Jason Isbell, Friend to the Vaccinated

In lower Manhattan last Friday evening, Jason Isbell, the songwriter and guitarist, told a story of a perfect night in New York. Isbell, who grew up in Alabama and lives near Nashville, was out with his friend Will Welch—an Atlantan who is now the global editorial director of GQ—and Welch led him to a bar on Sullivan Street where, that night, the music played was from the state of Georgia and most of the patrons were Southerners who’d come north and settled in the city.

Isbell wasn’t telling the story of that night over coffee or a drink. (He hasn’t touched alcohol in nine years.) He was onstage at the Rooftop at Pier 17, a concert venue up above the revamped South Street Seaport, with a Martin acoustic guitar slung around his neck, and his band, the 400 Unit, at the ready behind him. The weather was clear and cool; the crowd for the show, the first of two consecutive sold-out appearances by Isbell and the band, was about thirty-four hundred people—and many of us, I’d guess, were hearing live music in a venue that size for the first time since COVID-19 had arrived.

Concluding the story, Isbell waved broadly at the city in panorama: the Empire State Building, the suspension bridges, the office towers, a partial moon hovering over the three-masted iron-hulled ship berthed in the harbor. “And the best thing was,” he said, “we came out of that place and we didn’t have to be in Georgia. We were here in New York City!” He and the band then went into “Driver 8,” an R.E.M. song from 1985, which is included on their new record, “Georgia Blue.”

The record is a promise kept. Two days after the 2020 election, as votes were still being counted and the outcome remained uncertain, Isbell vowed, on Twitter, that if Joe Biden prevailed in Georgia, which hadn’t voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate in twenty-eight years, he would make a record of his favorite Georgia songs. He did, and he did. On “Georgia Blue,” Isbell and the 400 Unit, joined by guest artists—Brandi Carlile, Julien Baker, Adia Victoria, Béla Fleck—give fresh workouts to songs drawn from the deep well of music in the state. James Brown, Gladys Knight, and the Indigo Girls are represented; so are Now It’s Overhead, Vic Chesnutt, and Drivin N Cryin. The standout track is “Cross Bones Style,” a mesmerizing 1998 song by Cat Power, here featuring the fiddle playing and round-the-bend vocals of Amanda Shires (who is married to Isbell), set against Isbell’s and Sadler Vaden’s electric guitars.

“Georgia Blue” is casual, loose-limbed, and miscellaneous, but it makes a statement nevertheless. The album is an act of political will. (Proceeds go to three voting-rights organizations.). Eight years after his breakthrough record, “Southeastern,” it’s a further articulation of what might be called Isbell’s Southeastern sensibility: a sound and stance that draw less on geographic locale than on cultural affinity—that are fondly, even reverently, rooted in the music of the South, urban and rural alike, while standing apart from country-and-western’s romance with the heartland and nostalgia for the way things used to be. And the release comes at a moment when Isbell is involved in the struggle between geography and affinity that has emerged around COVID-19 vaccines and the rules associated with them.

Late in 2019, Isbell and the 400 Unit recorded “Reunions,” one of those this-century records that has the scope and impact of great rock albums of the seventies but without all the trite stuff about the end of innocence and the price of fame. (Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky,” from 2007, is another example.) Isbell and Shires then spent much of the pandemic on their farm, near Nashville, with their daughter, Mercy. He did more than tend to the property and the 1959 Gibson Les Paul he’d acquired after the passing of its previous owner, Ed King, who played with Lynyrd Skynyrd. He promoted the release of “Reunions” on his custom label, Southeastern Records. He grieved the loss of John Prine, the cherished singer-songwriter, who had become a close friend, and who died of COVID-19 in April, 2020. Isbell spent the better part of three months in Oklahoma, filming a role in Martin Scorsese’s next picture, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” As the pandemic eased—and before the Delta variant spread widely—he played a cameo role in “Billions,” the Showtime series about a hedge-fund magnate and the U.S. Attorney who tries to take him down, and gave a performance, with cameras rolling, at City Winery’s new venue at a West Side pier. That was the first indoor show he’d played since the virus struck.

Meanwhile, he and his management had put together a tour of outdoor shows in the South and Midwest, and planned a set of COVID-19 protocols to be followed. The band and crew, all vaccinated, would be tested daily and would wear masks in close quarters. Audience members would be required to show proof of vaccination or of a recent negative test. Adverse reaction was swift. Isbell was slagged on social media, and he slagged back: to one woman who vowed she’d never see his shows or buy his records, he replied, “Sounds great!” and invited her to continue not to. Several performances had to be cancelled; a show in Brandon, Mississippi, was moved to Memphis after local officials called the vax-or-test protocols “wholly unreasonable.” Fans requested refunds and griped when they were turned down. Isbell’s Twitter feed became a bulletin board for a swiftly coalescing movement of pro-vax performers, as Isbell retweeted their messages about protocols for their own shows. Isbell edited his Twitter handle to read “friend to children, the vaccinated, and those with certain underlying medical conditions.” He conducted a video interview with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as if to engage the proudly self-reliant Southeasterners whose resistance to COVID-19 vaccination has become an outlook all its own.

