I think where Isbell went wrong in his relationship with Adams is feeling like he owed anyone answers & explanations on social media. People demanding Jason disavow Ryan don’t deserve any answers, and it’s silly to pretend like Jason needed to publicly do it. You can have nuanced and complicated feelings about people, and Ryan Adams can be a piece of shit who also is someone you once admired and who helped you out of a shitty place.
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…Jason wrote and released a song about Ryan. I kinda just feel like Jason wanted to talk about Ryan Adams.
Honestly, writing and releasing songs shit-talking each other is so in line with both of their personalities, as far as I can tell.
I also feel like Jason was pulling the brakes on Ryan within like 24 hours of the article coming out. Take of that what you will.
Sure, but I don’t really blame a guy that much for distancing himself from a guy who was sexting with a 14-year-old.
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28 is too old now…
And I think that gets to your past points about Isbell feeling the need to be topical. he really doesn’t, and that’s coming from a total Isbell geek. I think it’s almost easy fodder to feel like he needs to sound off on topics like gun control. He could have just kept his mouth shut, for sure.
On a sort of related topic, the funniest thing to me is Isbell’s Broken Record interview with Rick Rubin, and he talks about how he doesn’t like to write songs with overly repetitive lyrics – and then Reunions is released and What’ve I Done to Help comes out where he 1. writes a Richie Havens style almost protest/accountability song, and 2. he repeats the same line 52 times (my other Isbell sicko friend mockingly counted them). LOL
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And that’s always going to be the trump card, which is of course perfectly acceptable.
I’m just pushing back on the idea that Jason was demanded to disavow Ryan and reluctantly offered an opinion. He was offering opinions within hours and then… released… a song… and did interviews for months about it, etc.
I don’t have kids, but I think having especially a daughter will empower fathers in different ways. Even feeling like he needed to be on the record about it.
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I agree, certainly.
I also think Isbell really likes to be liked (by certain groups of people).
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I won’t deny that Jason likes attention and validation from social media, I think that’s fairly obvious. I do not buy that Chaos and Clothes is a mean song, and if Ryan hadn’t thrown a little tantrum about it, no one would see it as such.
What Have I Done to Help is not a good song, and it wades into my main criticism of this era of Isbell songwriting, that he stopped telling stories that spoke to larger themes, and started to reverse engineer the approach, finding issues and then trying to invent a story around the issue.
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I went back and re-read the C&C lyrics a few minutes ago. I would agree - it’s not mean, in some ways.
He also says in the tune that Ryan didn’t know his own wife. While technically not mean and said in a lyrical way, I mean.
It’s kinda mean? Especially coming from someone who wasn’t married to Mandy Moore or Ryan Adams?
100%.
So part of what I think is silly about all this is the Taylor Swift Paradox, where every song must be about a real life person or relationship, and that the lyrical interpretation of it needs someone’s permission or approval or that we need to fact check it like it’s a magazine piece.
Was it okay for Paul to write a song about John’s kid? He wasn’t in their marriage. The song would definitely be worse if it was “Hey Julian” insisted of “Hey Jude” which is why I think you start with specifics and make them broader as a songwriter.
Like, if Chaos and Clothes or When We Were Close said “I miss you Ryan Adams/JTE, and maybe I, Jason Isbell, should have died of heroin overdose and/or gotten divorced from my wife, who I didn’t know at all” then hey, that seems mean.
But the whole searching for clues to identify who someone is singing about? Meh. Are the songs so overt that they invite that? Sure. I wish they were as subtle as A Long And Winding Road is. But saying “you cannot write songs about me without my blessing, well, thank god Joanie Mitchell didn’t see it that way.
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You’re So Vain … still love JT til the day I die.
I agree with a lot of that, KVV. I think alt-country dorks would be analyzing these lyrics and discussing who they were about without Taylor Swift though. Frankly, we were doing that while she was still in middle school.
I can’t really argue with your point that people shouldn’t have to clear every lyric with every potential subject.
But.
If you hate the guy and think he’s a child predator and want nothing to do with him, well… writing a song about him just feels weird.
Just like him completely shunning JTE and then popping a song out a few months after he died felt weird.
I dunno - I wanna defend Jason but so much of his shit just comes back to this weird attention-seeking streak he seems to have.
but…
The Nashville Sound came out in 2017
The Ryan Adams shit hit the fan in 2019
But I get your point. I think their relationship had devolved prior to the worst of Adams’ dirty laundry airing.
Sure, but the timeline makes it clear that’s not the order of things.
The Nashville Sound came out in June of 2017, which means Chaos and Clothes likely is written sometime in 2016.
The Times story about RA comes out in Feb. 2019.
Jason shits on RA in April of 2020 in GQ, saying he feels like he should have been more aware of how his friend was treating women.
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My bad - take out the child predator part then.
I think Jenn Marie Earle’s point a few posts up makes it clear what Jason is doing.
All defendable in the name of art, I suppose… but no song ‘has’ to come out.
This part made me wanna barf:
Isbell, for his part, said that when he was writing “When We Were Close,” he was thinking to himself, “How many victims if I tell the truth, how many victims if I don’t?” He continued: “And then you make that choice. Because the song has to exist… Usually, if you tell the truth, you make less victims than if you don’t.”