Jason Isbell

“When I hear somebody like Hayes Carll write a song that's touching and poignant and sad and funny all at the same time, it motivates me to step my game up and try to figure out a way to get more different emotions into one line or one song.”

“My dad, as much as I love him, has one of those signs - 'The Isbell's' - on his front door, and he's got the damn apostrophe in there. I haven't strangled him yet.”

“I need enough room to eventually throw a baseball with a child; that's all the yard I need. That's all I want.”

“I've always known that there are conflicting issues going on where I'm from. It's always been that way.”

“At the end of the day, I'm just trying to write a song that I like, that I'm not afraid to turn loose on the world. I do read a lot. I know a lot of people who read more, but I do try to keep a book in my hand most of the time, and I think that informs any kind of output that I'm going to have.”

“For any writer, a red pen is such a trigger.”

“I'm not trying to steer people in a direction. I'm just trying to move them. Wherever it takes them, it doesn't matter to me. I just want them to be moved in one way or another, and that's a hard thing to do, I think.”

“The world changes fast, and a lot of the old country folks have a hard time keeping up with it, and it makes them sad.”

“If you're going to document your own journey, the jokes work better in the first person, just like the stories do.”

“My dad, he worries a bit, usually with good reason. There were quite a few years there where he was probably trying to resign himself to fact that I wouldn't live too much longer, just because of the way I was living.”

“It's nice to feel like you have more in common with people rather than more differences.”

“Something that really helps when it comes to writing songs is you start to notice how children learn and how we all had to learn in the first place, starting from the ground up. It gives you a new perspective.”

“The south is very focused on family... the musical heritage of Muscle Shoals especially and the bands from the region.”

“I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but I grew up with a lot of opportunities that many people don't have.”

“I think I'm a common man for the most part, but I don't work as hard as most people that I know.”

“I have a lot of reactions to the outside world that I don't feel like would be appropriate for songs: things I'm not interested in writing about, things I don't want to think about any longer than 15 or 20 seconds.”

“If you're going to write, you're going to have to force yourself to really study the world.”

“If I spent my time wondering about what genre I wanted to be in or where I was on the charts, I wouldn't be able to write these kinds of song. I'd be too busy doing other things.”

“If you're the person whose problems were solved when you were born, your job is to try and help the people who aren't in that situation. It's very easy to say you're tired of political discussion when all of your problems are solved. I keep trying to think of it that way.”

“A lot of the world turns into checklists for me when I'm on the road. Like, OK, this person's alive, this person's fed, this person's good. Soundcheck is done. Everything becomes a checklist except for the actual show.”