For anyone who has ever struggled with substance abuse, or simply opts to lead a substance-free life, sobriety is not always easy. For musicians, the risks and challenges can be even more daunting with the constant temptations of life on the road, and staying creative while fighting addiction can be a double whammy.

Fortunately, the narrative of overcoming addiction continues to blossom, as more and more musicians and music professionals are sharing their stories, providing inspiration, perspective and awareness. Most recently, a mix of nine artists from various corners of the music world, including Julien Baker, Jason Isbell, Soko, Ben Harper, Steven Tyler, Phish singer Trey Anastasio, and more, gave GQ candid insight on how musicians can thrive creatively without using.

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Take indie-pop super-talent Julien Baker, who keys into the difficulty of pulling away from drugs and alcohol. Opening up about her path to a healthy, creative life provides a window in the terror recovery can include.

"The other fear is that when substances aren’t there and I’m alone, I’m going to have confront something even scarier, which is myself and my own consciousness," said Baker. "Now I have to sit there and be with myself, and that is most terrifying of all. However, as hard as it is, it’s an extremely necessary skill—the ability to be alone and to confront yourself. You can’t hide behind substances all the time. But yeah, it’s scary."

But pushing through the fear can also be rewarding. French singer/songwriter Soko described how her life opened up once she overcame the monster in her life, and inter-connected her physical health was with her ambition.

"It was very easy for me to stop," said Soko. "On top of being addicted to alcohol, I was also bulimic. I stopped food addiction and alcohol all at once—vegan, gluten-free, no processed food, no sugar, no alcohol, no caffeine, overnight. Just by being like: “I’m done. I’m ambitious, and I have things to do. And I want my life to have meaning.”

The GQ roundtable also poses the question of what advice has been the most helpful along the way. Harper's answer taps into a critical pitfall common among creatives, who, as they become more successful, can run the risk of being surrounded by people who won't always tell them the hard truth. 

"Don’t try to tell yourself a story that only you would believe," he says.

But in many ways, in the best ways, creativity can and does help artists push through the hard times to find a better version of themselves. Isbell, who admitted to getting sober because of his wife, fellow songwriter Amanda Shires, used creativity as not only therapy, but a tool for forging new connections.

"I wrote my way through it. I think part of the process for me of sobering up," said Isbell, "was using my work to connect with the world that I had always felt so isolated from. And I think probably my survival instinct kicked in and said, 'Well, what you do is you use these songs to connect with people in a way that you’ve not connected with them before.' And after that, I sort of felt like I belonged in the world."

If you or someone you know is also dealing with any of these challenges, it is important to know that you are not alone and there are resources where you can seek help, including the services of MusiCares. 

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Updated Friday Oct. 13, 2023 to include info about Kendrick Lamar's most recent GRAMMY wins, as of the 2023 GRAMMYs.

A GRAMMY veteran these days, Kendrick Lamar has won 17 GRAMMYs and has received 47 GRAMMY nominations overall. A sizable chunk of his trophies came from the 58th annual GRAMMY Awards in 2016, when he walked away with five — including his first-ever win in the Best Rap Album category.

This installment of GRAMMY Rewind turns back the clock to 2016, revisiting Lamar's acceptance speech upon winning Best Rap Album for To Pimp A Butterfly. Though Lamar was alone on stage, he made it clear that he wouldn't be at the top of his game without the help of a broad support system. 

"First off, all glory to God, that's for sure," he said, kicking off a speech that went on to thank his parents, who he described as his "those who gave me the responsibility of knowing, of accepting the good with the bad."

Looking for more GRAMMYs news? The 2024 GRAMMY nominations are here!

He also extended his love and gratitude to his fiancée, Whitney Alford, and shouted out his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates. Lamar specifically praised Top Dawg's CEO, Anthony Tiffith, for finding and developing raw talent that might not otherwise get the chance to pursue their musical dreams.

"We'd never forget that: Taking these kids out of the projects, out of Compton, and putting them right here on this stage, to be the best that they can be," Lamar — a Compton native himself — continued, leading into an impassioned conclusion spotlighting some of the cornerstone rap albums that came before To Pimp a Butterfly.

"Hip-hop. Ice Cube. This is for hip-hop," he said. "This is for Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle. This is for Illmatic, this is for Nas. We will live forever. Believe that."

To Pimp a Butterfly singles "Alright" and "These Walls" earned Lamar three more GRAMMYs that night, the former winning Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song and the latter taking Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (the song features Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat). He also won Best Music Video for the remix of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood." 

Lamar has since won Best Rap Album two more times, taking home the golden gramophone in 2018 for his blockbuster LP DAMN., and in 2023 for his bold fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

Watch Lamar's full acceptance speech above, and check back at GRAMMY.com every Friday for more GRAMMY Rewind episodes. 

