“I quit talking to myself and listening to the radio a long, long time ago,” Isbell offers on “Traveling Alone” before confessing, “so high the street girls wouldn’t even take my pay, said come see me on a better day.” The song itself is a weary tune, begging for companionship. In its own way, Southeastern marks a declaration of maturity for Isbell, a setting aside of foolish behaviors and personal demons for an attempt to create a larger, more peaceful world. His sobriety dovetails nicely with his new marriage and a number of the songs on the album are love songs devoted to his new bride, fiddle player, Amanda Shires. “Home was a dream, one I’d never seen until you came by” he croons on “Cover Me Up.” However, subject matter is far from the only thing that Amanda Shires brings to the table on Southeastern. Her beautiful fiddle playing brings a world of plaintive beauty to most of the tracks. She adds a tone of warmth and solace, to “New South Wales,” as well as being the other half of the story of us it encapsulates. “Here we sit across the table from each other, thousand miles from both our mothers, barely old enough to rust” and before going on to warn “the sin they call cocaine costs you twice as much as gold.” It is the most cohesive and enjoyable song on the album. In between the quiet and more contemplative notes,Isbell still finds the occasional moment to rock. The best of these is “Super 8 Motel,” which finds him looking back ruefully at his misspent youth.
Don Henley once observed that it took him over two decades to get the perspective necessary to write “The Heart of the Matter.” Southeastern stands as Jason Isbell’s personal “The Heart of the Matter.” It is an album that processes and entire life of mistakes through the lens of new found knowledge and forgiveness. It makes for a compelling album that manages to perfectly straddle the line between the personal and the professional. Many of the people who listen to the album will not be able to relate to being so coked out of their minds that even the hookers are turning them down. But everyone has something in their past they have made a hard earned peace with. Jason Isbell’s Southeastern is the perfect soundtrack to that peace.
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