America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety. But country also has a parallel history, of course: as music of the little guy, the theatre of the domestic, a place for preservation of simple folk traditions in the face of the overwhelming scale of modernity. And it’s into this that through this century the Alabaman singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whether solo or with The 400 Unit or Drive-By Truckers, has fit.
Which is not to say Isbell is all folksy, by any means. His snapshots of life are in the American tradition of Raymond Carver and Edward Hopper as much as of George Jones and Hank Williams – and that’s as true as ever on this acoustic album. His tales of love and loss and hardscrabble life are painted in a very few brushstrokes, but the economy of his rhyming couplets point to so much micro detail of real lives lived that the songs creep under your skin just like his lover who “falls asleep inside my head” in the title track.
I get the feeling he could very easily do the big-hat, big-truck anthemic thing if he wanted. His ease with those rhyming couplets means he can very easily do the cheesy stuff too – from very early on in this album you get lines like “I ain’t a cowboy, but I can ride / I ain’t an outlaw, but I’ve been inside” which are so instant and hooky it’s kind of boggling that they’re not already the chorus to a big country-rock standard. And there’s homespun wisdom in “Don’t be Tough” – “don’t be tough unless you have to… let love knock you on your ass” – that’s so cute it borders on Sesame Street.
But Isbell never lets his instinct for the obvious overwhelm the low key grit of stories of alienation, guns, drugs, mortality and fatally intense love affairs. Partly it’s because nobody writes intimacy like him: not just the fine detail of feelings and domestic detail, but the material reality of resting your head on someone – whether that’s with a feeling of overwhelming love, or in the final throes of a doomed affair. This is country as it always has been at its best: sentimental as hell yes, but very, very real. And in an age when Big America seems to have gone completely off the rails, it’s nice to be reminded of the small stuff.
Listen to "Foxes in the Snow":
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