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Quite a lot has changed for boygenius in the months following the release of their debut album, the record, in March.

The indie supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus initially joined forces in 2018, offering a self-titled EP and North American tour. Despite positive reception for both, the trio were largely quiet for several years and shifted to their solo projects.

So when their reunion and debut full-length was confirmed in January 2023, much attention was given to boygenius' trajectory. Once the record was released, the group seemingly went skyward.

Fast forward to the present and the band is on the third leg of their tour in support of the record, recently performing for 25,000 people at Gunnersbury Park in London and selling out Madison Square Garden. Continuing their exponential growth, boygenius recently announced the rest, a four-track EP set for release Oct.13.

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Sonically, the rest is a revisitation. ​​"We veered away from our folkier roots on the record in a way that was fun to come back to for the EP," says Bridgers sitting alongside Baker and Dacus on a Zoom call from the Westville Music Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut.

Even deeper rooted than their love of folk music, and what has remained consistent throughout  the five years after their initial connection, is the trio's shared dynamic. 

"We were never not a band," says Bridgers. Yet, "it doesn’t just mean that we’re all great musicians and therefore our talent gets exponentially multiplied," Baker says of their "supergroup" designation. "It’s the dedication to how we mediate music between the three of us as a conduit. That’s the important part." 

Their impact and connection extends beyond music as well. The trio has moved into other forms of media, producing a music film directed by Academy Award nominee Kristen Stewart, and have become icons for the queer community after performing in drag in Nashville to protest the city’s anti-drag legislation (among other pro-queer activities).

Ahead of their new EP, boygenius candidly dive into their songwriting process, relationships with queerness, and using music as a conduit of their connection. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

When you think back on who you were professionally and personally when you wrote the first EP, what is it like to bring those songs into the present on much bigger stages?

Phoebe Bridgers: I think about it more from a fan perspective now. I’m like The kids are singing it to me. They get excited when we play older songs 'cause they feel a part of it.

Julien Baker: It's sweet imagining them having anticipated it. Having been at that [older] show or missed that show. We’ve aged with them and they can trace our parallel aging. 

Bridgers: When we play "Me & My Dog," I was singing about myself and from my perspective. Now I’m so far away from it that it’s like the fans are singing it. I feel that way about "Souvenir." This is one for the fans to sing to us.

How did you view yourselves at the start of the group in 2018, and how does that compare to you are today?

Lucy Dacus: I’m a bigger fan of who I am now than who I was, but you gotta root for yourself, so I’m retroactively rooting for who I was.

Baker: I have more grace for my past self. I don’t know if I would have the wisdom to admire current me… think overall I’d be stoked. Some of the stuff [I've done] would surprise me.

Bridgers: We talk sometimes about how there’s a certain hometown mentality that can be poisonous. Like your friend whose band never took off says, “You guys f—ing sold out,” and we’re like “Well you didn’t get a chance to my friend. 'Sold out' means people buy the album.”

Baker:  In 2018 when I met you guys I was straight edge and vegan and now it’s nice to have a lobster roll when you’re in New England. I’m a lot more lax but more mature and I don’t know if I would have had the foresight as such a young kid.  I was so neurotic then and really principled in a misguided way, but I think I have to have retroactive grace for that person more than I need to admire.

You’ve mentioned that much of the writing for boygenius takes place separately, but the songs are finished together. How did writing the record compare to the first EP?

Bridgers: The main way is that we talk about each other now. We were just writing, trying to help each other with songs that already existed or little ideas that already existed. Now we have so much context for each other that the record starts eating its own tail and becomes about making the record, which is cool.

Baker: There’s an ease of communication that maybe wasn’t quite available when we were first working together, where each of us brought a verse that then got gently edited. 

A lot of the record is an exquisite corpse of working out line by line with each other. Then there are huge swaths that are just s— [Phoebe] wrote or just s— that Lucy wrote, but it’s nice to feel an entitlement to something that’s being created corporately instead of pieced [together].

Dacus: It’s never been difficult [communicating], so it’s not like it even had the chance to get easier. We do a lot of work to avoid difficulty. We do group therapy together and try to foresee what our pitfalls could be and avoid them. 

Not like it’s all easy. We’ll encounter really difficult math problems — [that’s] what it feels like in the studio where none of us will get it and we’ll be frustrated but it’s not at each other.

The final lines of "Powers" are "The force of our impact, the fission/The hum of our contact/The sound of our collision." From my perspective, the sound of your collision as human beings includes the music you’ve made together, but also the way you’ve presented yourselves to the public, for example, in standing up for causes you believe in, and then there is the sound no one else hears within your dynamic as a band. With all this mind, how would you describe "the sound of your collision?"

