My Life In 35 Songs, Track 27: “Speed Trap Town” by Jason Isbell

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“Everybody knows you in a speed trap town.”

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a songwriter.

I have this vivid memory of when I was 6 or 7 years old, getting ready for bedtime and humming melodies to myself, making up my own songs. A little later, it was me and my brother and sister in the basement, trying to be a “band,” even though all we had was an extremely loud drum set, a dinky 41-key keyboard with no amplification, and a homemade guitar built out of 2x4s and fishing line. And then, eventually, it was me in eighth grade, scrawling “lyrics” in my journal.

Despite many attempts, though, songwriting remained, for years, the most elusive skill I ever tried my hand at. It was harder than singing, harder than running, harder than what I was learning in my math or English classes at school. Maybe the problem was that I had nothing to say. Or maybe I was just so immersed in music that every attempt I made to write something of my own just came out sounding like a pale imitation of one of my influences. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that I wrote a song I was legitimately proud of, and I don’t know if that ever would have happened had it not been for Jason Isbell.

Isbell had already had a whirlwind career by the time I caught up with him. He’d gotten his start in 2001, joining the southern rock band Drive-By Truckers for a tour in support of their appropriately titled LP Southern Rock Opera, and then sticking around as a guitar player and occasional songwriter and singer for the next three albums. But I’d never heard a Drive-By Truckers song before, so I had no reason to have heard of Isbell through that channel. He’d also flown under my radar for his first three solo LPs, recorded between 2007 and 2011, which I don’t recall ever hearing or reading a single word about when they were actually current concerns in the music world.

No, I didn’t discover Isbell until 2013, when he released his breakthrough solo LP Southeastern. I still remember pressing play on that album for the first time, and audibly gasping when the chorus rolled around on the first song, “Cover Me Up.” That track was an epic love song that Isbell had written for his then-wife Amanda Shires, but it also offered a detailed, achingly honest account of Isbell’s struggles with alcoholism and his hard-fought road to sobriety. Southeastern, by serving up a stirring redemption story, did what none of Isbell’s other albums could do and broke him through to a whole new audience.

Isbell hit his stride at the right time, both for me and for the music world at large. Southeastern dropped just a few months after I graduated from college, during a time where I was yearning to hear fresh sounds from unfamiliar artists. Writing about Southeastern in 2023 for its 10th anniversary, I explained how my dissatisfaction with that time in my life – stemming from my difficulties landing a job and finding my footing in a brand-new chapter – temporarily turned me off to virtually all the music I’d ever loved.

“Every song or album just reminded me of better times, times when I’d felt more hopeful, more happy, more alive,” I explained. “Every familiar artist that had once felt like an old friend now felt like someone who was mocking my ineptitude at finding a way to get on with my life.”

Southeastern was the perfect antidote to my poison-pilled musical stasis. Isbell had a certain sonic kinship with artists I loved – a pre-cancellation Ryan Adams was the immediate point of reference that came to mind – but he was also bringing something new to the table. While his songs carried a lot of sadness, I heard a unique resilience in the way he sang. He delivered his songs with a little bit of regret, a little bit of self-effacing humor, and a real sense that he wasn’t going to hide anything to make himself come across better. While a lot of the songs told character-driven stories about other people – many of them fictional – Isbell sure didn’t shy away from portraying himself as a sloppy, aggressive drunk on songs like “Super 8” and “Traveling Alone,” and I found his candid confessions to be wholly refreshing. At a time in my life when I was feeling pretty low about myself, it was comforting to hear someone writing transmissions from the gutter.

As for the music world at large, Isbell arrived right when the country music ecosystem seemed primed for an alternative to the mainstream. 2013 was the year that bro country really took off into the ether, thanks to the success of the inescapable crossover hit “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line. That song kickstarted a new pop-heavy, male-dominated trend in the country music world, and soon, everyone from Sam Hunt to Thomas Rhett to Luke Bryan would be following in its footsteps. Perhaps because of that trend, though, the mid-2010s saw a rise in popularity for country music counter-programming, with artists like Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe, Tyler Childers, and Turnpike Troubadours developing big followings a little left of the mainstream. Isbell fit into that movement, and soon took the role as its arguable torchbearer.

Over the course of a decade, Isbell gradually became my platonic ideal of a songwriter. It wasn’t just that I liked his songs, or even that I related to them. The more music I heard from him, the more I marveled at his consistent ability to tug at something soul-deep in me. The simple way to put it is that a lot of his songs were tearjerkers: “Elephant,” a wrenching song about watching a friend succumb to cancer; “Relatively Easy,” about finding optimism even in the darkest times; “Children of Children,” an epic tribute to the massive sacrifices our parents make for us; “If We Were Vampires,” about the potency that mortality lends to lifelong romances; “Letting You Go,” a lullaby about envisioning your child’s wedding day, far in the future but closer than you think; “Cast Iron Skillet,” about just how stupid and petty and devastating prejudices can turn out to be; “True Believer,” about divorcing the one person you thought would be in your life forever.

