Category: MISC

–Editor’s note from American Songwriter’s July/August 2015 edition

Bob Dylan’s song “Fourth Time Around,” which is featured on his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde, is generally read as the American songwriter’s response to The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”. Dylan’s words are silly and playful, and come off as a parody of the lyrics that John Lennon wrote for his tune. The title seemingly refers to the boomeranging of influences The Beatles and Dylan exerted on each other in the early years of their stardom. (Dylan also turned The Beatles on to pot, another watershed moment for the Fab Four.) 

“Norwegian Wood” was recorded in 1965 and represented Lennon’s first real Dylan impression. When Lennon first heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1964, he played it over and over. His songwriting would never be the same from then on. Even tunes like “Working Class Hero” from his solo catalog years later bear strong Dylan fingerprints.  

“Fourth Time Around” is somewhat illustrative of the relationship between British and American folk and popular music. Throughout the centuries, the music of each country has played off each other in one long ricochet, almost to the point that they they’ve become two sides of the same coin.  

American folk music really begins with the ballads of the British Isles, some of which go back as far as the 13th century. In this issue, we take a close look at the Child ballads, a 10- volume collection of more than 300 songs that was originally published in the late 1800s. Many of these songs made it across the Atlantic via oral transmission and took deep root in Appalachia, becoming standards in old-time music. These tunes populate the songbook of the “old, weird America,” as music writer Greil Marcus so famously dubbed it. “Barbara Allen,” the most famous of the Child ballads, tells the story of “Sweet William” who lay on his deathbed for the love of a girl who didn’t return it. The folklorist Alan Lomax said the song “traveled west with every wagon” during the settling of the frontier, and Dylan said it was the inspiration for “Girl of the North Country.” The tune is part of the DNA of American songwriting. 

We also look at the influence of traditional Irish music on American folk and bluegrass. Nashville-based musician Tim O’Brien noticed the connection early on in his education. “My great-grandfather was from Ireland, and when I started playing bluegrass and fiddle tunes, I started thinking, ‘Oh, these are really Irish tunes. I quickly realized that Bill Monroe – who was actually of Scotch heritage – I realized that his bluegrass music, and Irish music and Scottish music, were very closely intertwined.”  

Elsewhere in the issue, we break down The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, an album that was recently reissued in Deluxe form just in time for their current stadium tour. The Stones wore their American influences on their sleeve, especially where the blues were concerned. It is one of the ironies of American music that it took a bunch of art-school kids from Britain to really shine a light on the treasure trove of blues music that had been grown on its own soil. Sticky Fingers is the album that really showcased the influence of Gram Parsons and American country music. And three of its standout tracks were recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Sheffield, Alabama. A very American album, indeed.  

For our cover story, we catch up with Noel Gallagher, formerly of Britpop titans Oasis. Many of the songs Noel wrote for Oasis (“Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” “Champagne Supernova”) have aged well and stand as high-water marks of that musical era. His new solo album is called Chasing Yesterday, a title that addresses the burden of making new art in the wake of having created something iconic. Gallagher, always a funny and frank interview, also offers some keen insights on the difference between American and British rock. “If Oasis were American, we would have been awful, because we all would have learned to play our instruments, and I would have been doing two-hour guitar solos.” And on the flip side, it’s okay for American band to go for the Brit sound … just don’t sing with a fake British accent.

–from the Editor’s note of the American Songwriter May/June 2015 edition

The story of the photo gracing the cover of The Blues Issue is as beguiling as its subject, Robert Johnson. 

The picture is considered to be the third verified photograph of Johnson, the Mississippi-born musician regarded as the King of the Delta Blues Singers. (Johnson is the man pictured on the left; on the right we see Johnny Shines, a Memphis-born bluesman who traveled and played with Johnson on and off throughout the ’30s.) 

Johnson is, of course, one of the more mysterious figures in American music. We know very little about his actual life; so little, in fact, that a Greek-sized myth took shape around him –namely, that he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for guitar brilliance.  

In his short life, the man from Hazlehurst, Mississippi made just 29 recordings. But even so, his small body of work would go on to alter the course of American folk and popular music. Johnson died at age 27, after being poisoned at the hands of a jealous husband whom he allegedly cuckolded, or so the story goes. 

The history of the “third Johnson photo”unfolds like detective fiction. Zeke Schein, a Robert Johnson enthusiast and guitar merchant who works at Matt Umanov Guitars in New York City’s West Village, stumbled on it back in 2005 while looking at vintage guitars on eBay. The photo was advertised as “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B King???”.  