Baker: Those are both semi-stolen lyrics. I read this book Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz and he talks about the idea of the lived experience being its own work of art, and then that art needing a witness to be savored and appreciated. 

He talks about the hum of our contact. It’s evocative of all the things that aren’t explicitly stated that take place. All the communication that’s extra-lingual. That is witnessed only in time and action and accrued over years and years. It’s so incremental that you can barely observe it as it's happening. Then you look back and realize that you’ve spent your life with people that have become like your family and they’ve been the driving force in what motivates you. It’s small and daily and powerful. 

So the album and all the other things you guys have done together are all the particles accruing?

Dacus: It’s just a gradual deepening all the time. I think that the closeness has been a pleasant surprise for all of us. Now that we’ve discovered it, we want to interact with it and protect it however we can. Originally it was just a fun lightweight idea. Now it’s my whole life.

Baker: There’s the real face-to-face friendship that we have, but we’ve always been making music together. It feels very much like music is the water that you’re swimming in. Music is the language that you’re speaking.

**The album artwork on the rest is in many ways the counterpart to the record, which feels very hopeful with the three of you looking towards the horizon like a team of superheroes.  Whereas on the EP cover, the surroundings are dark, your faces are darkened, and you’re huddled together for support. Through that lens, how would you compare the two releases?**

Dacus: That photo was taken during the same shoot for the original album art. We always liked the image, but when we chose these four songs to put out together, they all have this spacey, eerie quality about them. I think the wind being in our hair, the natural elements messing us up, it’s a little more unsettling and I feel like these songs — I don’t think they lack optimism, but they’re a little more focused on fear and unsteadiness. 

Bridgers: We had wanted it to be a different time of day in the photo. The back of the EP is dusk at the beach. Not a very hidden meaning in that.

You three have been celebrated very much of late for standing up for the queer community, trans community, and other marginalized communities, but you’ve also stated that doing so doesn’t necessarily make you “role models.” How has the time you’ve spent together as a band affected your relationship with your own queerness?

Dacus:  I’m definitely gayer because of these guys. [All laugh.]

Baker: That’s true! And I’m straighter somehow.

Bridgers: I was thinking that it makes me feel straighter to be around a bunch of gay people all the time. Like when I’m with only straight people.

Baker: You’re the gayest one.

Bridgers: I’m so gay and when I’m around gay people I’m like, damn. But that doesn’t hold true all the time.

Dacus: A serious answer would be that my favorite thing about queerness is how undefined it actually is. Having less allegiance to who I was, being willing to betray my idea of myself in service of what actually feels best and is most honest to the moment at hand — that’s a skill that I think I’ve been getting better at through my life. Not in small part to the people who love me and will accept me at any point of understanding myself, and these guys are included in that.

Baker: It’s like finding a new vernacular around queerness. It’s how you carry out the outfit, or it's how you carry out dancing, or it’s how you carry out some sort of body language that determines whether it’s queer. Not what the action is. It’s how you employ, and I think being around people who see the core static parts of myself …makes me feel more secure to play with the mutable parts of my identity.

Referring to what Julien said earlier about the lived experience being a work of art that needs a witness, how have you served as witnesses for each other? How has your lived experience with queerness influenced your art?

Baker: Queerness is inherently creative. Queerness exists in opposition to a standard. Not to replace it with a superior thing, but to dismantle a dominant prevailing view of how things should be just because that’s how they’re traditionally understood. 

Queerness involves creating a different future for yourself. Imagining yourself towards a different embodiment of you. An embodiment of you that isn’t naturally going to be fomented any other place than by these guys or by your community or by the community you construct.

Dacus: Julien has a banjo that she drew on and has “queer joy” on it, and I think that queerness and joy are inextricable themes. Why be queer if you aren’t trying your very best to access more joy in your life or more authenticity? 

So it’s actually amazing to realize I’m living in it so thoroughly now that I don’t actively think about it as much because it’s a part of everything that I do to the point where I don’t even see it sometimes, which is such a privilege.

In listening to “Without you, without them” I get the impression you guys are telling each other to share everything, so I ask a version of the question that’s posed in the final line of the song: after years of growing together, who would you guys be without each other?


Bridgers: Worse

Dacus: Impossible to know.

[All laugh]

Dacus: The idea of it from here feels really lonely. But it’s also weird to think [about] who would I have cared deeply about or who haven’t I met yet that [would be] as important as these people. Life is so various, and no matter how much you prepare for it it always will catch you off guard in sometimes the best ways.

Bridgers: I think if we had individually gotten more famous and then made friends even with each other from this point of view, it would be great, but I feel lucky that we met when we did. We were all on the same plain with a dream of selling out a 2000-capacity venue. Laying awake at night thinking about it as the end goal. 

