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Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, and Other Good Stuff


Seasick Sailor

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3 hours ago, tbone_ said:

His version of cover me up just makes me want to vomit

I have no problem with people covering or interpreting other people’s songs, but if you’re doing something as heavy and deeply personal as this song, you better do something special. Isbell has been pretty diplomatic about it publicly, but Wallen’s version is dogshit. I just don’t get the appeal of that dude. Underwhelming. Now, if Chris Cornell had covered it…

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On 3/7/2023 at 7:25 PM, Buzzrock said:

Holy crap. What is the deal with Morgan Wallen (his music, not the other stuff)? My niece who is into Isbell and Stapleton and Zach Bryan etc was raving about him. I listened to 30 seconds of that new album and good lord that is some awful shit. Do people put him in the same bucket with the others I mentioned?

Morgan Wallen is doing numbers as good or better than like Taylor Swift and Beyonce. He's a cultural force, which means his music is necessarily average to middling and probably optimized in a studio office somewhere for the broadest range of appeal in his demo.

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Morgan Wallen is doing numbers as good or better than like Taylor Swift and Beyonce. He's a cultural force, which means his music is necessarily average to middling and probably optimized in a studio office somewhere for the broadest range of appeal in his demo.

Read recently that he’s the first country artist ever to have a #1 song on the billboard top 100 or some shit like that. I may have that wrong but it was some surprising accomplishment that a) I was surprised hadn’t been done before and b) was surprised it was this douche nozzle that did it.

That’s our world I guess.
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Morgan Wallen is doing numbers as good or better than like Taylor Swift and Beyonce. He's a cultural force, which means his music is necessarily average to middling and probably optimized in a studio office somewhere for the broadest range of appeal in his demo.

Our resident klansman has spoken.
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On 3/29/2023 at 10:38 AM, Seasick Sailor said:

New Single from Weathervanes:

 

i'll probably listen to this a few more times and find all the things I appreciate about it, but I kinda zoned out for a minute and when I snapped back I found myself hoping that Isbell starts listening to some old Clash records or something.

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10 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

i'll probably listen to this a few more times and find all the things I appreciate about it, but I kinda zoned out for a minute and when I snapped back I found myself hoping that Isbell starts listening to some old Clash records or something.

Yeah, it's not bad.  But it's pretty forgettable.

I kinda wish he'd start listening to Mountain or Ram Jam.

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Doc is fantastic.  A few thoughts:

-they did a great job opening up his past/childhood and demonstrating how joining DBT at a stupid young age inevitably created his addiction issues.  Lot of really interesting shit there.

-for the first half of the movie, I kinda thought Shires came off like a pretentious jackass, but that kinda flipped by the end of the film.

-there’s a great song in the bones of Be Afraid, but I still don’t like what ended up on the record.

-There was some pretty strong examples of “dry drunk” behavior from Isbell.  Particularly when he stonewalled Shires during the Reunions recording.

-They didn’t go over the top on it, but they very clearly pointed out that Shires isn’t a tee totaller.  For as big of a part as sobriety and recovery are in who Isbell has become, that surprised me a little, but also came off as a testament to his strength and commitment to his recovery.

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17 minutes ago, Al_4_ISU said:

-They didn’t go over the top on it, but they very clearly pointed out that Shires isn’t a tee totaller.  For as big of a part as sobriety and recovery are in who Isbell has become, that surprised me a little, but also came off as a testament to his strength and commitment to his recovery.

I haven’t seen the show yet, but this part doesn’t really surprise me. In recovery myself, there isn’t much more of an uncomfortable feeling for me in a social setting than other people altering their behavior for me, even if they have great intentions. Happened early on, and always made me feel like shit. You want to shotgun a Busch Light during Farmageddon?  Hell, I’ll hold your plate of food for you. 
Will be interested in your thoughts on the dry drunk part. I was a dry drunk for around 5 years, and probably was even more of an asshole than when I was drinking. 
Glad you weighed-in. Was interested in your inevitable review before I watch it. 

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honestly I wasn't all that excited about the doc but now I am. I was assuming it was going to be "here's Isbell and the 400 Unit recording an album", which would be cool but.... "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" was an awesome documentary but one that followed Wilco recording Star Wars would probably be boring as shit. I'm super intrigued by the Isbell/Shires dynamic (she also seems kinda fucking nuts to me but I'm willing to believe that I'm not being fair) and the talk in this thread has me excited. As someone who discovered Isbell (Sturgill first) after recovery, I'm down for the full 12 step treatment.

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Haven't seen it but Amanda is fun Instagram/Twitter follow.  She is far from a tee-totaller.  

She is tough.  Hell, she was on the road with Billy Joe Shaver for a while...and he was the one who convinced her to start writing her own songs.  Plus, the time with the Texas Playboys.....at a very young age.    I can imagine she can be very blunt and wouldn't want to get her pissed off, for sure.  

My favorite quote of hers is, "I can hold my breathe longer than I can listen to current country radio".  

