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#WHEN I GROW UP SONG THEATER PLUS#

You can have an idea and you can execute it and not compromise - and still listen to the other people in the room.” Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit WebsiteĪmythyst Kiah’s Rounder Records debut, Wary + Strange, marks the glorious combination of two vastly different worlds: the iconoclastic alt-rock that first sparked her musical passion and the roots/old-time music scene where she’s found breakout success in recent years, including recognition from Rolling Stone as “one of Americana’s great up-and-coming secrets.” With an unforgettable voice that’s both unfettered and exquisitely controlled, the Tennessee-bred singer/songwriter expands on the uncompromising artistry she most recently revealed as part of Our Native Daughters-an all-women-of-color supergroup whose Kiah-penned standout “Black Myself” earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best American Roots Song and won Song of the Year at the 2019 Folk Alliance International Awards. “I had this reinvigorated sense of collaboration. “It definitely helped when I got into the studio,” Isbell says. Isbell also watched the great director work, saw the relationship between a clear vision and its execution, and perhaps most important, saw how even someone as decorated as Scorsese sought out and used his co-workers’ opinions. The melancholy yet soaring track “King of Oklahoma” was written there. There were guitars in his trailer and in his rented house and a lot of time to sit and think. The roots of this record go back into the isolation of the pandemic and to Isbell’s recent time on the set as an actor on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. On stage with the 400 Unit, he can be a guitar hero when he wants, and a conductor when he wants, and a smiling fan of the majesty of his bandmates when he wants to hang back and listen to the sound. When he plays a solo show, he is in charge of the entire complicated juggle. He can be private but with them behind him he transforms, and there is a version of himself that can only exist in their presence.

They make a big noise, as Isbell puts it, and he feels so comfortable letting them be a main prism through which much of the world hears his art. The record features the rolling thunder of Isbell’s fearsome 400 Unit, who’ve earned a place in the rock ‘n’ roll cosmos alongside the greatest backing ensembles, as powerful and essential to the storytelling as The E Street Band or the Wailers. Some will make you cry alone in your car and others will make you sing along with thousands of strangers in a big summer pavilion, united in the great miracle of being alive.

Life and death songs played for and by grown ass people. Weathervanes is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption.

#WHEN I GROW UP SONG THEATER HOW TO#

“As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.” “There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell says.

#WHEN I GROW UP SONG THEATER PLUS#

He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and then strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equaling four once you reach a certain age - and carry a certain amount of scars. This is a storyteller at the peak of his craft, observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. Weathervanes carries the same revelatory power.

A Jason Isbell record always lands like a decoder ring in the ears and hearts of his audience, a soundtrack to his world and magically to theirs, too.

When i grow up song theater