From White Knight Syndrome to “White Man’s World”: The Evolution of Jason Isbell
By: Emily L. Hauser
Tags: Americana, Rock, Jason Isbell, Reunions

The Chicago Theater, September 1, 2017

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Very early in his career, Jason Isbell revealed himself to be an uncommonly empathetic songwriter. Almost immediately after joining the Drive-By Truckers, he wrote “Decoration Day,” a track that places the listener not just in the shoes but behind the eyes of its narrator, and “Outfit,” in which a father speaks with such frank love that it can move the stony to tears. And all that at age 22.

Empathy is tricky, though. It can easily tip over into a pressing urge to step in, to save. As soon as Isbell was no longer with the Truckers, his capacity for empathy became messier — morphing into the sort that hops on a horse to tilt violently at windmills and bad men, in defense of damsels deemed to be in distress.

“You took him home from a nightclub/ he took a nightclub to you,” he sings in “Shotgun Wedding” (Sirens of the Ditch). “Now I watch from the window/ too guilty to scream.” The character is wracked with remorse for not having taken action sooner, and offers a woman (to whom he can barely bring himself to speak) unasked-for deliverance: “How about a shotgun wedding?” he suggests, “what about me?” There is violence here, but it is ambient, suggested; we never learn who the shotgun might be pointed at.

In “Seven-Mile Island,” the lead track off Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, we meet a White Knight who, we learn, has failed: “Lay some stones down on top of my grave/ tell my lady I just couldn’t bear to see her/ tell my daughter I just couldn’t be saved.” The pregnant Mary, the daughter on the way — neither are as important as the narrator’s need to fix the unfixable, and this time, the violence is self-inflicted.

The potentially abusive nature of white knightery emerges in “Daisy Mae” (Here We Rest), as the character initially evokes languid visions of “the noonday sun,” eventually meandering into a passage where the words weigh as if unaware of their own consequence: “Here, he never touched you/ inside this house he never called your name/ so stay where I can see you, girl.” In the last verse, we finally learn the narrator’s plan: “But I won’t lay this pistol down/ until the sky falls to the ground/ leave him there to call your name/ ’til man and land are both the same.”

In Isbell’s hands, each of these songs is ruthlessly poignant. The listener may not be inclined to empathize with his characters’ motivations, but the singer insists that we do — each man’s suffering palpably real, and, rightly or wrongly, the only thing he feels he has to offer.

The power Isbell summons to such stories is never greater, however, than in “Yvette” (Southeastern). Here the focus is more evenly split between an abused girl, the father abusing her, and the boy who sees it, again through a window. “I might not be a man yet, but your father will never be,” Isbell sings, “so I load up my Weatherby/ I let out my breath, and I couple with death.”

In these songs as in life, white knightery serves at least in part to deflect from the Knight’s own troubles, the proffered salvation centered not on its object but on the Knight’s need to save. Only in “Yvette” do we see a narrator prepared for genuine sacrifice — yet even here, the object of the boy’s sacrifice is only ever described from a distance, never actually heard from. Like her father, Yvette’s erstwhile savior also strips her of agency.

To date, however, “Yvette” is the last of its kind in Isbell’s oeuvre. Southeastern came out soon after he got sober, and in what is surely a related turn of events, that uncommon empathy began to seek ways to sit with discomfort, rather than scramble for battle. In “Relatively Easy,” Isbell sings of a friend who has died by suicide, and acknowledges that the death is “not for me to understand”; in “Elephant,” the narrator cares for a terminally ill friend, only ever able to “carry her to bed/ [and] sweep up the hair from her floor”; in “Different Days,” the change in attitude is made explicit: “Ten years ago I might/ have seen you dancing in a different light/ and offered up my help in different ways/ but those were different days.”

Southeastern’s shift away from outward-facing white knightery comes with a parallel shift toward a new inward gaze. Isbell’s previous work had often laid bare a baroque self-loathing, but only rarely genuine self-reflection. On the other hand, the very first track on Southeastern, “Cover Me Up,” is both a love song and an outline of his path from “days when we raged” to sobriety — “forever, this time.”

“Traveling Alone,” “Different Days,” “Live Oak”– track after track is marked by an effort to frankly engage with past and present behavior and build something, if not better, at least more honest. More honorable. “In a room by myself,” he sings in “Songs That She Sang In The Shower,” “I pace and I pray/ and I repeat the mantras that might keep me clean for the day.” Unlike Yvette, the woman dying in “Elephant” gets a voice, & her opening line might as well be addressed to the songwriter: “Andy, you’re better than your past.”

That inward gaze is not narrow, however, but strives for accountability both within four walls and outside them. In “Flying Over Water,” Isbell sings of “Daddy’s little empire, built by hands and built by slaves,” touching briefly on ideas that will become more central to his writing over the next two albums.

This new theme — the search for a more honest, more honorable life — is all over 2015’s Something More Than Free, from the very personal in songs like “If It Takes a Lifetime,” to the national-historical in “Palmetto Rose,” in which Isbell returns to those ideas touched on in “Flying Over Water” — the song’s title is a reference to a traditional African American art form, and the lyrics take listeners from “some bullshit story about the Civil War” to this remarkable image: “Out on Sullivan’s Island, they’re swimming/ on the beach where the big boats rolled in/ with the earliest slaves and their children/ our first American kin.”

Of course, Isbell’s work has always been explicitly political, from the songs sung with his old band to solo tracks like “Dress Blues” and “The Devil Is My Running Mate.” What was less apparent in the past was a sense of personal responsibility for the state of the world against which he raged. It’s on Nashville Sound (2017) that the bridging of personal and political becomes unequivocal.

In “Hope the High Road,” Isbell issues what amounts to a new mission statement: “I heard enough of the white man’s blues/ I’ve sang enough about myself”; in “White Man’s World” we see that new mission articulated — not a character, not a White Knight, not an inch of distance between the injustices of which he sings and Isbell himself.

“I’m a white man living in a white man’s world” the song opens — this is his world, and everything he’s about to tell you, is on him. Doors slammed against women, the genocide of Native Peoples, the cotton fields of slavery, the racism of today — it’s all in his lap, by virtue of who he is, who he was born. “White Man’s World” is both a declaration of personal responsibility and a call to others to acknowledge their own, so that we may share in the process of seeking justice: “Still breathing, it’s not too late/ we’re all carrying one big burden, sharing one fate.”

Isbell’s seventh studio album, Reunions, is expected on May 15th; as of this writing, two singles have been released, each a conscious embrace of the vision set forth in “White Man’s World,” each a call to action in the face of American politics gone mad; a third single is expected later this week.

The world in which Isbell writes and sings is changing rapidly, and none of us can know what will happen in our post-coronavirus America — but the words of “What’ve I Done To Help” already speak directly to the moment: “The world’s on fire and we just climb higher/ ’til we’re no longer bothered by the smoke and sound/ Good people suffer and the heart gets tougher/ Nothing given, nothing found.”

Yet for all that, it’s a good bet that Reunions or any future albums won’t consist exclusively of protest songs. Isbell’s uncommon empathy most often expresses itself in his startling capacity to make words and music sound like a lived life; there are sure to also be complex characters and intimate moments.

But broken women and the White Knights who feel compelled to rescue them appear to no longer be in the mix. We’re all capable of being better than our past, Isbell seems to be saying; we have to save each other.