Review | Troubadour on the Mend, by His Lonesome

Luminous Singer-Songwriter-Guitarist Jason Isbell Returns to Santa Barbara at the Arlington, with a New Solo Album and New Family Status in Tow and in Song

By Josef Woodard Mon Mar 24, 2025 | 02:28pm

Musicians are people too. They don’t live in a vacuum or beyond the domain of life’s vicissitudes, and that human touch can color their creative output, especially in the case of singer-songwriters — as witnessed by some bold examples on Santa Barbara’s recent concert scene. The stunning and recent Granada Theatre appearance by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings was part of these neo-folkies first tour since the COVID blockade and the 2020 destruction-by-tornado of their Nashville home studio Woodland. To celebrate their rebirth, their strong new album was named Woodland.

A week later, much beloved and sad song specialist Jason Isbell showed up, bandless, at the Arlington Theatre on the promotional road for his first official voice-and-guitar solo album, Foxes in the Snow. The backdrop to his current story, occasionally touched on in his new batch of songs, is his recent divorce from musician Amanda Shires, with whom he has a 9-year-old daughter. This tour stop may have had an extra helping of poignancy for the Santa Barbara audience, having voyeuristically watched the then-apparently happy couple performing in their own home studio, as part of the COVID-era “House Calls” streamed performance series in 2020 presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L).

But his latest Arlington show (also an A&L presentation) was anything but a teary-eyed songfest — or at least any more than usual for the eloquent sage of the sad song. The Alabama-born Isbell, 46, is a witty poet of song, with just the right amount of twang in his thang. And he can act, as Martin Scorsese recognized by casting him as a morally questionable character in Killers of the Flower Moon. Onstage, Isbell explained that he wrote many of his new songs while killing time in his trailer between takes (he also relayed a funny yarn about Leonard DiCaprio’s advice for what to do in the ample free time in the small town Oklahoma location: hang out in the Walmart. “But I worked at Walmart,” Isbell joked.).

Isbell’s latest go-it-alone project provides further proof of a self-evident truth: In the ranks of his so-called Americana world, he is a triple threat, a stellar songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist who refuses to stay locked into cliches of the genre. Virtually every song at the Arlington came equipped with a custom guitar riff, hook or approach, just off to the left of standard practice folk/country/rock guitarisms.

Jason Isbell, UCSB Arts & Lectures performance at the Arlington Theatre, March 15, 2025 | Photo: David Bazemore

In solo mode, Isbell can convey the spirit and energy of songs by his band the 400 Unit (so named for a mental treatment facility in Florence, Alabama), which kicked up the best kind of dust at the Arlington in 2022 and whose songbook was a source for much of the recent concert’s setlist. Among the highlights of that list were “King of Oklahoma,” “Cast Iron Skillet,” and “If We Were Vampires,” a witty take on the shelf life of a love affair, now tinged with fresh meaning.

On the whole, Isbell’s set served as an impressive and broad survey of his songbook to date, periodically steering things back to his present tense real life circumstances. In the new song “Gravelweed,” for instance, he sings the refrain: “I was a gravelweed, and I needed you to raise me/I’m sorry the day came when I felt like I was raised/And now that I live to see my melodies betray me/I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.”

Returning for a three-pack encore portion of the evening, Isbell paid respects to a notable hero and influence, John Prine (“Storm Windows”), framed by moving songs from the Isbell new album, “Ride to Robert’s” and the finale of “True Believer.” That song is one of a few from the new batch which Isbell has admitted a direct reference to his shifted family circle, with the stinging chorus “All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it/There’s a letter on the nightstand I don’t think I’ll ever read/Well, I finally found a match, and you kept daring me to strike it/And now I have to let it burn to let it be.”

Then again, Isbell is an experienced and versatile enough songwriter to understand the fine and coarse line separating personal truth and fictional fantasy — sometimes including both within a single song. As he coyly told the crowd early in the show, “This show is not organized according to what’s true and what’s not. It’s not like in the old video stores, with drama, comedy and horror films in different sections.”

Once again, in this latest Arlington encounter, Isbell spoke the loudest in terms of musical truths and the impressionistic stuff of poetry. Never mind the street level realities.