If there’s one thing Jason Isbell knows, it’s how to write a sad-ass country song. Beginning with his tenure as a rambunctious youth in Drive-By Truckers, he found a way to make even the Tennessee Valley Authority heartwrenching. His excesses drove him from the Southern rock giants and ultimately landed him at rock-bottom, rebounding with his solo opus, 2013’s Southeastern. Songs about cancer-stricken barflies and covering up in a cold house established Isbell as a singular voice in the burgeoning alt-country movement. Today, singer/songwriter/guitarist/400 Unit bandleader Jason Isbell turns 44 and we’re celebrating his birthday with his saddest song ever written.
In 2016, Isbell and the folks at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert cut a commercial for his 180-minute, four-chord epic that you should probably know by now is fake. The song covers such staple sad country topics as: “unemployment, the troops, reliable trucks gone done breakin’ down, the devil’s brown liquor, the no-good banker man knocking on the door with papers, and more.” Still not convinced? Try to read this lyric without reaching for the Kleenex and a bottle of Southern Comfort: “So I’ll raise up a whiskey with my unemployed hands / While the banker man knocks on the door. / I can’t drive to escape him with my broke down truck / And the troops are all fighting their war.”
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Other “cartoonishly tragic down-home scenarios” include ailing family dogs/dying family dogs/ten thousand dead family dogs, long-suffering single mothers, tragic cannon accidents, a father outliving his lawnmower, and many, many more. The track will be available on triple cassette and Tidal, “the two saddest music formats known to mankind.”
“Anytime someone tells me I write sad songs I tell them you should listen to Vic Chesnutt,” Isbell said last year on KEXP. “Because clearly, you’ve never listened to Vic Chesnutt.”
Happy birthday Jason Isbell! Enjoy a snippet from his saddest song ever below and revisit Live For Live Music‘s review of his latest batch of brilliantly depressing Americana, 2020’s Reunions.
Jason Isbell Releases The Saddest Song Ever
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