On Saturday, I went to the performers’ area at Pier 17 before that night’s show. A masked road manager met me at the elevator. There was a testing station set up at a folding table, and as I waited for the nurse, who travels with the band, several of the musicians and crew members started chatting about Dover Street Market on Lexington Avenue, where one of them had just bought new sneakers. All were wearing masks. The nurse arrived; I self-swabbed, took a seat, and waited. The road manager estimated that they’d tested about a thousand local venue employees that summer—“and, yes, two people did test positive.”

Ten minutes later—test: negative—I was shown in. Isbell, in a denim suit, sparkling kicks, and a mask, was just finishing his own test. He settled on a couch near a floor-to-ceiling window, with the ship and the harbor behind him.

“It’s puzzling to me, I know it is to a lot of people,” he said. “We were in this terrible situation, so many people were getting sick and dying, people couldn’t go to work, people couldn’t send their kids to school. And now the miracle that we all prayed for is here—we have vaccines—and so many people are reluctant to take them. It’s really disheartening, but I’m at a point where I’ve lost my patience.” He sighed, and corrected himself. “Not lost my patience. But I’m just tired of waiting on the people who can get the vaccine but won’t get the vaccine. Now, I still obviously feel for people who legitimately can’t, who are immunocompromised or definitely the kids. I’ll be so much more comfortable when my six-year-old can get it. But if you’re somebody who has the option of being vaccinated and you haven’t done it yet, I’m kind of over it: I don’t care to consider you as a part of our group anymore. Because we have to move on. We’ve got to keep going.”

The vaccine divide runs through families and neighborhoods in the Southeast. This weekend, Isbell’s manager, Traci Thomas, will be married in Alabama, where Isbell and the 400 Unit will headline a two-day music festival. Isbell will give her away at the wedding. Her two siblings won’t be there, though, because she is requiring vaccination, and they are not vaccinated. Isbell himself has family members who haven’t seen his daughter since 2019 because they won’t get a vaccine. “I understand that they don’t know who to trust,” he said, ruefully. “Still, it’s been long enough. We have given enough reasons. They have enough evidence.”

In his music, Isbell crosses great divides: Leonard Cohen and Tom T. Hall are among his musical kin, and two of his contributions to “Georgia Blue” are homages to Otis Redding and Duane Allman—singer and guitarist, Black and white, each taken by sudden death in his mid-twenties. During our conversation, I suggested that he straddles borders, and he pushed right back, pointing out that the expression suggests political ambivalence. “I’m not a border-straddling musician,” he said. “I’ve made pretty clear which side of the border I’m on.” It’s true. He has. And yet he begins his live shows by saying, “We’re from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for the most part”; he’d introduced himself as a “country person” the night before; and the music he makes can’t help but evoke the part of the world where the country-music business and conservative politics are in synch, the rebel flags still fly, and the culture war against COVID-19 vaccination is the new Lost Cause. With that story he’d told about Georgia-in-Greenwich-Village in mind, I asked him whether he still feels at home in the Southeast.

“I still feel at home there, but that’s because I have . . . fortified my home,” he said, laughing as if to indicate that he meant the term figuratively. “I kind of have an island in Tennessee now, where we live, and we’re surrounded by people who are fairly similar to us: it’s a lot of musicians who don’t want to live in the city.” He described the experience of going out to see a show in Nashville, say, at Third Man Records, Jack White’s state-of-the-lost-art vintage recording studio and live-music space.“There’s a bunch of cool, hip kids over there,” he said. “And Jack White’s there, or something like that; and then you go outside and there’s a bachelorette party with cowboy hats on and they’re drinking while they’re driving a Pedal Tavern. People are jumping out of the way and Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk is on the corner, and it’s, like, ‘Oh, shit! I’m in Nashville!’ ” About the U.S. senator Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, who has denounced the “left-wing hysteria” surrounding the pandemic, he told me: “She’s the most embarrassing senator in America, and that’s our representative!”

The night before, he had thanked the people in the audience profusely for getting vaccinated and thus making it possible for him to perform live—“at a time when I really needed to play some shows.” I asked him to describe precisely the need he has that live performance satisfies. “It’s something that reminds me of what I have in common with strangers,” he said. “And that’s really important for my mental health, because I’m sort of a natural isolator, and I was an only child.” He added: “I need something to remind me that people aren’t that different from me.” He looked out the big floor-to-ceiling window. “There’s also the joy and the satisfaction that I get from working the machines: leading a band, playing the guitar, singing, testing myself, having to retain that focus. . . . It’s kind of like the opportunity to fly the plane every day—like, a pilot really loves to be in control and be up in the sky. And that’s kind of how it feels when you’re on stage.”

Showtime was a few minutes away. We checked our phones. I’d got a notification that Giancarlo Stanton, playing for the Yankees against the Red Sox in a crucial game, had hit a go-ahead grand slam. Isbell had got a notification of another kind. “Hey, I’m negative,” he said.