By Jocie Brolin

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:: Forget spooky season, it’s story season. Read on and you too may be captivated by Jason Isbell’s wordsmith-ery

:: October 29, 2026

:: What is your go-to activity to stay entertained on a plane ride or long car-ride? Maybe it’s reading a book, watching a movie or listening to a podcast. For me, I like to listen to good stories. So, I put on my headphones and turn on Jason Isbell.

Jason Isbell is an Americana, alt-country singer hailing from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He started out in the rock band Drive-By Truckers before transitioning into a solo career. He now performs and makes music with the 400 Unit, though he has also been playing solo shows to promote his newest solo album “Foxes in the Snow.” His songwriting is highly acclaimed; he places #19 on The New York Times “Readers’ Choice: The 100 Greatest Living Songwriters” and has won six Grammy awards: three for Best Americana Album, and three for Best American Roots Song.

To delve into the genius of Isbell’s storytelling, I have chosen to focus on two songs of his, both of which detail an entire novel’s worth of a story in under six minutes.

The first is “Decoration Day,” which Isbell wrote when he was singing lead for the Drive-By Truckers. This song covers the story of a feud between two families: The Hills and The Lawsons. It is actually based on a real blood feud that Isbell is related to, his great-uncle was a Hill.

The narrator of the song is a Lawson, who shares that he “never knew how it all got started” and that it was a problem that went on with the patriarch Holland Hill before he was born.

Later in the song, the narrator’s father tells him that one of the Hill boys is going to come by the house, “The lumber man’s favorite son,” and that he should “Beat him real good but don’t dare let him die…”

The son questions why he should have to fight for an old feud that began for reasons he does not even understand. He expresses to his father that “[The Hills] ain’t given us trouble before / That we ain’t brought down on ourselves.” The narrator’s father does not take well to this and “Put[s] a chain to [his back]” and his “ear to the floor.”

Dying from the feud he spent his life fighting in, the narrator’s father meets his end with a bullet fired by a Hill. Even then, the narrator still sees the nuance. The song ends with him saying  “If I was a Hill I’d have put him away / And I’d fight ‘til the last Lawson’s last living day.” In other words, if he were born a Hill, he could have been the one who put his father in his grave. Unlike his father, the narrator knows that his opposition to the Hills only comes from the side of the feud he was born into, and that he does not have his own reason to hate them.

My second selection is “Live Oak” which comes from Isbell’s 2013 solo album “Southeastern.”

“Live Oak” begins with four striking lines: “There’s a man who walks beside me / It is who I used to be / And I wonder if she sees him / And confuses him with me.”

The narrator, a murderous man on the run from the sheriff, tells us “I’d never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze / So I found another victim every couple days.” This is until one night, he falls in love with a woman in a small town. Looking back at the first four lines, we can now assume that the “man who walks beside” him is who he was in his murderous past, and that he wonders if his lover can see this side of him.

Eventually, rumors of his past spread throughout their town, so he chooses to tell his lover what he did. However, when he tells her that he’d “Robbed a Great Lakes freighter / Killed a couple men aboard,” her eyes flicker “like the sharp steel of a sword.” Rather than being afraid, she is enthralled.

The narrator realizes “All the things that she’d suspected / [He]’d expected her to fear / Was the truth that drew her to [him] when [he landed] [t]here.” Thus, we find out that she saw the dark side of him all along and actually loved him because of it. This leads the narrator to fear that it is only that old, violent side of him that she loves, not the man he has become now.

He ultimately decides that she only loves the part of him he is trying to get away from, and chooses to kill her. “Well I carved a cross from live oak / And a box from shortleaf pine / And buried her so deep / She touched the water table line.” This is ironic because the narrator’s logic is that to move past his murderous old self, he must murder another person. He ends the song with four lines almost identical to the opening “There’s a man who walks beside her / He is who I used to be / And I wonder if she sees him / And confuses him with me.” My interpretation is that the man that walks beside his dead lover is his past self, which metaphorically is dead as well.

Many speculate that this song is a metaphor for Isbell’s past addiction to alcohol, and how he used to be a man that he is no longer proud of.

“Decoration Day,” and “Live Oak” are two great examples of Isbell’s masterful, striking storytelling. If these songs sounded interesting to you, I also recommend checking out “Outfit,” which he sang with the Drive-by Truckers, “Yvette” which like “Live Oak” is on the solo album “Southeastern,” and “King of Oklahoma” which is on Jason Isbell’s most recent album with the 400 Unit, titled “Weathervanes.”

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