Schein soon realized that neither of the gentlemen in the photo was King. The asymmetrical left eye and long, bony fingers of the figure on the left were tell-tale signs. This could very well be Robert Johnson, he thought to himself. Schein placed a bid on the photo and ended up acquiring it for $2,200. He still owns it to this day, though he assigned the copyright to the Johnson estate. “It’s their family and I thought it was the right thing to do,”he says.   

Over the last decade, there has been much dispute as to whether this is in fact Johnson pictured. Lois Gibson, one of the world’s leading forensic experts, issued a sworn affidavit in recent years attesting that it is the famous bluesman. Claud Johnson, Robert’s son, has always maintained that it is his father.  And even if this isn’t Johnson or Shines, the photo itself is an undisputed masterpiece, a pictorial tomb of the unknowns for the bluesmen of old. 

Based on his research, Schein now believes the photo was taken circa 1935, which would put it close to the time of the Johnson “cigarette photo.”Schein says the type of suit sported by Johnny Shines in this picture –a style similar to the “zoot suits”that became popular in the African-American community in the 1940s –was around much earlier than he previously thought. We do not know who took the photo or where it was taken and likely never will. Before he died in 1992, Shines said a woman named Johnnie Mae Crowder took a photo of him and Johnson in Arkansas, but that tidbit of trivia has not been corroborated.  

Johnson has been called the best of all blues guitarists by more than one authority, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton among them. Schein thinks the hype is well justified. “He was, in my opinion, the Jimi Hendrix of his time period,”he says. “I feel like Robert Johnson definitely borrowed heavily from people who came before him, but he put it out in a way that was his own voice, in my opinion …and it was the origins of what we came to accept as rock music.” In this issue, we look at the legacy of Robert Johnson and the work of the foundation. Robert’s grandson, Steven, is calling on today’s musicians to help carry the mantle of Johnson’s legacy. “We want those people that he inspired and those that talk so highly of him to reach out and become a part of what we’re doing now,”he says. 

Elsewhere in this issue, we take a liberal definition of the blues. In addition to profiling hardcore bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont region of Carolinas, and Texas and Chicago, we look at a few New Orleans jazz cats as well as singers like Billie Holiday, all of whom played the blues in one way or another.  

Today, the blues can be read as a living, breathing document of the plight of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. It’s “folk music”in the strictest sense of the term. But the blues is much more than that. It’s dance music, it’s jukebox music, and for contemporary blues artists like ‘Keb ‘Mo, it’s a vehicle for positive expression. So it’s not always about being down and out.

I first saw Ryan Adams perform during the Goldtour in the winter of 2002. It was in Munich at the Georg-Elser-Hallen, an ill-lit music venue named after a German carpenter who tried to kill Hitler in 1939.

 It was a good show. Bucky Baxter, a former member of Bob Dylan’s band and the father of Rayland, played steel guitar. I don’t know why but I heckled him. Watching a rock and roll show in a hall full of Germans is a strange experience. They are not there to boogie, they are not there to rage. Rock and roll appears a wholly alien creature.  

 By the time of that show, Adams had two solo albums under his belt, including his debut on Bloodshot Records, Heartbreaker, already regarded then as something of an indie classic. Two years before, he had disbanded his star-crossed country band Whiskeytown after ditching his homeland of North Carolina for New York.  

 In recent interviews Adams has been dismissive of his work in Whiskeytown, calling the songs “style appropriation” of a type of music – “country” – that he doesn’t really care for. But those albums are still revered by so many. There are no better songs about feeling disconnected in the South, and yet, his imaginative renderings of life in small-town North Carolina betray a deep sense of affection for the place, crooked though those renderings may be. 

 My favorite Ryan Adams songs are the ones where he’s singing about the South, usually from some place outside of it. His songwriter voice, at times, comes off like the Quentin Compson of the American songbook. He’s the Southern kid  living up North who has to explain the mysteries of the dark and bloody ground after being asked by a Yankee, “Why do you hate it?” 

Of course there are so many kinds of Ryan Adams songs. A quick trip through his extensive back catalog is a schizoid experience and unfolds like a survey course through a myriad ofstyles of American popular music, from rock to country to New Wave to metal to hardcore punk.

