Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Few songwriters working today can stop you cold with a single line and keep you thinking about it for days. Jason Isbell is one of them. Starting tonight, six-time Grammy winner Jason Isbell is performing at Radio City Music Hall for two shows. This evening, he has a solo set, and tomorrow, he'll be joined by his band, the 400 Unit. The tour is in support of his latest album, Foxes in the Snow, which is also the first solo project without the band in 10 years.

The album reflects on heartbreak and loneliness and love. Here's the title track, Foxes in the Snow. Take a listen.

[MUSIC - Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow]

Jason Isbell: I love my love, I love her mouth

I love the way she turns the lights off in her house

And I love my love in her velvet bed

Where she's heard me sing the words that can't be said

And all the dreams that die unseen

All the diphenhydramine it took to put my soul to sleep

Now it's easy.

Alison Stewart: A Vault review says that the spare arrangements of the album leave Isbell's lyrics no room to hide. Foxes in the Snow is out now. Joining me now in studio is Jason Isbell. It is nice to see you.

Jason Isbell: It's so good to see you, Alison. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: You recorded this album at Electric Lady Studios-

Jason Isbell: I did. Yes.

Alison Stewart: - in Greenwich Village, right down the street.

Jason Isbell: Right down the street.

Alison Stewart: What do you like about that space?

Jason Isbell: They have everything you need. They're very nice folks over there. It's a great studio. I mean, I love that it's so easy for people to make music in their basement or their garage or their bedroom now, but there's something about going into a real studio that's been there for a long time where you feel like, I better do something that's worth doing in this room. They have great gear, and it's easily accessible. I spend a lot of time in this city now, so it was convenient. More than that, I guess conceptually, I just wanted to walk into a studio in the Village with a guitar and a notebook and make a record.

Alison Stewart: Did you get a feeling being in the building, in the walls?

Jason Isbell: I don't know. I mean, I guess so. I guess there's probably some ghosts in there.

Alison Stewart: I was thinking.

Jason Isbell: I mean, Nashville studios have really intense ghosts if you're a ghost in the studio kind of person. Yes, I think you do. More than anything, though, it, to me, is about living up to the room that you're in. I try do that at Radio City too. I mean, that you don't want to go in there and not be any good.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Don't want to go and stink up the place.

Jason Isbell: No. There's a lot of places out there to go play bad music in, and Radio City's not one of them.

Alison Stewart: What was the first song you actually recorded?

Jason Isbell: Ever, or for this album?

Alison Stewart: This album.

Jason Isbell: For this album. Oh, that's a very good question. What did I start with? You know who would know is Will Welch. He was in there with me that first day, and he would know, but he is not here today. Let me look at the tracklist. Maybe the title track, actually. I think I may have started with that one, because that one's very hard to play and sing at the same time, or at least it was the first 50 times I did it. I may have started with that because I like to--

When I was eight, my dad took me to a theme park in Atlanta, and he made me ride the scariest ride first. It's terrifying. It's kind of torture. I don't know that I would do that to my kid, but after that, the rest of the day was easy. I kind of do that in the studio I think.

Alison Stewart: You do the hard stuff first?

Jason Isbell: Yes. The hardest thing first and then get it over with. Usually I come back and redo it all, but not on this project. This one, I just sat in a chair and played the guitar and sang, and we moved on.

Alison Stewart: Did you know how many songs, how long you wanted the album to be?

Jason Isbell: I knew how many I had, and I had 10 or 11, I think, total. Usually, I don't write more than I need. I'll have a couple of songs that don't make the cut, and then I may write one or two while I'm in the studio, but not a lot. Not a lot of songs happen that way.

Alison Stewart: What didn't make the cut for this record?

Jason Isbell: There were a couple songs that didn't make the cut, and [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: Was it the vibe of the song? Was it the melody of the song?

Jason Isbell: Sometimes subject matter. Sometimes I think, "Well, I've got enough songs about that. I don't need another song about that." Then, sometimes it's just a matter of where my tastes are right then. We all, I think, have a box set in mind for one day, maybe after I'm dead, the estate can release all the songs of mine that I didn't like. That seems to be what people do these days, but [crosstalk]--

Alison Stewart: Don't die.

Jason Isbell: Yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: Not yet. [chuckles]

Jason Isbell: Good for them. Good for my kids. You can do that. Yes, sometimes also, those songs come back around later, and I don't use them for other albums. I'll use them for different projects, but I won't use them-- If I'm going to make an album, I'll usually write all those songs in the year or so leading up to the recording of that album.

Alison Stewart: What kind of acoustic guitar did you use?

Jason Isbell: That is a Martin. It's a 017. I think it is 1940, I believe. It's pre-war. Not a very expensive guitar. Certainly when it was made, it wasn't. It was budget guitar for Martin then, but made with all the same care and the same quality materials as the finest guitars they were making then. I got that in Brooklyn at a music store that I love over there, Retrofret. I called Shira. I was staying in town. My girlfriend lives in the city, and so I kind of go back and forth between here and Nashville.

