank you