Jason Isbell banishes his monsters

You’d think that Jason Isbell was an inconsolable wretch if you judged him only by his songs. On his most recent album, 2013’s harrowing Southeastern, he gave his life a harsh look and set the resulting confessions to goosebump-raising melodies. Company loved misery: The record swept the 2014 Americana Music Awards, where Isbell won Artist of the Year, Album of the Year and Song of the Year (for “Cover Me Up”).

He was writing about a different life. Almost two years on, Isbell is sober and happily married to fellow musician Amanda Shires. He’s preparing to go into the studio in March to record his next album, which he expects to release in the summer.

Ahead of Isbell’s Tuesday show at the Uptown, I called him to talk songwriting, sobriety and change.

The Pitch: This isn’t an industry that makes getting sober easy. How do you stay on the straight and narrow?

Isbell: I have routines. I have things that I do every day. One of the major things that I do is, I just try to remind myself that I don’t feel terrible physically. That helps. When I wake up in the morning and I don’t have a terrible hangover, that’s a nice thing. I can brush my teeth without gagging. I can move around before noon. Those things help me out a whole lot. I keep in close contact with my wife when she’s not on the road with me, with my family, and I try to remind myself that there are people who actually need me to be in the world, and that helps me a whole lot, too.

But, you know, when you say to yourself, “I’m in the music business, so that’s gonna make it really hard for me to get sober,” that’s just your unconscious mind trying to get another drink. Every business is hard. Every job is hard. All of it sucks when you’re trying to clean up.

How do you maintain that close contact with your wife when you’re on the road?

We have rules. We don’t go longer than three weeks at a time without seeing one another. We try to keep it to two if we can, but three is the maximum. She’s a musician, and I’m a musician, so we knew what we were getting into, and that’s helped a whole lot for us. I think if I would have met somebody who needed to stay home all the time or take care of the house or a bunch of kids or whatever while I went off and gallivanted around with a rock band, it would probably be a bit more difficult, but she has her own things to do and her own records to sell and her own songs to write. If we slip up and don’t look at the schedule and wind up having too much time apart, that can be difficult.

You got married just as Southeastern, a dark album, was being finished. It seems like your life is so much lighter now. Is that being reflected in the kind of songs you’re writing now?

Oh, no, I’m still writing these miserable, sad sons of bitches. [Laughs.] My wife likes to remind me of the Townes Van Zandt quote where he says, you know, “You’re either singing the blues or ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ There’s weight in the world, and just because I’m happy doesn’t mean the whole world is perfect. Who needs songs about things that are fine and already fixed? I like to write about relationships. That’s probably first and foremost — different types of relationships between people and how people communicate with each other. And that’s always gonna be a heavy subject.

Once in a while, I guess, something will come up that’s a little bit joyful or celebratory, but that’s heavy, too, isn’t it? Being happy is just as heavy as being sad because there’s always that potential.

Does songwriting as a process get easier, or is it always this bloodletting sort of thing?

[Laughs.] Well, it doesn’t really get easier, but I have figured out how to do it a little bit better and how to be more concise. It’s easier for me to enjoy the work that I’m doing. When you’re blocked from writing, it’s usually because you’re blocked from enjoying the work that you’re doing, and that happens often when you have a shift in your tastes, when your tastes grow more rapidly than your abilities, and you can get wound up really easily. I am getting to a point where I like what I write more than I used to, and that just comes from practice — doing it over and over and over. Writing songs is like working puzzles, and I love playing music, so it’s never something that frustrates me too much.

There’s a phrase that you used in an interview once. You were talking about how artists sometimes will write two or three really worthy songs and then put an album together with filler material because, you said, they were “too afraid to face themselves in a piece of paper.” How much of yourself do you face when you sit down to write?

Yeah, there’s always something personal that you put into a song when you’re writing it, and I try to push that over the line as much as possible. I try to write things that I don’t feel comfortable with. I feel like that’s my responsibility. I don’t know, I might be wrong about that, but I feel like if you want to write things that have some strength to them, you have to be able to face yourself in that way. You have to spend the time that it takes and you have to have the gumption to go out on a limb and say, “OK, I’m gonna make myself look real in these people’s eyes. I’m not going to try and be cool or serve any kind of image of myself that I might have in my head.”

And that’s difficult, but that’s the only way for me to progress as a songwriter and as a person. If you say those things out loud, it’s like opening up your closet door when you’re a kid and you think there’s a monster in there. But you open the door and you see for yourself that there’s not a monster.