Jason Isbell On the Importance of Honesty in Songwriting
"If you're not challenging yourself as a songwriter then you're not going to get any better at it," says Isbell.
Jason Isbell is one of today’s most revered songwriters. The two-time Grammy Award winner performed four sold-out shows at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium last fall and has previously shared the stage with another songwriter legend and hero of his, John Prine. In an interview with Sounds Like Nashville, the singer/songwriter discusses the best advice he has received on songwriting and his decision to move to Nashville.
Isbell left his native of Alabama nearly five years ago for Music City much to the urging of his wife, singer/songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires, who was his girlfriend at the time.
“I had a good support system here and I had recently gotten clean and sober,” he tells Sounds Like Nashville, settling into a chair backstage at the Country Music Hall of Fame’s CMA Theater before a recent performance. “Where I was living in Alabama wasn’t the best place for me to be sober. Especially because I was in the same building as the bar.”
While many songwriters move to Nashville to make it in country music, this wasn’t the case for Isbell. He says he came for the relationships he had made here.
After Isbell got clean he released two critically acclaimed solo albums, 2013’s Southeastern and 2015’s Something More Than Free, which garnered him two Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album and Best American Roots Song for “24 Frames.” Well known for his descriptive lyrics and piercing honesty, Isbell says he works hard to write songs that are “personal and terrifying.”
“The best advice I have ever received is be honest. Tell people more than you’re comfortable with and that’s served me really well,” he says of songwriting. “It doesn’t mean everything you write has to be from your own experience. It just means that you have to be honest with your audience and not be afraid to tell them what you’re afraid of or who you are and what you’ve done. I think that has served me probably better than anything else.”
While Isbell admits that it is often difficult to be so honest in his songwriting, he says being open is supposed to be challenging.
“If I can get to a point in my life where the majority of my challenges are creative challenges then I’ll be happy. I think that’s where I’m at right now,” he admits. “If the hardest things that I have to do are open myself up and write songs that are personal and terrifying, in that way then I’m doing it right. If you’re not challenging yourself as a songwriter then you’re not going to get any better at it.”
Another suggestion he has for songwriters is to write a lot of songs. As he recalls, former bandmate Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers wrote at least one thousand songs before he liked any of them.
Isbell has written his fair share of songs over the years, too. He says many of the tracks he has written hold more meaning to him today than when he first wrote them. One song in particular is “Elephant,” off of Southeastern, which is about a platonic relationship between two people and one of the characters is dying from cancer.
“That song means a lot more to me now because when I wrote it, the characters were fictional combinations of real people that I knew. I didn’t write about this person who exists, but people’s reaction to it has made it a lot heavier to me,” he explains. “It’s been important to a lot of our listeners because they’ve had those experiences.”
He says that many people initially gravitated to the song because they felt that he had insight into what they were going through. Again, he stresses that the best way to have people relate to one’s music is to be honest.
“If you choose the right details, people will hear a song and think, ‘How did he know that? There’s no way that guy could have known that about my life!’ Picking the right details comes with developing your taste, listening to a lot of different songwriters and a lot of different songs and just practicing a whole lot.”