So it's weird that I met two people with as close to the same life experience as possible and then it changed into another version of as close as possible. We all come from an indie space. We all are queer. It would be s—y to have nobody that was in my shoes around me.

Baker: Y’all have been additional rudders in my trajectory since we met, and I have no way of knowing — nor do I care to know — how my character would differ if I didn’t have y’all as a whetstone of sharpening my own wit and honesty and musical practice.

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It's a spine-tingling feeling for a Drive-By Truckers album to begin a cappella; although it's only happened on three of them, it feels like a trademark, a wink. And when singer, songwriter and co-leader Patterson Hood comes in alone, it's like a single lightbulb flaring up, illuminating the dusty air, brighter than creation's dark.

"By the time you were born, there were four other siblings/ With your mama awaiting your daddy in jail," Hood warbles through his mealy Alabaman twang at the top of 2002's Decoration Day — one of the cult rock band's most beloved albums. "And your oldest brother was away at a home/ And you didn't meet him 'til you were 19 years old."

So begins "The Deeper In," one of Drive-By Truckers' prettiest and most affecting songs. With immense pathos and an odd sense of sweetness, Hood tells the true story of a brother and sister falling in love with each other, having four babies and going to prison for their incestuous relationship.

Despite this unconventional and taboo subject matter, by the end of these three minutes and 16 seconds, even the uninitiated can behold the Truckers' giant, beating heart.

"It's not like they grew up together as brother and sister gettin' it on," Hood remembered more than a decade later. "They didn't meet until they were grown-ups, and it was just such a sad story.

"A lot of the people I write about are nothing like me, but there has to be some aspect to them that I can feel a certain empathy for or else I'm not interested in writing it," he continued. "I try never to be condescending to the characters I write about, even the really s—y ones."

Which makes it the perfect gateway to Drive-By Truckers' fourth album.

Named for the day that southern churches place fresh flowers on the graves of their ancestors, Decoration Day is their most vulnerable album by some margin, and a pivotal entry in the Athens, Georgia-formed rockers’ discography. On June 17, the album will ring in two decades in DBT fans' ears and hearts.

Since then, Drive-By Truckers have evolved from scrappy, brainy, misunderstood road dogs to a bona fide rock institution. And their ex-guitarist, singer and songwriter Jason Isbell — who made his precocious debut on Decoration Day — has led a GRAMMY-winning solo career that involves things like a GQ spread, an HBO doc and a forthcoming Martin Scorcese flick, Killers of the Flower Moon.

As such, the story of Decoration Day has necessarily been told and retold:

After three failed bands together, Hood and his partner and foil, Mike Cooley — two incredibly distinct yet totally simpatico songwriters — finally get their big break with their fourth. Afterward, their band tours for two years, wherein a gifted, 22-year-old upstart jumps in the van as third guitarist. Within two weeks, he writes two of their finest songs, "Outfit" and "Decoration Day."

Given their breakneck touring schedule, relationships frayed back home. Hood and Cooley write about the attendant emotions, and their lyrical references, characters and themes swirling into a matrix of grief, despondency and regret.

"Everyone in the band was either going through a divorce or on the verge of one when we made that record," Hood tells GRAMMY.com of Decoration Day. "Because that was about the time that we had really hit a tipping point of being on the road 200-plus days a year, and no one making any money. And everyone's wife's saying, 'F— this.' Except for Cooley's wife, who's still here."

But when they picked up their instruments, the result was explosive joy; Hood, Cooley and Isbell remember the Decoration Day era as an unmitigated blast. But more than on any past Drive-By Truckers album, their candid, evocative lyrics made the material penetrate the heart.

In a single line in the shattered "Sounds Better in the Song," Cooley seems to sum up Decoration Day in its totality: "I might as well have put that ring on her finger/ From the window of a van as it drove away."

While it's been beloved by fans since its release — and as Hood says, it still sells well today — Decoration Day can be somewhat subsumed by the two other major albums that precede and succeed it.

But while 2001's Southern Rock Opera and 2005's The Dirty South also represent DBT at their finest — full of crackling storytelling, elephantine performances, sticky melodies, and idiosyncratic turns of phrase — there's a case to be made for Decoration Day as their crown jewel.

Because from the album opener onward to "My Sweet Annette," "Heathens," "Sounds Better in the Song," and so many other tracks — Decoration Day is arguably the most personal and heart-forward album the Truckers ever made.

Drive-By Truckers' first two albums contained some of their most representative songs, like "The Living Bubba," "Uncle Frank," "Love Like This," and "One of These Days." Still, those tended to be sandwiched between a lot of goofs and piss-takes, from "Steve McQueen" to "The President's Penis is Missing" to "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town."