I was here and needed a guitar, and I didn't want a big, loud, expensive guitar to travel around with and keep in the New York apartment. I bought that Martin and wound up writing and recording this record with that guitar. Martin's actually now made a run of clones of that guitar that they're-- like a signature edition of that. It's a really great instrument. It's small mahogany, kind of quiet, but louder than it should be for that size.

Alison Stewart: Yes. It's sort of interesting. The guitar helped you write the songs in a way.

Jason Isbell: Yes. Well, I have a lot of different guitars, and the type of guitar that I'm playing when I'm writing a song will sometimes dictate the type of song that I'm writing, because I write maybe half of my songs on electric guitar, half on acoustic guitar. This one, I did all on that guitar, just because I wanted it to-- I think what was really important for me was to make an album that was designed to be performed solo acoustic from the beginning.

What I didn't want to do was write a bunch of songs where I had a band in my mind, I had a production in my mind, and then I took all that away and just sang and played the song. I wanted to start with this concept and continue it throughout. You're always trying to do something a little different. I don't want to fall into these patterns of making the same albums over and over and over, but also don't want to do something that's just weird for the sake of being weird, because people can hear that, and I can hear that, and that bores me.

I think there should be a reason for something to change. It just occurred to me that I had been through a lot of changes in my life. I'd had a time that was very intense for me, and I never made a record that was just me and a guitar and a microphone. That's what I set out to do.

Alison Stewart: You didn't want to do an unplugged situation. You just wanted to just-

Jason Isbell: Right.

Alison Stewart: - perform.

Jason Isbell: Yes, yes. I didn't want there to be anything missing. I didn't want this to be a version of that performance. I wanted this to be the whole piece. Yes. I think we forget sometimes that music doesn't have to be so big. It can be a tiny, tiny little thing and still have the same kind of emotional impact.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jason Isbell. He's stopping by Radio City Music Hall tonight and tomorrow in support of his latest acoustic album, Foxes in the Snow. Let's listen to the first track from the album. It's titled Bury Me, and it starts off acapella.

Jason Isbell: Yes. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Whose idea was that?

Jason Isbell: That was my idea.

Alison Stewart: It's my idea. [laughs]

Jason Isbell: That was my idea. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but it was mine.

Alison Stewart: What effect were you hoping to have with it?

Jason Isbell: I grew up learning to play on a lot of hillbilly songs, mountain music, and gospel songs that I learned from my grandfather. The melodies in those songs work whether you're accompanying them with an instrument or not. Some of the people in my family were just singers. They didn't play the guitar. They didn't play anything else. They just sang. Sometimes they clapped. If you think about something like people grinning in a face, don't mind people grinning in your face. Oh, what was his name? Now it's escaping me. He did John the Revelator, blues singer.

Anyway, some of those songs should work that way without any accompaniment whatsoever. I felt like this was the kind of song where the melody was familiar enough that it should work that way, so I wanted to lead into it that way.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Bury Me.

[MUSIC - Jason Isbell: Bury Me]

Jason Isbell: Bury me where the wind don't blow

Where the dust won't cover me, where the tall grass grows

Or bury me right where I fall

Tokyo to Tennessee, I loved them all

See the windmills turn up 55

Still got so much to learn, still feel alive

And one lonely girl is all I need

To tie me to this world, make me believe

Well, I ain't no cowboy, but I can ride

And I ain't no outlaw, but I've been inside

And there were bars of steel, boys, and there were bars to sing

And there were bars with swingin' doors for all the time between

Alison Stewart: That's from the album Foxes in the Snow. My guest is Jason Isbell. How do you think about sequencing on your records? Do you think about it when you're writing the songs?

Jason Isbell: Yes. Well, maybe not when I'm writing them, when I'm recording them, but it's different for this record because typically-- and it was Son House that I was trying to remember three minutes ago. That was the name. Anyway, I can't forget that [unintelligible 00:11:50]. Normally, for sequencing, I learned this from Matt Ross-Spang, a producer engineer from Memphis, years ago, but you work for vinyl.

Basically, in the '60s and the '70s, you would have a certain amount of information that you could put on a vinyl album, and the grooves are different width as you get farther away from the center of the record. The things that have more instrumentation, more production, need to get more space on an album. They would sequence the tracks for logistical reasons so the record would sound right when you played it on a record player. I stick with that.

I think that there's something about us that's conditioned to hear an album that way, and I think it still works. For this album, that wasn't a question because it's just me and an acoustic guitar the whole record, so you didn't really have that to worry about. I think more than anything else, I went with tempos and key, like the primary key of the song, and then subject matter, because you don't want to hit people over the head with three or four sad songs in a row. You just have to mix it up a little.

