The Waiting Room Lounge

Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit

w/ The Kris Lager Band

For a comparatively brief moment in the mid-1960s, Muscle Shoals, Alabama was the unlikely epicenter of a major American songwriting renaissance. Style matters, for in those turbulent times the writers and their collaborators fused the vocal passion of African-American soul and gospel to an Anglo-Saxon storytelling tradition which goes back at least to Beowulf: Tough, hard, passionate, unflinching songs, unrepentant in their sense of place and direct in their stubborn Southernness. That is a powerful group of people to spade across the work of Jason Isbell, as his second solo album, named for his band, is, well, only his second solo album. And he’s almost 30. It’s not simply that he lives in Florence, Alabama, just outside Muscle Shoals, nor that he recorded Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit at the famed FAME studio there. That guarantees nothing. The songs will stand on their own.