As Isbell tells GRAMMY.com, Hood and Cooley's irrepressible humor and irony reached a crossroads on Southern Rock Opera.

"They finally fully accepted a persona, and wrote songs that were specifically for Southern Rock Opera, and a lot of those were in character," he says. "And I think once they did that, and got that out of their system, Hood and Cooley both felt freer to be themselves in songs, and take it a little bit more seriously."

Even when Hood sings in character — like the foreclosed farmer plotting a "banker man's" homicide in Decoration Day's one-take scorcher "Sink Hole" — there's a splash of real-life battery acid in his delivery; his fury feels wholly genuine.

Likewise, Cooley's "Marry Me" and Hood's "My Sweet Annette" — which Hood once characterized as "two very different views of marital bliss" — don't feel like character songs, despite being constructed as just that. Regardless of who the narrator is, Cooley's small-town bluster on the former, and Hood's pained, regretful delivery on the latter, hit you straight in the chest.

"Hell No, I Ain't Happy" represents the other side of the coin; between your ears and Hood's psyche, there are zero obfuscatory layers. The sound of an opening beercan kicks off one of Hood's most face-peeling meltdowns — capturing the mother of all ragged, unmoored days on the road.

"There's a purdy little girl outside the van window/ 'Bout 80 cities down, 800 to go," he roars. "Six crammed in, we ain't never alone/ Never homesick, ain't got no home."

"Outfit," Isbell's debut song for the Truckers, is also as real as it gets. A fabulously witty, detail-stuffed rundown of advice from his father, it remains one of his signature songs, a hollered audience request ever since.

Isbell calls Hood's loping, gorgeous ballad, "Heathens" his "favorite song of Patterson's — one of my favorite songs anybody's ever written." (Years after getting booted from the Truckers and cleaning up his act, Isbell covered the song for Hood's birthday; today, Hood says the two have grown especially close over the last few years.)

From there, the three songwriters keep slugging out impossibly great song after impossibly great song. The straight-ahead rocker "(Something's Got to) Give Pretty Soon" is one of the band's most perennially rewarding deep cuts — as well as one of their most raw-nerved.

"Maybe what you need is for someone to send you flowers/ Someone strong and mean who can prove he has the power to/ Show you more than charm and take you on your way/ To where you want to be at the end of the day," Hood sings. "And it breaks my heart in two to know it ain't meant to be."

"But it ain't me," he concludes.

In its final stretch, Decoration Day heads into more elliptical territory — starting roughly with Cooley's chilling "When the Pin Hits the Shell."

Following the title track — Isbell's steely-eyed chronicling of a festering feud between families — the album concludes with "Loaded Gun in the Closet," featuring Cooley at his elusive, riddling best. To overanalyze the lyrics would be to spoil the mystery of whether the gun was ever used — and if so, which of the unwitting spouses will end up on the business end.

As a whole, Decoration Day is an album that you can revisit over and over and over, and still perceive new shades of meaning.

"That whole album is really about love and loss and the choices you make," Hood said about a decade after the album's release. "Dealing with the consequences of the choices you make is a huge overriding theme."

Which applies whether you're an incestuous couple on the lam; an exhausted, punchy rock band barrelling through the middle of nowhere; or a dysfunctional couple with an exit strategy in a waiting firearm: it's all Decoration Day.

In his nigh-definitive breakdown of DBT's discography, writer and musician James Toth characterizes the band's following album, 2004's The Dirty South as such: "If the divorce-themed Decoration Day examines the destruction of a relationship, the glacial, smoldering The Dirty South sounds like the monstrous diesel engine garbage truck that comes to collect the detritus and run over the small pieces."

A remastered, expanded edition, The Complete Dirty South, which features vocal re-recordings and tunes meant to be on the original album, is out June 16 — a day before Decoration Day's 20th anniversary.

Coincidence or not, this proximity shows how Decoration Day profoundly widened their aperture, and allowed for that masterpiece in its own right. From there, the Truckers have continued to fine-tune all dimensions of their cockeyed universe — the personal, the political, the philosophical, the devastatingly funny. (Many of their songs being all four.)

Thereby, this so-called "Southern rock" band with a deliciously regrettable name were able to transcend their rough-and-ready original parameters, and write songs that shake you to your foundation — a giant handful of which can be found right there on Decoration Day.

One could go on and on. But it sounds better in the song.

Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood On Subconscious Writing, Weathering Rough Seasons & Their New Album Welcome 2 Club XIII

At this stage, a Jason Isbell album isn't just an album; it's a juncture in his ongoing press narrative, another breadcrumb trail as per his personal life.

His first three after he left Drive-By Truckers represent the man in the wilderness; 2013's Southeastern and 2015's Something More Than Free were reflective of his newfound sobriety and marriage to musician Amanda Shires. 

The birth of his daughter figured heavily in 2017's GRAMMY-winning The Nashville Sound; that album's "If We Were Vampires," a duet with Shires, stands as Isbell's monument to mortality and won a GRAMMY.

With 2020's Reunions came a splashy New York Times feature about Isbell and Shires' marital struggles, with a lede about a brush with a relapse — suddenly, his ascendance seemed freighted, complicated. 

All this begs the question: is having his private life codified and illuminated with each record ever irksome, or frustrating, for Isbell?

"Honestly, I think I appreciate that. I think that serves the ultimate purpose of making art — to document your life, because it is really a way of holding on to these things," he tells GRAMMY.com. "If you leave those things behind, they'll sneak up on you, and then you'll find yourself in a bad place, and you won't know why."

Isbell's new album, Weathervanes, is out June 9; it's his sixth with long-running backing band the 400 Unit. At its essence is a psychologically splintered cast of characters, found on highlights like "Death Wish," "King of Oklahoma" and "This Ain't It."

"They're fallible and they're human. And I think they're all trying to do their best in one way or another," Isbell says of the ties that bind them. "There's a lot of me that's in each of them — some moreso than others."

Rather than commenting on his marriage or sobriety, Weathervanes is the product of his changed relationship with pressure, and being in the public eye. The album arrives in the wake of Running With Our Eyes Closed, a raw-nerved HBO documentary about Isbell. He just acted in his first major film, in Martin Scorcese's Killers of the Flower Moon, headed to theaters in October.

"It's OK to say, 'This is a scary thing to do. I'm afraid that people aren't going to connect with it in the same way, and my work is not going to have the same impact on folks that it's had in the past,'" Isbell says. "And once I learned how to admit that to myself and the people that I care about, things got a lot easier."

Read on for an in-depth interview with Isbell about the road to Weathervanes, how being directed by Scorcese informed his process in the studio and surviving his hard-partying, hard-touring Drive-By Truckers days.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Can you draw a thread between where you were at during the Reunions period, and where you're at during the Weathervanes era? The HBO documentary certainly captured the former.

Yeah, yeah. And then, in the middle, we had the lockdown and all that kind of stuff.

For me, the pandemic era — although it's not finished yet, but what we call that pandemic era, that year or two where we were all stuck in the house — was ultimately a good time for me to revisit some psychological, emotional questions that I had for myself, and I sorted a lot of that stuff.

When the bulk of the documentary was made, I was having a hard time dealing with the pressures of my work, and the pressures of family. And the main reason why I was dealing with that was because I just wasn't recognizing it for what it was, and I wasn't aware of the effect that those things were having on me.

Getting stuck in the house with my family and myself for that long, I think, really helped me; it forced me to confront that stuff and admit what it really was that was causing me difficulties. And once I got through that, things opened up and got a lot easier for me.

I had a really, really good time making Weathervanes. I don't know if I had a good time writing it, because I don't know if that's ever exactly fun. It's fun when you finish a song; it feels like you just left the gym. 

But when you're sitting down in front of the blank page, it feels like you're walking into the gym, and you might have just gotten four hours of sleep the night before.

What were you dealing with internally? Just childhood stuff, stuff bugging you from the past?

There was some of that. It was also just relationship difficulties; they were just constant. 

Amanda and I have been married for 10 years, and it's the kind of thing where you get in this rhythm of life where you go through the same sort of rituals every day, and you ask the same questions and you get the same answers, and it's easy to get into that monotony and not really reach and look for ways to grow.

I think before the pandemic happened, I'd gotten to a point where I was in this rhythm: go out and play shows, make records, come home, spend time with the family. I was sort of ignoring the pressure of all that, and especially in the work.

I've been very fortunate with my last few albums that they were well-received and things have gone really well. And when I go into the studio to make a record… it was hard for me to admit to myself that that caused me anxiety and a lot of stress, because I didn't like how it made me look. I wanted to look tough and look like I had everything under control.

And after making Reunions, I realized that that's not necessarily the case. And once I learned how to admit that to myself and the people that I care about, things got a lot easier.

What psychological or spiritual wells were you drawing from for these songs?

I try to make these characters, and then I follow them around. And I don't know exactly what they're going to do next. I think that's the only way to keep it really natural.

There's a lot of me that's in each of them — some moreso than others. Some of the songs I write, I am writing about me. 

But one of the things that I like about songwriting is that you don't really categorize music in that way. You categorize movies and books in that way; there's fiction and nonfiction, there's documentaries and other movies. But for songs, it's all of the above.

So, a lot of this is me, and a lot of it is synthesized characters that have characteristics of multiple people that I know. Then, I just let them act naturally and follow them around, and the themes find there way in there. 

