Quotes from Jason Isbell

Sleeping on people's floors when you're 22 is fine. But when you get your life in order and have a family you want to keep and a certain level of health, touring bigger means you can keep going for longer.

I didn't know what to expect when we first started touring behind 'Southeastern' because you don't want to lull anybody to sleep or lose their attention. But it's really been incredible how the crowds seem to be just as excited for the slow, sad songs as they are for the old rockers.

Right when I started touring, there was this wariness I had of the world outside of my small town. But I'm not that person anymore, and I was never completely that person.

Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you're not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it's understood.

I need enough room to eventually throw a baseball with a child; that's all the yard I need. That's all I want.

I write pretty much year-round, but I definitely do more when a deadline is looming.

Any narrative, whether it's fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that's the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It's a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.

I think I affiliate with somebody like Ben Howard. He's quite a bit younger than I am, but I think what he's doing is in a very similar tradition.

When I was playing with the Truckers, a lot of really good things happened. And we had a good trajectory for a long time. For that kind of a band, for the kind of music that I've always made, we had a lot of success, I think.

A lot of people make records where there are a couple songs worth listening to and you skip through the rest, and I don't want to do that because those records bore me pretty bad.

If you're going to document your own journey, the jokes work better in the first person, just like the stories do.

For any writer, a red pen is such a trigger.

Every time I'd get a job, they'd say: 'You'll be good at loading trucks.' I couldn't explain that there was more to me than carrying things.

I think a lot of people are scared, and I know I was scared to get sober, at least using this as an excuse; 'I don't want to be one of those sober people.' And I don't think you have to be. I think you can be one of those people who happens to be sober.

I've always wanted to pull off 'No One is to Blame' by Howard Jones. I've done that a couple times in solo shows, but I can't figure out how to do that with a full band and make it work.

When I was writing 'Southeastern,' I'd just recently gotten sober. For me, that was a major turning point in my life. It changed things I did on a day-to-day basis. My whole routine was upended. It took me some time to get used to that and figure out how do I keep myself entertained.

A lot of the world turns into checklists for me when I'm on the road. Like, OK, this person's alive, this person's fed, this person's good. Soundcheck is done. Everything becomes a checklist except for the actual show.

Songs like 'Outfit' and 'Decoration Day' and 'Dress Blues,' those were good songs, but the output wasn't as consistent in those days.

The more you read, the better you are at writing, no matter what you're writing. A lot of songwriters miss that and don't see the connection there, and I've always felt like you're more able to communicate if you have a bigger toolbox to work with.

I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of good songwriters, and I try to actually work on the craft of writing a song rather than just leaving it up to inspiration.

The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.

The south is very focused on family... the musical heritage of Muscle Shoals especially and the bands from the region.

The fact that I have a Southern accent and write about a lot of rural things leads people to put me in the country category.

My wife and I both grew up with parents who were very young. Her mom was, I think, 17 or 18 when she was born; my mom was 15 when I was born. So, as we got older, we started thinking a lot about that - about the time that those people missed because we came along when we did and because they devoted so much of their lives to taking care of us.