There’s so much more to Isbell’s songs than emotional manipulation, though. The world is full of sad songs, but Isbell’s works are deeper than that – more human, more existential. The more I listened to his music, the more I wanted to get inside the songs and see what made them tick.

That desire hit a fever pitch in the summer of 2015 when Isbell released his follow-up to Southeastern, called Something More Than Free. At the time, I was getting more enamored with country and Americana music, and I was also in the midst of trying to write and record my first-ever album. The previous fall, for the first time ever, I’d written a song I liked enough to play for other people. When my grandfather passed away on October 2, 2014, the only thing I could think to do was pick up my guitar and try to find a way to honor him and everything he’d meant to me. My grief over losing him proved so loud that it drowned out everything else. For once, I didn’t hear all my influences swirling around in my head, and I didn’t imitate them. For once, I couldn’t hear my inner voice second-guessing every lyric or melodic choice. And by the end of the afternoon, I had a song called “Carry It Forth” that I genuinely loved, and that spoke to his monumental presence in my life. Nine days later, I performed it at his wake, somehow staving off tears until the final chord.

As the sun rose on 2015, my resolution was to follow the path that losing my grandpa had illuminated and write my first album. I spent that year enamored with songwriters, and my end-of-the-year list reflected that obsession: Butch Walker’s Afraid of Ghosts and Chris Stapleton’s Traveller, both albums written for the singers’ respective recently departed fathers; the Dawes album All Your Favorite Bands, where frontman Taylor Goldsmith came into his own as one of modern music’s preeminent observers of the human condition; Noah Gundersen’s Carry the Ghost, a record that grapples with religion, spirituality, and identity in richly complex ways; Kacey Musgraves’ Pageant Material, full of songs that felt lightweight and simple and effortless, but which were actually as tightly-wound and flawlessly constructed as any Max Martin hit. These albums and others may have caught my attention in any circumstance, but they felt especially notable to me that year, as I tried to get to the root of what I thought made a song transcendent.

Perhaps no album was more central to that search than Something More Than Free, the new record from Isbell. I still remember my first listen to that album, feeling my jaw drop a little more with every subsequent track due simply to the songcraft on display. A lot of the songs seemed to group together into thematic clusters, but to tackle their themes in entirely different ways. Take “24 Frames,” “Flagship,” and “How to Forget,” all songs about marriage that eschew any and all cliches in favor of thornier conversations on the effort that goes into making a relationship last…or not last. Or take “If It Takes a Lifetime,” “The Life You Chose,” and the title track, all character studies about blue collar types told with three dimensions and a hefty dose of empathy.

“I write about people I know,” Isbell told me that spring, when I somehow wrangled an interview with him for AbsolutePunk.net. “I write about things that I’m close to, things that I have experience with. I try to write about people whose lives might be a little bit more challenging than mine on a day-to-day basis, because, for the most part, I have it pretty easy. I try to challenge myself to work hard and be as creatively relevant as possible. But that’s not a very difficult task compared to getting up every morning at 5:00 and going and digging ditches all day. So I try to stay in touch with people like that, and I try to write the stories about them sometimes, because I grew up around those folks. I still know a lot of ’em. And not everybody can find a way out of that. Sometimes you just work for the sake of being able to get back to work the next day.”

My favorite song on Something More Than Free, immediately, was “Speed Trap Town.” I loved it because it took a title concept that you could so easily see popping up in a shallow mainstream country song, but imbued it with so much life and complexity and sorrow. In the song, the narrator’s father has just passed away, and he’s reflecting on the relationship the two of them shared together. It quickly becomes apparent that the dad wasn’t such an upstanding guy, and that his passing has finally given our narrator the clean slate he needs to leave the place that always held him down. It’s a song that ingeniously plays with all your assumptions about country music motifs – fathers and sons, hometowns, grief over a family member’s passing – and then twists them a little bit more with every passing verse. It reminds me of Springsteen’s Nebraska, because just like many of those songs, it’s so thematically rich and plot-heavy that it could easily be fodder for a film script.

The empathy in Isbell’s songs – and his unique gift for making his audience feel that empathy in incredibly deep ways – comes down to details. In “Speed Trap Town,” it’s the cheap roses from the supermarket, the compassion from strangers that for some reason makes you cry, the breakdown in the parking lot. It’s the Thursday night high school football game, the home team’s defeat, and how that failure mirrors the narrator’s own broken-down spirit – “a boy’s last dream and a man’s first loss,” as Isbell puts it. It’s the cold, sterile feeling of the ICU at Christmastime, waiting for the inevitable moment when your loved one slips away, but still just…waiting; waiting for someone to die. It’s the flashback to the moment the illusion of the father got shattered, “when that girl who wasn’t mama caused his heart attack.” It’s the hazy drive out of town, stuck between heartbroken and liberated, the quick couple hours of shuteye in the pickup truck, and the cheap gas station cup of coffee. And it’s where our hero ultimately finds a fresh start, “a thousand miles away from that speed trap town.”