I don't have to insert the themes, because there's enough in my unconscious mind that the songs will wind up dealing with real things — as long as I'm honest with everybody.

There's a wide variety of perspectives and experiences in these songs. What do the Weathervanes characters have in common?

I think when it's done right, they have the same things in common that the listeners have. They're fallible and they're human. And I think they're all trying to do their best in one way or another.

That's maybe what I'm exploring more than anything else — not as a mission statement, but a connector, in hindsight, is this idea that people have different circumstances, influences and pressures exerted on them. But what does it mean to try to keep hope, and survive, and do your best in all these different stations of life?

I'm a Randy Newman fanatic; he can dispense a novel's worth of detail in just a few lines, by implying so much negative space. I've noticed you've written in character from the beginning, like him.

When I met Randy at Newport [Folk Festival], I told him the thing about how much I loved his work and everything, and he leaned in really close where nobody could hear and whispered in my ear, "I like your songs, too." That was a huge, huge moment for me. I said, "Well, you don't strike me as much of a bulls—er, so I'm going to take that."

**One of your guiding lights for Reunions' sound was the '80s rock you enjoyed as a kid. What was the aural aesthetic for Weathervanes? And can you talk about the learning curve of self-production?**

I started thinking, OK, here's how these records by Dire Straits and the Police sounded, and this is why they sounded that way, and this is what worked about that, and what translates to now and what doesn't, and what can be replicated and what can't. 

So, I brought some of that with me into the Weathervanes recording. Most obviously, on a song like "Save the World," there was an intention I had before I went in the studio. This happens to me a lot. I'll get a big idea, and I'll think, Oh, this is great. We can do the whole record this way.

And by the time I'm in the studio, I'll think, OK, maybe we just use this as a tool. We don't do the entire record like this. Because then, that would take over the concept and distract from everything else.

At first, I wanted to make a dry record. I was listening to [1978's] Outlandos [d'Amour], the Police record, and there's hardly any room or reverb or anything. "Roxanne" — all those songs are right in your ear. And that's a flex, because to do that, you have to be able to sing and play with great tuning and great timing.

And the Police — first of all, there's just three of them, so it's easier to do than it is with five or six people. But they also were master musicians, and you have to be really on point to make a dry record like that, or it's going to be a mess when you go to sing the harmony.

That was something that I wound up using as a tool. I think a lot of this record has less reverb and less room on it than you would expect. I think it was done in a way where you don't necessarily notice it off the bat.

Also, watching the Get Back documentary, I thought, Man, these guys didn't have tuners.  They just tuned it by ear for the whole record.

I didn't want to torture my guitar techs, so I wasn't going to make a whole record without any tuners. But there are some moments on this record where we tuned by ear rather than tuning to a machine, so it would sound more human. Really, a lot of my production style — if there is such a thing — is how do we get a little dose of humanity of something that is sort of slick and polished.

I interviewed [Drive-By Truckers co-leader] Patterson [Hood] on Zoom last year, and I was struck at how sweet and energetic he was. How did you guys walk away from those hard-touring years alive and intact?

We don't know the answer to that. We got very lucky. Also, we were white and we were male, and I think that plays a lot pinto it. I think if we had not been white, some cop would've shot us all a long time ago.

I don't know if there was some kind of divine intervention in some of those situations, but I still look back on it and think, I don't know how we survived all that. I really don't.

Were there any near-death experiences?

Oh, there were so many. We saw huge, disastrous accidents happen right in front of us. There were times when we'd be on snowy mountain passes and lose control of the van for 20 seconds, and then finally it would snap back into place. I don't know how it happened.

On a different note, you touched on gun violence in "Save the World." I was struck by how un-preachy it was. I felt like I was in your head, or privy to a family meeting.

That's the trick, you know? You have to be really personal with it, I think.

If you're writing a song about a big, heavy topic like that, don't try to ascend somebody else's perspective. Love, romance, breakups, heartbreak, death; we all have experiences with those things.

So, if that's what you're writing about, you're free to take other perspectives other than your own, because we all have that commonality. We know what those things feel like, or what the fear of those things feels like.

But when you're writing about something like school shootings: I have not been involved in one of those. I've not seen one of those go down firsthand. I've been close a couple of times, but it's not something that I could write from the perspective of somebody who was actually in the building.
So to be honest with the work, what I have to do is think: How does this affect me? How do I feel about this? And then write from that perspective. I don't think anybody's ever noticed this, but the songs where I'm tackling the biggest, most complicated issues are the ones where I'm writing from the most personal point.

**Give me your personal MVP moments from the members of the 400 Unit on Weathervanes.**

[Guitarist] Sadler [Vaden] has this old Vox guitar that has built-in fuzz effects, and he played on that on "Miles," the last song on the album, and really added something special to that.