This one was probably tracklisted a little bit more like a setlist for a live show. Typically I would say, well, we got a ton of drums here, so we need to put this one in this spot, or, this one's quiet and acoustic, so we can use this in these groups. This record didn't work that way.

Alison Stewart: Oh, it sounded like you had a little more creative control that way.

Jason Isbell: I think so. Yes, I think so, which is sometimes a good thing. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes I would rather have logistical control instead of being in control of it myself. I like those restrictions.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned starting when you were really young, when you started writing songs. What kind of things would you write about when you were a 12 or 13-year-old?

Jason Isbell: Just very horny stuff. It was terrible. It was embarrassing. Yes, it's like a 13-year-old boy writing, so you can imagine what I was writing about. I listened to blues music all the time when I was that age because I was learning to play the guitar, and I had found this treasure trove of old southern blues music, and that was it. I mean, I just obsessed on the stuff. I would rewrite blues songs and put my own lyrics in it.

There's nothing more embarrassing than a 13-year-old, 12-year-old white kid in Alabama rewriting blues songs, but it wasn't for anybody else, it was just for me because I enjoyed it. Then, I read a lot, and so within a couple of years, I started combining the two things that I loved the most, which was reading fiction and playing the guitar. That's when something really clicked for me. That narrative kind of came into play rather than just saying, I like this, I like that, dance now. When I started thinking, oh, maybe I can tell a story with this, then it all sort of locked in for me.

Alison Stewart: Ohh, what were you reading? Who were your storytellers that you liked?

Jason Isbell: When I was that age, I remember the first book that really hit me was Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls. That was a huge one when I was little. I was probably seven or eight years old then. Then, after that, I started doing a little bit of Faulkner, and I remember reading some Hemmingway. My mom's brother had some Hemingway books in his room at my grandparents house that he'd left to go to college, and I remember reading those.

I would also steal my mom's books. This was the '80s, and my mom was reading like Dean Koontz and Stephen King and stuff. I would steal those and read them when nobody knew, and yes, I would get in trouble. Dad would have to take those away from me because I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. I was terrified. I was so scared. I was so scared.

Alison Stewart: Jason Isbell is stopping by before he performs at Radio City Music Hall tonight and tomorrow. Let's listen to another track from the album, Foxes in the Snow. This track is titled Good While It Lasted. What's the back song on this?

Jason Isbell: This one doesn't mean what you think-

Alison Stewart: Back story.

Jason Isbell: - it means. This is one of those that sometimes you try to trick them a little bit, and this is about a relationship, but it's not at the end of a relationship. It's at the beginning of a relationship.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Jason Isbell: Good While It Lasted]

Jason Isbell: You're like sleep, take what I can get

But I've gotta make some sense of this, so here the fuck I sit

At 3AM trying way too hard

To find the words to slow my sweet, addicted heart

You're like sleep, I can't get near enough

And I pretend that I don't need you when I'm out doing stuff

Went so deep, a lucky young man's dream

And last time I tried this sober, I was seventeen

And all that I needed was all that I had

And it was good while it lasted

You let me kiss you on Broadway in a black Cadillac

And it was good while it lasted

Alison Stewart: Jason, you're playing an acoustic set by yourself tonight at Radio City Music Hall, and tomorrow you're with your band. What do you like about each setup?

Jason Isbell: The overhead is pretty great for the acoustic solo show.

[laughter]

Jason Isbell: That's the best part of that. No, truthfully, there's one thing that I've noticed that really is interesting to me. With the band, you can control the volume dynamic, but there's not much you can do about the speed. The tempo is-- You're at the mercy of the rhythm section. If I want everything to get quiet, the band, they're all great players and great listeners, and they'll get quiet pretty quickly, but speeding up and slowing down is not really a possibility on stage.

Even though we don't use a click track, it's still you're kind of hanging on, and you're going at the tempo that the rhythm section's at. If it's me solo acoustic, I can speed up and slow down intentionally, and that adds something really interesting for me to the solo show. Also, there's a freedom to playing solo where I don't feel like I have to orchestrate the setlist the same way. If I play two quiet songs in a row or three quiet songs in a row, it doesn't seem to be that bad big a deal because the expectation is not of rock and roll.

That being said, playing with the band is probably more fun. I get to play lead guitar, which is really nice, and I like everybody in the band. Communicating with them musically is very rewarding for me. Yes, I think I would miss either one of these things if I just did one of them.

Alison Stewart: Well, you get to do both.

Jason Isbell: Yes, exactly. Yes. Yes. Very lucky to do both.

Alison Stewart: Jason Isbell is playing Radio City Music Hall tonight and tomorrow in support of his latest acoustic album, Foxes in the Snow. Thanks for being here.

Jason Isbell: Thank you very much, Alison. I'm always glad to be here and talk to you.