Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Weathervanes (2023) [Hi-Res]

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. Weathervanes carries the same revelatory power.

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. 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 equalling four once you reach a certain age - and carry a certain amount of scars.

Jason Isbell has established himself as one of the most respected and celebrated songwriters of his generation. The North Alabama native possesses an incredible penchant for identifying and articulating some of the deepest, yet simplest, human emotions, and turning them into beautiful poetry through song. Isbell sings of the everyday human condition with thoughtful, heartfelt, and sometimes brutal honesty.

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.

Isbell broke through in 2013 with the release of Southeastern. His next two albums, Something More Than Free (2015) and The Nashville Sound (2017), won Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album and Best American Roots Song. Isbell’s song ‘Maybe It’s Time’ was featured in the 2019 reboot of A Star Is Born.

His most recent full-length album, Reunions (2020), is a critically acclaimed collection of ten songs that showcased an artist at the height of his powers and a band fully charged with creativity and confidence. The roots of Weathervanes go back into the isolation of the pandemic and to Isbell’s recent time on the set as an actor on Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon.