AN EVENING WITH JASON ISBELL IS A WONDERFUL NIGHT OF COMPLEXITY AND CHARACTER

LIVE REVIEW l Jason Isbell – Barbican Centre, London 10/02/25 by Morris Shamah

Jason Isbell is best known for his electric work with his band, The 400 Unit, and for his brief stint in the Southern Rock band The Drive-By Truckers. With his upcoming solo album, FOXES IN THE SNOW (7th March, Southeastern), Mr. Isbell is stripping back, and his current tour reflects that. Billed as “An Evening With Jason Isbell,” the Alabama six-string-gunslinger takes the stage with just an acoustic guitar, two mics, two glasses of water, a stool and a single stage monitor. Dressed in a black suit with snakeskin boots, he looks less like a traditional rock star and more like might have just stepped out of an episode of some southern neo-noir TV show that your best friend won’t shut up about.

These spartan “Evening With” shows are a break from the big-band bombast, the drunken revelry and blinding light shows. It’s the stories, not the music, that finally gets to breathe and stretch its legs. For the audience, this is a chance for them to connect with the details, the turns of phrase, the surprising connection they previously hadn’t noticed.

For someone who didn’t have a relationship with Jason Isbell’s music prior to this show, I found it to be all of the above and then some. Isbell’s music is endlessly familiar, but stripped to the roots like this, the space for your own narrative to explore is immense. Just when you think you’ve connected to the heart of the song, Jason takes an acoustic guitar solo, your mind drifts, and you realise where in your life those connections really come from. Then he comes back in for the final verse and brings you back up to Earth.

It’s clear from the crowd that certain songs are favourites – if you think the cheer for Live Oak and Cover Me Up is loud, wait until he plays Elephant and If We Were Vampires and Alabama Pines. For an un-intiated, however, one of the strongest tunes is a new one, Ride To Robert’s. “We all get lost out here / the deepest ditches line the righteous path / god said hold my beer / and he made a man so he can watch him laugh.” The patience that Isbell displays with his new material indicates the trust he has in his audience, and the storytelling to match.

Early on, Isbell talks about how books and films are always categorised as “fiction” or “non-fiction,” “drama” or “documentary,” but in music, that line doesn’t seem to exist. The listener seems to belive the singer is the character they’re portraying. Isbell spends the night trying to dissuade us of that notion – that the stories aren’t expressly things that happened to him, that the advice given in the songs isn’t advice he wants you to take. His comments are delivered casually, in his slow southern drawl, but you can tell that he’s serious – Isbell does not want you to think he is his characters.

The evening is a showcase for Jason Isbell the storyteller, but he never lets us forget that he’s also Jason Isbell the guitarist. He plays his acoustic guitar finger-style, no pick. His command over the strings is nothing short of brilliant – there’s not a bad note, no sound of fingers sliding, just pure guitar singing through. When he his the deep root note, everything anchors in the ground, when he plays around with the rhythm, it’s a natural as wind in a rainstorm. Isbell only takes the time to expressly and explicitly show off once, during Outfit, a Drive-By Truckers song and – by far – the highlight of the evening. A father-son song, Isbell prefaces it with a humourous story of his own father. It’s the closest thing the night gets to trancedent, and it’s the only time that Isbell the singer lives up to the complexities he promised in his spoken crowd work.

In speaking with some Jason Isbell veterans after the show, it seems that he is going through a transitional period. The concensus is that Isbell is – for whatever reason – distancing himself from his work, trying to seperate himself from his art. As a blank test subject, I can say that it works; with this Evening With, Jason Isbell proves himself to be not a confessional poet, but a weaver of stories and characters.

At the end of the night, Jason Isbell promises to come back soon “with the rock band.” It’ll be interesting to see how his work continues to grow and evolve with The 400 Unit. If Isbell is fully embracing his role as the folktale teller of the American South, he’ll need to find a way to maintain that depth when performing with the band, something even the most complex of singer-songwriters have struggled with. One thing’s for sure – he isn’t coasting through this part of his career. Isbell is maturing with intention right before our eyes and ears, if you’re lucky enough to listen.

Setlist

1. Bury Me
2. Overseas
3. Foxes in the Snow
4. Gravelweed
5. Live Oak
6. Cover Me Up
7. Eileen
8. Last of My Kind
9. Elephant
10. Ride to Robert’s
11. Cast Iron Skillet
12. If We Were Vampires
13. Alabama Pines
14. Speed Trap Town

Encore:

15. Outfit
16. Beth/Rest (Bon Iver cover)
17. True Believer

Author