Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit will be hitting the road throughout the summer with headline dates and festivals.

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

“There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell says. “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.”

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. Life and death songs played for and by grown ass people. 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. 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.

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. 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. When he plays a solo show, he is in charge of the entire complicated juggle. 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.

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. There were guitars in his trailer and in his rented house and a lot of time to sit and think. The melancholy yet soaring track “King of Oklahoma” was written there. 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.

“It definitely helped when I got into the studio,” Isbell says. “I had this reinvigorated sense of collaboration. You can have an idea and you can execute it and not compromise -- and still listen to the other people in the room.”

Amythyst Kiah

Amythyst 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. When met with the transcendent quality of her newly elevated sound, what emerges is an extraordinary vessel for Kiah’s songwriting: a raw yet nuanced examination of grief, alienation, and the hard-won triumph of total self-acceptance.

Produced by Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers, Amos Lee, Andrew Bird) and recorded at the legendary Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, Wary + Strange arrives as a deeply immersive body of work, endlessly redefining the limits of roots music in its inventive rhythms and textures. Despite its mesmerizing effect, the album’s sonic grandeur never eclipses the impact of Kiah’s storytelling, an element influenced by losing her mother to suicide when she was 17 and also by a longtime struggle to find her own sense of belonging. “A lot of these songs come from a moment in my 20s when I was grappling with trauma while also trying to navigate the experience of being a Black and LGBT woman in a white suburban area in a Bible Belt town,” says Kiah, who grew up in Chattanooga and later moved to Johnson City. “I’ve had moments of feeling othered in certain aspects of my life, and it took me a long time to figure out who I wanted to be and how to move through this world.”

Though much of Wary + Strange centers on an unfiltered expression of heartache, its songs represent years of tireless effort and exploration. A testament to the steadfast conviction behind her musicianship, Kiah recorded the album twice before linking up with Berg—then scrapped virtually everything and started over from scratch. “My favorite records are the ones that pull you into another world and completely absorb you, but I didn’t quite know how to get there on my own,” she explains. After an introductory session with Berg in early 2020, Kiah found herself floored by his transformation of “Fracture Me,” a bluesy portrait of longing for obliteration. “I knew I needed to work with Tony when he came in with a bass harmonica to use instead of a bass [guitar] and then got out the Mellotron and added a flute line at the chorus of this country blues song,” Kiah recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to see what else he pulls out of his bag of tricks.’ I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a moment of thinking, ‘Am I really going to record everything all over again?’, but I just kept coming back to, ‘What do these songs really need?’ My goal is to keep growing as an artist, which means trusting the process and doing whatever it takes to make a great record.”

In bringing Wary + Strange to life, Kiah revisited another form of therapy: the powerfully cathartic records she turned to for solace as a child and teenager. “The way I listened to music when I was younger was very much based on trying to find some kind of healing,” she says. “The way that someone like Tori Amos took these incredibly personal things and expressed them with piano and vocals was spellbinding to me, and it was my dream to create something that evocative.” At age 13, Kiah started writing songs on a Fender acoustic guitar from her parents; she later broadened her musical vocabulary by studying in the Bluegrass, Old-Time, Country Music program at East Tennessee State University. Not long after self-releasing her 2013 debut, Dig, she began garnering acclaim from leading outlets like NPR and The New York Times, who remarked that Kiah’s “razor-sharp guitar picking alone guarantees her a place among blues masters, but it’s her deep-hued voice that can change on a dime from brushed steel to melted toffee that commands attention.”

With the arrival of Wary + Strange, Kiah aims to offer listeners the same sense of purposeful escape that music has long provided her, all while building an undeniable sense of communion with her audience. “For anyone who’s struggled with grief or trauma, or felt left out and weird and like they didn’t belong, I hope this album lets them know that they’re not alone in that feeling,” says Kiah. “I hope they understand the experiences I’m trying to relay to them, and I hope they come away from these songs knowing that they can heal from whatever it is that they’re going through.”