His new self-titled album was recorded and self-produced at his PAX-AM studio in Los Angeles and released on an imprint of the same name. It comes at you full throttle like a shot of ‘80s adrenaline, and makes you wanna pull out that yellow Sony Walkman and Vision Shredder skateboard that you got for Christmas in 1987 and just go to town. The album cover art itself is decidedly ’80s. It features a pixilated selfie and appears to mimic the cover art of 1984’s Reckless by Bryan Adams, his almost namesake, an album released on November 5 of that year, Ryan’s 10^th birthday.

 By all accounts Adams seems to be at a personal and professional high-point. His PAX-AM studio sounds like it’s his ideaof an idyllic paradise, an important psychic base from which he can make and produce music unfettered by the demands of the music industry. (Adams recently produced albums for Ethan Johns, Jenny Lewis and Fall Out Boy.) He seems to be following the path laid out by Jack White, an artist Adams recently praised for subverting the traditional model of the record industry with his Third Man Records operation.  

 In this issue, we take a good look at the music scene in Los Angeles. We visit some of the city’s best singer-songwriter venues, including the Grand Ole Echo, which hosts a Sunday old-timey jam that almost sounds like a back-porch hang in Nashville. We also stop in at the Hotel Café, an L.A. institution that has served as a key meeting place and clubhouse for musicians during the last several years.

 We take a look at the musical history of Laurel Canyon, the epicenter of the folk-rock scene in the late ’60s, a place that created a musical ideal that still holds sway for a number of young acts today. We talk with a number of L.A. writers about the business of penning tunes for film and television, including Jenny Lewis, Robert Schwartmann of Rooney, and Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne. Writing for the screen is a different beast and requires the writer to learn a new language. In the television world, those who can produce their own material stand at an advantage, as directors are looking to keep the payroll down to a minimum.

 And don’t forget to check out our annual Holiday Gear Guide. This year we feature nothing but guitars, most of which come in well under a $1,000. They won’t break the bank like so many that are fresh out of the factory. Happy holidays.

I made it up to Music Row

Lordy, don’t the wheels turn slow

Still, I wouldn’t trade a minute

I wouldn’t have it any other way

Just show me to the stage 

– Alan Jackson, “Chasing That Neon Rainbow” 

It’s a Sunday night and the party is in full-tilt on the rooftop of Tootsie’s. It’s early June, the humidity has broken for a brief spell and what feels like a Caribbean breeze blows through the streets. Two Australians come over and introduce themselves, country music enthusiasts from down under who are clearly enjoying their time in Mecca. A girl from Alabama is yelling “Roll Tide” and later reveals that her mom was a cheerleader at Bear Bryant’s funeral. This is still the Dirty South indeed. 

The band inside is belting out a few covers of ‘90s country. Songs like Sammy Kershaw’s “Queen Of My Double Wide Trailer,” Tim McGraw’s “Just To See You Smile,” and John Anderson’s “Straight Tequila Night” hold sentimental charm as they dominated radio for this Gen Xer’s middle-school years, back when peace and prosperity reigned and Reba still had a perm. 

Like many locals, I tend to avoid the crowds of lower Broadway, with the exception of trips to Robert’s Western World, the crown jewel of the strip that shines like the star of Bethlehem for vintage country enthusiasts. But this night at Tootsie’s has turned into an unexpected celebration. It was never part of the night’s agenda, but here we are, giddy as thieves, somewhere over the neon rainbow. 

My partner-in-crime, a Nashville native, has a sudden revelation amid the din. “Even though it’s country music, it’s cool that Nashville’s identity is about art,” she says. “There aren’t a lot of places you can say that about. Yeah, it’s pretty cheesy sometimes but it makes people happy.” 

It’s certainly making us happy at the moment, and there is even talk of catching a redeye to Rio de Janeiro on the credit card later that night. 

“Twenty years from now do you think you’ll regret going to Rio tonight?” she asks. We have clearly been seduced by the devil’s music, and all its attendant fanfare. 

****

Of course, Nashville has always been about more than twin fiddles and steel guitar. But country is the fulcrum of the town’s wider music scene. It created the infrastructure that made it possible for the rock, Americana and bluegrass scenes to flourish in recent years, and it is country music that still draws people the world over to this city.

These days it’s exceedingly difficult to make a living as a songwriter or musician. Yet the dreamers keep showing up to town, and reaching for the brass ring, despite a rising cost of living due in large part to the orgy of publicity Nashville has received in the national media. You have to be willing to waitress and work at coffee shops, or get a more traditional 9-to-5 office job in a cubicle. That is what it often takes.

In our Nashville songwriter’s guide, writer and musician Andrew Leahey navigates the nooks and crannies of the city’s songwriter scene. He takes us to The 5 Spot in East Nashville which hosts $2 Tuesdays as well as a monthly Country & Western series, where young musicians cover the greats of traditional country. He also checks in with Mike Grimes, owner and operator of The Basement, one of the town’s bestclubs, whichhosts New Faces night, a great launching pad for songwriters fresh off the boat. Wealso pays a visit Welcome To 1979, an all-analog recording studio that won’t break the bank and offers vinyl cutting services. Gruhn Guitars and Carter Vintage Guitars, which are almost like museums, have all your needs covered for vintage guitars. And lastly we take a long look at the history of the Ryman Auditorium, the old church that serves as the scene’s spiritual home. The venue is the Wailing Wall of traditional country and bluegrass, but it also holds a special place in the hearts of all who play there, regardless of genre.

Our cover subject Conor Oberst, whofinished his new album at Blackbird Studios here in Nashville, just graced the stage of the Ryman, where hometown heroesGillian Welch and David Rawlings join him onstage for an encore. Gil and Dave,who own Acony Records in East Nashville, then hopped down to Robert’s later that night and played with the house band. Just another night on lower Broadway.

Years ago, a friend from New Hampshire was in town visiting me and we ended up at Robert’s. “How can you ever be in a bad mood living here?” they asked.

“Well, I don’t do this every night,” I responded.

But, then again, we Nashvillians sort of do.

The first record I owned was a 45 of Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.” I played it repeatedly on my Fisher-Price turntable, a hideous looking orange and tan contraption that you could not break if you tried.

The year was 1984 and I was five years old, newly indoctrinated into the world of rock and roll. I also owned a copy of Weird “Al” Yankovic’s “Eat It,” preferring it to the Michael Jackson hit it parodied. Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” another early favorite, once inspired an insurrection at the kitchen table, with my brothers and I hurling English peas at the powers that be.

To this day, “The Longest Time” is still my favorite Billy Joel song. The music you fall in love with in your youth becomes part of your DNA. It never really leaves you and you return to it again and again, in good times and bad. All the music you absorb as an adult is subconsciously held up to those early songs you love. And it’s those sounds you reach for when you’re be-bopping around in your car on a Friday afternoon in spring.

In our cover story, Billy Joel talks to veteran music journalist Alan Light about his early days, his passion for songwriting and his return to live performance – he’s currently working his way through a historic, once-a-month residency at Madison Square Garden. He reveals that he started out trying to make it as a songwriter, and never had designs on becoming a performer. A friend suggested he record his own album and use that as a way to market his songs. The rest is history.

Joel has not released an album of new songs in more than twenty years; 1993’s River Of Dreams remains his swan song. He continues to write, mostly in the form of symphonic music, but it’s usually just for him. He says he feels no desire to try to crank out any more pop hits. You have to respect him for that. So many musicians and athletes can’t let go, hooked on the fleeting success they had in their glory days (his Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and 2 remains one of the top 10 selling albums of all time.)

Joel is of course very much a product of New York. So naturally this is the perfect issue for us to explore the city’s current songwriting scene, as well as its storied music history. Even if you’re never visited the Big Apple, or have no desire to ever live there, you cannot help but construct your own fantasies about the place, largely formed from the myriad novels, songs and films that have taken place there.

And even as you become aware that Manhattan is now only a playground for the rich, having snuffed out its middle class, in your mind that fantasy of making a living there still exists. It is still an iridescent world where sparks can strike on any corner. It’s still the place where Bob Dylan launched his career in 1961, where the Ramones helped create punk rock in 1974, and countless others – from Paul Simon to Talking Heads to Norah Jones to Vampire Weekend – got their start.

 In our NYC survival guide, we interview the latest crop of songwriters about their efforts to make it as working musicians, and the everyday challenges they face. Writer (and musician) Nick Loss-Eaton tells us that the city is always changing, and that it’s not even the same place it was five years ago. We look at the best singer-songwriter clubs in the five boroughs, where to rent studio space, and tell you the best way to go about booking gigs. Good luck on your own New York journey. We can’t wait to hear about your success.

​In New Orleans, jazz is king. This is, after all, the cradle of jazz itself, a town that was home to such titans of sound as Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, as well as the lesser known Buddy Bolden, a turn-of-the-century cornetist who left no recordings to the world but is said to have invented jazz when he created the Big Four beat – a variation on the standard marching band beat which added a healthy dose of razzle-dazzle to the mix. 

Music tourists the world over flock to the Crescent City for its jazz and brass bands, whose sounds inhabit the French Quarter and  Frenchman Street, day and night. You can hear the old standards at Preservation Hall, ground zero for Dixieland jazz, or skip over to Frenchman in the Marigny district and take in some hot new band at The Spotted Cat. 

It’s an instrumental town, to be sure, a Music City of a different sort. Three chords and the truth has never been the mantra there. The poets of the town took to page or stage, not song. But that’s slowly starting to change, thanks to a new crop of songwriters who are writing original music that draws heavily off the city’s rich musical heritage. It’s modern music steeped in the old ways. 

It’s a more succulent version of country than we have in Nashville, one that is more cabaret than honky-tonk. The distance between vintage country and New Orleans blues has never been that great. After all, it was Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, a New Orleans-bred blues musician, who mentored Hank Williams in Georgiana, Alabama, and taught him to play “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It,” a tune first associated with Buddy Bolden’s band. 

Hurray For The Riff Raff leads this charge of young guns in New Orleans. The group is the project of Alynda Lee Segarra, a Bronx native who left home as a teen and hopped trains as she travelled across the country, finally settling in the Crescent City years later. She cut her teeth busking in the French Quarter with several rag-tag music ensembles, starting out on Decatur Street and then graduating to the more esteemed corners of Royal, where the bigger dogs play. 

While logging time as a street performer, Segarra grew steadily as an artist, soaking up various styles of American music, as well as the lessons and wisdom of her musical peers. Street performance is crucial to the city’s musical lifeblood. Unlike other American cities, busking in New Orleans is not considered a step up from panhandling. It is an art form, a test of endurance, a feat of entrepreneurial skill. It’s a great education for any musician, where one can expand their musical palette and, if good enough, can hustle up enough dough for food and rent. 

Long-time New Orleans music writer Alex Rawls tells the story of Hurray For The Riff Raff’s rise and looks at Segarra’s songwriting approach. Her writing is steeped in tradition but, like Woody Guthrie and a young Bob Dylan, it takes on the topics of the day. She writes about Trayvon Martin, pens murder ballads from a feminist perspective, and tells stories about her life on the road and growing up in the Bronx’s Puerto Rican community. She connects the ghosts of old-timey American music with the Twittersphere. She is a troubadour with a smartphone.

 We also look at the singer-songwriter scene in New Orleans and the new roots-music clubs cropping up in the Bywater and Carrollton neighborhoods. And we talk to artists like Luke Winslow-King, a Michigan transplant signed to Bloodshot Records whose tunes sound like they were shot out of your great-grandfather’s Victrola. New Orleans native Andrew Duhon, whose most recent album The Moorings received a Grammy nomination, tells us about his experience carving out a career as a songwriter, one who plays regularly in New Orleans but also tours a great deal. 

Unlike some music cities, New Orleans is a town where a songwriter can develop on their own, away from the daily pressure of music business insiders and trend-setters. “You can get out of the machine [in New Orleans],” says Kristin Diable, a songwriter who moved to New Orleans from New York a few years ago, “or go right back into the machine.” For many artists, it’s the best of both worlds.

Editor’s note for January/February 2014 issue.

Brian Eno famously said that only 30,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band. The death of Lou Reed – the Velvets co-founder and solo artist who graced the cover of our Legends issue back in 2008 – has inspired countless tributes in recent weeks. Clearly, his influence extends well beyond what his sales figures might suggest.

In this issue, Reed tells Paul Zollo that his songs were beamed in from what he called his “permanent radio,” a non-stop barrage of music playing in his head. These sounds, both chaotic and tuneful, were set to Reed’s bare-bones street poetry, which told stories of characters living on the dirty boulevards of New York. Reed’s music crumbled walls, literally. Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright who later became president, once told Reed that his music helped pave the way for his presidency and the dismantling of communism in Czechoslovakia. How?

In the late ’60s, Havel smuggled one of the early Velvet albums back into his country. It began making the rounds through Prague’s underground arts scene, eventually landing in the hands of the psych-folk band Plastic People of the Universe, which fell hard for the Velvets and began taking its musical and ethical cues from them. The government eventually banned the Plastics from performing in public, and several of its members ended up jailed for subversion, an act that led to the publication of Charter 77 – a declaration of human rights published in the mid-’70s that was authored mostly by Havel. When the Communist government resigned from power, in ’89, the event was dubbed the Velvet Revolution. Not a bad legacy for a man who said he wrote songs simply for fun, because “he got a major-league kick out of it.”           

Reed once interviewed Havel during his presidency and asked him if art had the ability to change things. Havell said ‘No,’ but countered that it could change people. And it was up to people to take it from there.

* * * *

Uncle Tupelo is another band whose true legacy can only be measured by the depth of its influence. The songwriting team of Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy would release four albums over its career and split in 1994, never really graduating beyond the world of small clubs and college radio. But the group’s potent blend of vintage country and folk – married with the energy of hardcore punk – launched an entire movement and spawned a host of flannel-clad imitators. So much of what is now called Americana – middle-class indie music with strong folk roots – seems like it can traced back to Uncle Tupelo.

In our article, Stephen Deusner talks to Jay Farrar – one of the most inspired and idiosyncratic lyricists of the last quarter century – about the band’s newly reissued debut record, No Depression. Deusner paints a grim picture of Belleville, Illinois, the Rust Belt town that birthed this pre-Internet band of young twentysomethings, who were desperate to leave a place decimated by closed-up shops and factories. This urgency to fleeinforms every track on No Depression. Farrar and Tweedy would eventually get out. After the band’s split, Farrar went on to form Son Volt and Tweedy would start Wilco. You know the rest.

We also check in with Jimmy Webb, now the chairman of the Songwriters Hall Of Fame, who authored such classics as “Wichita Lineman” and “The Highwayman.” And for our cover story, Elvis Costello talks with Alan Light about his new album, Wake Up Ghost, a stellar collaboration with famed hip-hop band The Roots that finds the Englishman pushing his songs into new frontiers.

Editor’s note for Sept/Oct 2013 issue of American Songwriter.

Three years ago I saw Jason Isbell perform aboard the deck of a Carnival cruise ship. He played one muggy evening just as our ship made the turn around the northwest tip of Cuba, on its way to Grand Cayman island. The turnout for that night’s show was weak. Maybe five or six people on deck. I watched with two American Songwriter colleagues and a central Florida version of Snooki from Jersey Shore.

 Isbell did not seem to be enjoying himself. At one point during his set, he clamored for a drink, so we brought him a double Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. He then launched into “Goddamn Lonely Love” from his Drive-By Trucker days and said the song was about his ex-wife. He followed that with the amped-up “Go It Alone” from Here We Rest.  If you said “lonesome” was a theme that night, you would not be wrong.

 Isbell and his band the 400 Unit were one of a dozen or so acts playing the “Sailing Southern Ground cruise,” a four-day floating music festival put together by the Zac Brown Band. This quixotic, maritime voyage took us from Tampa to Grand Cayman and back over Labor Day weekend in 2010. American Songwriter pulled duty as the media sponsor.

 By day three AS had come to know the pangs of sea life. Snookies multiplied like Gremlins in the oversized hot tubs. Midnight buffet raids lost their magic. Guitar solos began to sound like caterwauls. One night we lost all grip on reality and conducted a series of on-camera interviews with hapless cruise-goers that we called “Experiments In Journalism.” Those videos have since been deleted from all recording devices.

 Isbell’s performances that week on the ship – I think we caught three or four – proved to be our only relief, and they would have been enough had we only heard “Decoration Day” and “Outfit.”

 The former Drive-By Trucker’s career has come far since that week on the Inspiration. His new album, Southeastern, has been met with near-universal acclaim. As a friend put it, “it just makes all other records look bad.” And as this issue goes to press, Isbell is about to play a sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium, the Mother Church of country music.

By Isbell’s account, his personal life seems to be at an all-time high, thanks in large part to a recent marriage and newfound sobriety. Southeastern documents – with a poet’s eye and without a trace of maudlin sap – his comeback story. It is not a confessional album per se. Themes of loss and redemption are woven into a larger tale, featuring a mosaic of characters that include killers on the run and cancer victims. There is a multi-dimensional quality to the writing that other songwriting “legends” would stumble in vain to capture.

I met the album’s producer, Dave Cobb, at a party recently and said closing track “Relatively Easy” was my personal favorite. He was surprised. “Really? That was the first song we cut. And those usually don’t make the album.”

The speaker in “Relatively Easy” recounts the suicide of a close friend, his own personal breakdown, and then curiously ponders the life of a stranger he passes in the street, wondering whether this man is alone or in love. He punctuates all this by telling his girl that “…  compared to people on a global scale / Our kind has had it relatively easy / Here with you, there’s always something to look forward to / My angry heart beats relatively easy.”

It’s a sentiment worth remembering.