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4 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

honestly I wasn't all that excited about the doc but now I am. I was assuming it was going to be "here's Isbell and the 400 Unit recording an album", which would be cool but.... "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" was an awesome documentary but one that followed Wilco recording Star Wars would probably be boring as shit. I'm super intrigued by the Isbell/Shires dynamic (she also seems kinda fucking nuts to me but I'm willing to believe that I'm not being fair) and the talk in this thread has me excited. As someone who discovered Isbell (Sturgill first) after recovery, I'm down for the full 12 step treatment.

I actually went to the same treatment center as Isbell.  Baboso on here helped find it.  (If it can get him sober, it can damn sure help you).  Anyway, I was talking to Jeff Plankenhorn before a show in Atlanta  (with Scrappy Jud) just after I got out of treatment.  He then spent a LOT of time with me after the show.  A year before, he had mentioned his sobriety date and I responded that he and Isbell had the exact same sobriety date.  He said, "That's a strange thing to have in common".    He remembered me commenting on that and has stayed in touch since.    

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On 4/10/2023 at 10:23 AM, Celery Man said:

honestly I wasn't all that excited about the doc but now I am. I was assuming it was going to be "here's Isbell and the 400 Unit recording an album", which would be cool but.... "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" was an awesome documentary but one that followed Wilco recording Star Wars would probably be boring as shit. I'm super intrigued by the Isbell/Shires dynamic (she also seems kinda fucking nuts to me but I'm willing to believe that I'm not being fair) and the talk in this thread has me excited. As someone who discovered Isbell (Sturgill first) after recovery, I'm down for the full 12 step treatment.

I've turned on that a bit after watching the doc. She is obviously eccentric and has a really anxious energy that she also puts into her vocals - I think that combined with mostly "seeing" her through little snippets of nothing on instagram makes her a bit of a cartoon where in the documentary she was actually fairly balanced.

Loved watching this on the couch with a guitar. I need to watch more music things on the couch with a guitar. I didn't realize that they took the "write it in the studio" approach, or at least that they did that with this album. I can appreciate that but I think a thing I've articulated several times in this thread is that I prefer the end of tour live version. Loved Shires comment about being afraid of fucking a part up because everyone would like it. 

Isbell's youth fashion was great. I didn't realize that the Truckers just loaded him into the van when he was basically still a kid. Goddamn he looked like shit at that last drinking show. Scenes with his daughter just killed me, I'm getting my daughter some overalls.

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@dcbc's post in the pizza thread (where a neighbor signed for a misdelivered 12 string guitar) reminded me of my other favorite part of the Isbell doc, which was Shires hating 12 string guitars. Just the whole sequence of... either Isbell or the producer suggesting that a 12 string might work there, the energy draining out of Shires face, cut to Isbell laboriously tuning a fucking 12 string in the control room and Shires giving a defeated look to the camera.

Both the 12 string part specifically, but also the part where there's one person fighting a losing battle against something they desperately want not to happen to a song in the studio, lol. Forever ago... it would have been circa 2010, the Old 97s were recording at a studio off City Park that my old band's producer did a lot of engineering at, and he called up our horn section asking if they could come out and record on a few songs. I was mad jealous, the horns talked all kinda shit because they knew how much I liked the Old 97s (although they weren't even there when they recorded). And then the album came out and there were no horns anywhere, and we eventually got the story from our producer that it was one of those kinds of arguments where Rhett thought horns would work well and Murry didn't want any goddamn horns. And Murry won.

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Doc is fantastic.  A few thoughts:

-They didn’t go over the top on it, but they very clearly pointed out that Shires isn’t a tee totaller.  For as big of a part as sobriety and recovery are in who Isbell has become, that surprised me a little, but also came off as a testament to his strength and commitment to his recovery.


From It Gets Easier: “You can't expect her to follow your lead
She's fine with wine and her weed”
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From It Gets Easier: “You can't expect her to follow your lead
She's fine with wine and her weed”

Watched the doc and loved it. See they used this line in the doc so more of a “no shit” post by me sorry about that! I think it was just something I had internalized from that song but probably you haven’t sat and listened to Reunions much since it isn’t your fave.
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I had never heard of this Morgan Wallen dipshit before today. My kids like to play pandora on our fridge in the kitchen while we make breakfast, etc and they had it on the Taylor swift radio channel this morning. Something came on that made me consider taking the knife I was cutting some stuff for food prep and going to homicidally sing it to take out as much of humanity as humanly possible before I stopped myself, looked at the culprit on the screen, and it was some trash by Morgan Wallen. Mind you, I’m already in 8-10 year old girl music mode so my tolerance level is ultra high at the moment.

I down-thumbed it without committing any atrocities. 

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i got into isbell kind of late in the game.  never listened to the drive by truckers and only knew the song go it alone due to it playing in an episode of sons of anarchy.  knew of southeastern when it came out but never really paid it a lot of attention until much later.  really, it was the nashville sound and reunions that really made me start listening to him more and then i went back and revisited southeastern but it was really only those three albums for awhile.  but ever since i watched the documentary i've done a much deeper dive and am discovering shit like this and it's much easier for me to see things through the viewpoint that a lot of you see them when you say the recent stuff isn't as good as the older stuff:

 

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