It's a vintage guitar, but not a highly collectible, very expensive guitar. It's got this weird kind of freak-out fuzz tone that is included in the instrument, and he used that on that song to great success.

Jimbo [Hart]'s bass on "Middle of the Morning" is just a beautiful groove. It's a simple part, but the timing of it it is just exactly right. He's just right in the pocket.

Chad [Gamble], on the outro to Miles, where there's multiple drum kits happening — I think he handled that beautifully, and built up to that big cymbal crash at the end. 

We wanted a gong, but Blackbird [Studio in Nashville] didn't have a gong. They had this crash cymbal that was 72 inches or something; it was huge. It took up the whole reverb chamber. When Chad made the big crash at the end, we were all jumping up and screaming in the control room when it happened because it was so f—ing hilarious.

Derry [deBorja] — I feel like his synthesizer part on "Save the World" was a big moment for him. He spent a lot of time on that. We tried to send the clock from the Pro Tools session to the analog synthesizer and get it to line up.

It proved to be a very complicated exercise, because we were trying to marry new technology and old technology, but he found a way to make it work.

Let's end this with a lightning round. I polled my Facebook friends on what they'd want to ask you; it's a mix of New York music industry people and hometown friends from California.

This one's from Ryan Walsh, who leads a rock band called Hallelujah the Hills. He asks if when "white nationalist monsters" figure out your politics and tell you on Twitter they won't listen to you again, "do they really abandon ship, or is even that promise nothing but some sad barkin'?"

I don't think most of those were ever fans to begin with. I refuse to believe that those people have been actually listening to my songs all along. I think they see something that somebody's retweeted, and then they Google me and they see that I'm a musician, and they say, "I was your fan until just now." I think it's all just a b—shit tactic.

The jazz-adjacent singer/songwriter Dara Tucker says, "I'd like to hear his thoughts on Gordon Lightfoot."

Oh, Gordon was amazing. I played a song that I wrote, "Live Oak," last week, after Gordon's passing. I mentioned from the stage that I don't think I could have written that song without Gordon's work. The way he dealt with place, and the way he made folk music very specific to his own life.

I think "Carefree Highway" was the first song where I had that kind of lightbulb moment, where I thought, Oh, he's feeling really bad about something. This is not a celebration. This is not hippy-dippy s—. This is somebody saying, "I'm sorry." And that was a big moment for me.

Journalist Tom Courtenay asks, "Does he think Nashville/radio's gatekeeping is fixable, or does it only make sense for anyone remotely subversive to work outside of it at this point?"

I think what, if anything, will fix it, is when this particular brand of straight white male country music is no longer as popular as it is. 

I don't think that's a good thing. I would love to see it fixed from the inside. But the way I picture the state of popular country music right now is they're staring at a machine with a whole bunch of buttons, and there's one button that they know will spit out money when they hit it, so they just keep hitting it.

They won't take their hand off of it long enough to try any of the other buttons, even though some of the other buttons might spit out more money. 

Singer/songwriter Ephraim Sommers asks, "What is his greatest difficulty, obstacle or weakness as a songwriter, and how has he worked to overcome it?"

Humor is hard. It's hard because I laugh a lot in my everyday life, and it's hard to find a way to work humor into a song. The way that I work to overcome it is just by trying to notice different situational details that would create a funny image in a song.

It's something I'm not very good at. John Prine was great at it; Todd Snider's great at it. But to be funny without being bitter in the kind of songs that i write is a real challenge.

I don't want it to be funny in a self-referential way. I would like for it to be funny no matter who was saying it or writing it. That's a tough one for me, but I just keep trying over and over and over, until finally the joke is present enough for somebody to get it.

I'll close with my own question: What's grist for the mill creatively for you right now? What are you listening to, reading or watching?

Jennifer Egan, The Candy House; I'm reading that right now. Last night, we watched Guy Ritchie's The Covenant, the war movie. That was good. Of course, I like "Succession."

Right now, I'm just super excited about the Scorcese movie that I was in. I heard rumors that the trailer's coming out tomorrow.

Tell me about that.

That process of working on that movie really found its way into the studio when I went back to record — just the way Scorcese was able to hear other people's opinions and collaborate while still keeping his vision. 

Actors are people — they're not instruments — so you can't completely manipulate them, no matter how good you are at directing. So, it's not like the director is the guitar player and the actor is the guitar. There are a bunch of real humans in the room, so they're all going to have opinions and ways of delivering things.

To see him navigate that and hear everything — and still make the movie that he saw in his mind — was a pretty incredible thing for me.

Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood On Subconscious Writing, Weathering Rough Seasons & Their New Album Welcome 2 Club XIII