Jason Isbell's fifth studio album opens with a familiar face. The narrator of the cheery "If It Takes a Lifetime" is a man settling down after years on the road, adjusting to an empty house and a dead-end job while acclimating to the lowered expectations of a lonely life. The song's chief conflict is summed up by the line, "I keep my spirits high, find happiness by and by." There's more than a little bit of Isbell the touring musician and recovering alcoholic in that narrator, not only in the lines about the road ("I thought the highway loved me but she beat me like a drum") but also in the references to not drinking ("I don't keep liquor here, never cared for wine or beer"). "If It Takes a Lifetime" sounds like Isbell playing a game of What If: What if his solo career hadn't taken off after he departed the Drive-By Truckers eight years ago? What if he hadn't emerged as one of the most popular voices in the thriving Americana movement? What if he had just settled down in one of the small towns he depicts so vividly in his lyrics?
It's a fine song, sporting a spare, defiantly upbeat arrangement and a melody that celebrates rather than laments the narrator's situation. With an eye for telling details that accrue into specific settings and characters, Isbell is one of few songwriters today who can turn a line like, "Working for the county keeps me pissin' clear" into a solid earworm. And yet, I can't quite shake the feeling that I've heard "If It Takes a Lifetime" before, in some iteration or another, at some point in Isbell's catalog. Five albums plus two live releases into a solo career, any songwriter will find his themes solidifying, his sound coalescing into something recognizable and, if he's lucky, something completely distinctive.
"If It Takes a Lifetime", however, introduces an album that contains too few surprises. These are, as usual, not story-songs so much as they are character sketches: Very little happens beyond a character reflecting on past mistakes and present circumstances, which means the narrative arc—the big decisions, the major conflicts; in short, the action—has been consigned to the distant past. As a result, Isbell's narrators tend to be surprisingly passive, observing the world without doing very much. "I don't think on why I'm here or where it hurts," notes the main character on the title track, who lives in his own memory more than in the present world.
"Children of Children", which serves as the album's centerpiece, wrestles with some tangled issues in a family with "five full generations living," but Isbell seems more interested in the romance of sepia-tone photographs than in the reality of a great-great-grandparent. It's an odd hull of a song, whose weirdest element is the way it borrows the female hardship of childbirth only to bolster male drama: "All the years I took from her just by being born," the narrator says of his teenage mother, even though he's really talking about the burden of his own guilt. The arrangement is spare and languorous, with Derry DeBorja's Mellotron adding a windswept quality to the music. Isbell and producer Dave Cobb put that instrument to fine use on Southeastern, where it played like a jerry-rigged orchestra and conveyed an immense sense of isolation. On "Children", however, the ersatz strings generate only ersatz drama.
In general, the music does little to distinguish these characters or enliven the lyrics. Cobb is one of the most adventurous producers in Nashville, and together they have made Isbell's sparest record yet, with an austere palette dominated by acoustic guitar. The results are noncommittal: not quite folk, not quite country, definitely not rock. Even Amanda Shires' fiddle sounds stripped of the eccentricities she typically brings. It's a shame, as Isbell's home state boasts a lively and surprisingly diverse music scene, with bands like Alabama Shakes, St. Paul & the Broken Bones, and Wray slyly subverting and therefore rejuvenating Southern conventions. Isbell is obviously familiar with the music of the region, yet Something More Than Free sounds nondescript and—worse—placeless.
In 2015, Southern identity occupies the center of a number of heated debates, and few artists are better poised to comment on its complexities than Isbell. But race has never been a compelling issue for him, and while class underlies every one of his songs, he long ago stopped writing about it with much acuity. His approach has become internalized, rooted in a self-consciously literary first-person perspective. And while he's created strong work within these parameters, I still lament the lack of urgency to engage with anything too far beyond the reach of his customary stand-ins. Isbell once again shows the world through familiar eyes, but here it just feels like we've seen it all before.
