"Decoration Day," a dark, rocking examination of intergenerational violence based on his own family's lore, proved to be so good that the band named their next album after the cut. Not long after Isbell joined the Truckers, he penned three incredible songs in rapid succession. Two, he lost sight of himself in a haze of booze. One, he quickly revealed his genius for empathetic portraiture, painting alienated, lost souls and revealing entire worlds in precise drops of telling detail. So began the wild years of Isbell's young adulthood, a fiery, creative period that delivered him to two ends. When he joined the group in 2001, he was 22 and so much younger than his bandmates that one member of the Truckers had gone to high school with Isbell's mother.
Jason Isbell on stage with the Drive-By Truckers during Bonnaroo 2005 in Manchester, Tenn. Isbell may have been a young adult, but he looked more like a doughy high school sophomore, especially among the more grizzled members of a hard touring band. He joined the band for the show and then departed on tour with the band for the next six years. As a result, Isbell got a rapid field promotion onto the stage. A member of the Drive-By Truckers, a band that had returned to its home in the Shoals to play a breakthrough house concert for Spin magazine, failed to show up for the gig. Then, at the age of 22, his moment arrived. By his early 20s, he returned to his home in the Shoals of Alabama, an obscure corner of the country that produced some of the greatest R&B in the universe, where he found work writing for FAME Studios. Playing local bars before he was even a teenager, and the Grand Ole Opry by 16, he went off to college but, famously, never completed his degree for want of a single required health studies class.
He would sit alone in his bedroom for days on end, isolated and insulated from his parents' arguing, tearing through the classics. He had honed his skills as a songwriter and guitar player since he started playing the mandolin back when his hands were too small to wrap around a guitar neck. Luck favors the prepared, as they say, and young Jason Isbell was ready.
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