Former Drive-By Trucker and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Jason Isbell hooks up with The 400 Unit to bring us a fresh take on The Nashville Sound. In the spring, Jason Isbell marked an anniversary with a quietly contented post on social media. “This week marks 10 years since I parted ways with the Drive-By Truckers,” he wrote. “I weigh one pound less than I did then. Pretty proud of that.” As we meet in London, he laughs when I bring it up. “Yeah, at 38 I weigh less than I did at 28,” he says in his usual soft tones. “For an American, that’s tough, because we all just balloon. I guess the point of that is I’m in better shape than I was then, and I feel younger than I felt 10 years ago.” The statistic is a measure of how low Isbell’s life had dipped, during his days with the esteemed southern rockers of Athens, Georgia. But it also delineates his personal recovery and professional evolution ever since. His unceasingly admirable new album The Nashville Sound, the first since 2011 on which he shares the billing with his band the 400 Unit, comes shimmering into the long glow cast by two colossal predecessors, 2013’s Southeastern and the double Grammy-winning Something More Than Free in 2015. The Nashville Sound is produced, like those two forerunners, by the apparently omnipresent (and quite possibly omniscient) Dave Cobb. Just as he has done with Chris Stapleton, A Thousand Horses and others, he encouraged a vibe of spontaneity on what is at times a more muscular, yet still reflective, body of work. “A lot of this is live, even vocals,” confirms Isbell. “Dave’s got me doing that and I like it once it’s done. It’s kind of nerve-wracking as it’s going along, because I used to take two or three days to sing everything and try to get it perfect. I think that sucked some of the soul out of it. So Dave cajoled me into keeping some live vocals, and it works good, because then I don’t have to go back and sing a bunch of crap at the end of the sessions.” Isbell is on a roll, and he is cautiously but undeniably upbeat about it, acknowledging the accelerated awareness that now greets his excursions to the very core of modern-day Americana. “It started with Southeastern, and then Something More Than Free carried that forward,” he says. “That’s great, that’s what you want. It takes some adjusting, but all the problems are good ones. “The rooms got nicer, the audiences got bigger and I was able to buy better guitars and hear myself every night. All the things you dream about. Having a private bathroom before the show. You’d be amazed how far that goes towards your happiness on a day to day basis,” he adds drily. “So now, if I’ve got my family with me, I can tour. However long they want me to tour, I’ll tour, as long as my family’s around, and that’s a great thing.” It’s a Family Affair Isbell married fellow musician Amanda Shires in 2013, and their baby daughter Mercy Rose celebrates her second birthday in September. We’re speaking during a brief London sojourn to talk up his new album and, far more importantly, for him to meet up with Amanda as she opens on tour for John Prine. The year Shires was pregnant, and then gave birth to Mercy Rose, Jason stayed home all year. The work-life balance is in good order, which is way more than you could say about his hard-living past. Born in Green Hill, Alabama, to teenage parents, he emerged from a church-drilled upbringing to bust out of college and get a publishing deal at Muscle Shoals’ celebrated soul headquarters, FAME Studios. Having befriended its resident bass-playing figurehead David Hood, Isbell got to know his son Patterson, leading Jason to join the already-admired band that Hood Jr had co-founded, southern alt-rockers Drive-By Truckers. Isbell was with them between 2001 to 2007 and appeared on albums such as Decoration Day, The Dirty South and A Blessing And A Curse, he gradually established himself among their writing team, and as Hood’s co-vocalist, with songs of bloodied rawness that reflected his own increasing reliance on chemical and alcoholic recreation. Have a listen to Never Gonna Change, for example, on 2004’s The Dirty South, for a tale of black-eyed peas and shotgun shells that tastes like a mouthful of southern grit, and which reflected an unswerving hedonism. “You can throw me in the Colbert County jailhouse, you can throw me off the Wilson Dam,” he wrote. “But there ain’t much difference in the man I wanna be and the man I really am,” he added, with the confidence of Cash and the defiance of Haggard. “I’m really happy that I was in that band and I’m proud of the work that we did,” he says as he casts a thought on his old behaviour. “I have a really good memory, and I’ve recently discovered that it can be traced to certain traumatic events in my childhood. “I needed to remember very specific details, for reasons I won’t go into, but I trained myself to have a very strong memory. I’ve played those [Truckers] songs so much and toured so much, that the ones that I still perform, I try to put myself in that place every night, because I don’t ever want to go through the motions. “So I still remember what the whisky tasted like, I still remember the hangovers. They’re interesting to me now,” he says, with an almost scholarly diversion, “because if you’d never had anything to drink and you woke up feeling like that, you would think you were dying. You would go to the emergency room immediately. But when you’re hungover, you’re like ‘I deserve this.’ That’s pretty incredible.” Such is the learned reflectiveness of the older Isbell. “But I still remember all those things, and I’m glad that