In the song, and in all Isbell songs, it’s the sharp-relief details that make the music, that bring the listener closer and closer to the characters before this sly, meticulous songwriter silently sticks a knife into your heart. There aren’t many platitudes or cliches in Isbell’s songs, because he knows better than to waste valuable real estate on words that aren’t valuable.

In an interview he gave around the release of 2017’s The Nashville Sound, Isbell said his best advice to young songwriters was for them to find a way to put lots of “very personal, very private, very small, very particular details into songs,” because only then are you “revealing enough of yourself” and getting “your whole person and who you really are” into your work.

“That’s as close to unique as you can possibly get,” he said. “Because everyone’s put all the chords together in all the mathematical ways that they can possibly be put together, and they’ve rhymed everything that can be rhymed.”

“Early on, I thought, ‘This is too specific. This is too much about me. Nobody’s gonna latch onto this,’” he added, about his detailed songwriting. “Well, after a while, I started noticing that’s what [listeners] really liked, because that’s when people say, ‘How did you know this about my life?’ And then the ultimate service that it does for me is it reminds me of how similar I am to other people in the world. And I think ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’ can kind of be lumped into: the good art reminds you of your similarities and the bad art reminds you of your differences.”

I won’t claim to have ever written as good a song as Isbell’s 50th best song, but I took a lot of Isbell’s advice when I got into songwriting, and what came out of it were two albums I love. I made both those records, 2016’s A Way to Get Back Home and 2017’s Life in the Rearview Mirror, in the living room of the first house my wife and I ever owned together, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I made them, mostly, on spare weekends when she was traveling for work and I had a lot of time to myself. And I wrote songs that were extremely personal and extremely detailed. I wrote songs about my grandpa, and my family, and my wife. I wrote songs about my elementary school friends, and my college roommates, and my friend Blake before he moved off to England. I even wrote a song about the car I drove in my college years, because it got me across so many miles and bore witness to so many of my most private, emotional moments. And I wrote songs about a lot of the stories I’ve told throughout the course of this series, from the moment in eighth grade when I thought my family was going to move away from the only town I’d ever known, to the moment in college when I suffered my gravest failure.

Look, getting people to care about the art you make is extremely difficult, and I would wager that not more than 100 people have ever listened to those two albums I made. My music does not, in the grand scheme of things, “matter.” But I’m still extraordinarily proud of those records, and of how authentically they tell the story of who I am. My life changed dramatically not long after I made the second album, and the time I had for songwriting and home recording projects largely disappeared. At this point, it’s been years since I sat down and wrote a song. Maybe someday I’ll get back to it. I know I still have songs I wrote years ago that I never recorded but that feel like they deserve to be preserved in some way.

The great thing about Isbell’s songwriting lessons, though, is that they needn’t apply to songwriting alone. Many of the things that Isbell espouses – the empathy, the granular details, the search for common ground – are things that pop into my head regularly in my day job as a journalist. I don’t think I’d be very good at my job if I weren’t able to put myself in other people’s shoes, get on their wavelength, find a way to give a damn about what they give a damn about. But I think good journalism, in many cases, can serve to remind us what we have in common rather than what makes us different, and I, like Isbell, aspire to tell stories in ways that make those connections easier to feel. The world is too divided; if I can do my little part to make it feel less so, then I can sleep easy at night.

I probably don’t even need to say that Isbell’s songwriting lessons have been profoundly impactful on the way I write about music. The entire aim of this project has been to show the ways in which music intersects with your life when you really, really love it. Over and over again, I’ve written my story in the most honest, accurate, and detailed way that I can recall it. Sometimes, I’ve wondered whether I was sharing too much of myself. But just as Isbell said in the quote above, those uneasy overshares have often been the moments where someone has told me that, somehow, what I wrote was true of their life as well. What a gift to know that, in this big chaotic world, some of the most beautiful elements of our existence are rhyming with someone else’s.

It reminds me of a Tom Petty quote I love, and since I couldn’t find space for Tom in this series, I’ll quote it here – especially because, if there’s a modern Tom Petty, it’s Jason Isbell.

“Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.”

Amen, Tom. Amen.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers
• Track 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine
• Track 19: “Dusk and Summer” by Dashboard Confessional
• Track 20: “The Sound of You and Me” by Yellowcard
• Track 21: “Holocene” by Bon Iver
• Track 22: “Handwritten” by The Gaslight Anthem
• Track 23: “Can’t Smile Without You” by Barry Manilow
• Track 24: “The House That Heaven Built” by Japandroids
• Track 25: “Miles Apart” by The Dangerous Summer
• Track 26: “Song for the Road” by David Ford

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