"When We Were Close" by Jason Isbell

diving deeply into a very good song

the guy who wrote the song

So, Jason Isbell. We barely have the time. I’ll just say: greatest living folk/Americana/Southern rock/whatever singer-songwriter. Very influential, critically adored, deeply confessional. You think I’m exaggerating? Listen to this.

Stunning, isn’t it?

But I want to talk about a different Jason Isbell song today, “When We Were Close,” from his latest album Weathervanes. To do that you’ll have to humor me, because it requires a semi-academic tangent into the personal and musical history that birthed this song. Because “When We Were Close” is about the late Justin Townes Earle, son of Steve Earle, mentee of the late Townes Van Zandt, after whom Justin was named.

townes & steve

Townes Van Zandt was the enfant terribles of the 70s outlaw country scene, a drug addict and alcoholic who lived as hard as the characters in his songs. Awful with money, worse with women, and only able to land a few big hits, Townes never settled down. He toured his whole life in between failed stints of rehab, and only stopped as his body finally fell apart before his death in '97. Along the way he wrote several albums full of bluesy country standards, all shot through with a painful depressive streak that leaned towards nihilism. Townes also provided a brutal sort of artistic mentorship to the country rocker Steve Earle, who was just a teenager when he first met Townes in 1974. 

Obsessed with the already-mythologized Van Zandt, Earle began an artistic courtship that eventually led to his touring with Townes, and adopting his drinking and drugging approach to tour life. He was famously cruel to Earle, although he did teach him to use clean needles. They grew apart as Earle grew more famous than him, and fell deeper into heroin use than Townes ever did. During the early ‘90s, Earle nearly died more than once. When Townes came to see him at the depths of his addiction, Earle recalls telling him, “I must be in pretty bad shape if they sent you.” 

justin townes earle

When Steve Earle had a son, he named him after his complex, gnarly mentor-icon: Justin Townes Earle (JTE) was born in 1982, and was raised in a melodramatic family context, shuttled back and forth between life with his drug addict rockstar father and a struggling single mom. JTE has said that he first used heroin in 1994, the same year that his father served a prison sentence for weapons and narcotics possession. By the mid-2000s, the country-rock scion had developed a well-deserved reputation as a maestro guitarist and brilliant singer-songwriter in his own right. Despite long stints of rehab and brief stints of sobriety, Justin never overcame his addictions for long. He remained a phenomenal talent nonetheless, a productive lyricist and ruthless self-interrogator.

Justin Townes Earle died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2020. When he passed away, he and Jason Isbell hadn’t spoken in over a decade. But it wasn’t always like that; the two of them shared a deep and complex history of friendship and collaboration.

jason & justin

Jason Isbell started out in the early 2000s as a songwriter apprentice at the famous Muscle Shoals studio, and then as a guitarist and songwriter for southern rock provocateurs the Drive By Truckers. He was kicked out of the band in 2007 for “creative” (read: addiction) reasons. As Isbell floated on the periphery of the Nashville scene at the turn of the decade, just famous enough to eke out a living playing small shows, he met Justin Townes Earle.

At the time, Justin was more successful than Isbell. But they were living parallel lives in a way: brilliant writers, troubled minds, staying true to the music. JTE welcomed Jason and his then-girlfriend, now-wife Amanda Shires into his creative world. They were given opening spots on his tour, and Jason played electric guitar and sang backup vocals on “Harlem River Blues,” one of JTE’s biggest hits. They shared a clear artistic chemistry, as well as an extreme weakness for hitting the booze and god knows what else. Here's a video of them performing "Harlem River Blues" in 2011, hammered out of their minds. 

Justin fell out with Jason and Amanda over something stupid: Justin was sleeping with a roadie, and then he wasn’t, and then Jason hired her for his tour, and hurt feelings spilled into anger. Something complicated and shitty like that - it depends on which Reddit thread you read, which Isbell interview you annotate obsessively.

Regardless, their separation coincided with major changes in Jason’s life. In 2011 he got married to Amanda Shires, and in 2012 he finally got sober. By the time he broke out into stardom with his magnum opus “Southeastern” in 2013, he and Justin were no longer on speaking terms. Looking at it from the outside, it’s tempting to simplify the story: Jason got sober, and Justin didn't. 

let’s talk about the actual song

It’s a universal story, and one story supported by the lyrics of "When We Were Close," a song about Justin Townes Earle, which strikes me as one of the angriest (and best) songs ever written by Jason Isbell. 

Musically, “When We Were Close” could pass for a track that Isbell wrote for the Drive-By Truckers, featuring heavy drums, twin guitars and a bar-rock feel. But these lyrics are pure late-era Isbell. He has aged into a direct, borderline-minimalist writer, leaning hard on brevity and his eternally immaculate meter to communicate story and buried emotion.

I got a picture of us back when we were close 

Before we had somebody picking out our clothes 

But you always dressed in your Sunday best 

Even when we didn't have nowhere to go 

I got a picture of us playing in a bar 

And your shirt cost more than your guitar 

But you played so heavy, and you always let me sing a couple 

Even though you were the star

We jump right into the song’s narrative framework: Jason Isbell, reminiscing about Justin as he looks at pictures. He gets to the song’s subject right away: JTE was known for his Brooklyn-meets-rockabilly couture, and Isbell remembers him always dressing in his “Sunday best." 

As Isbell transitions into the chorus, “When We Were Close” becomes more emotional, even as the language turns cryptic and referential. 

I was the worst of the two of us

But Rex's Blues wasn't through with us

“Rex’s Blues” is a classic song by Townes Van Zandt, which Townes wrote about Rex “Wrecks” Bell, owner and operator of the Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe, outlaw country hangout where Townes recorded Live At The Old Quarter.

The song is an abstracted character profile of a wandering soul plagued by discontent. And when Isbell ladens himself and JTE with “Rex’s Blues,” he turns a song title into a mental health diagnosis. Jason’s meaning here is clear; he isn’t an AA man, but he is sober, and considers himself an alcoholic. He’s saying they were both addicts. That they both had the disease. 

You were bound for glory and grown to die

Oh, but why wasn't I?

Why wasn't I?

The chorus ends with a dose of survivor’s guilt, but the words that intrigue me here are “grown to die.” They are lifted from the son, and maybe Isbell just liked the poetic turn of phrase. But it makes me think about a deeper meaning, one related to that beautiful, awful name: Justin Townes Earle.

it gets even darker

The late wife of Justin Townes Earle has expressed a visceral discomfort with “When We Were Close,” and requested that Isbell stop performing it. This is almost certainly the offending stanza:

I saw a picture of you laughing with your child 

And I hope she will remember how you smiled 

But she probably wasn't old enough, the night somebody sold your stuff 

That left you on the bathroom tiles

The lyrics can feel off-putting at first, especially in the context of the widow’s complaints. But songwriting is an inherently ego-centric exercise, and I don’t think we should police the politeness of art.

There is no pretense of politeness here: Isbell really belts this stanza, his voice rising into a southern-rock snarl reminiscent of his days with the Drive-By Truckers. This is an angry song, full of sincere pain. And the final stanza makes it clear that Isbell isn’t choosing to think about this stuff.

Got a picture of you dying in my mind 

With some ghosts you couldn't bear to leave behind 

Jason isn’t looking at a physical photograph anymore. The image of Justin’s death is a mental fixation, an obsessive thought brought on by the trauma of loss. But in the most rousing, beautiful part of the song, Isbell rises from the dark and reanimates his old friend.

But I can hear your voice ring, as you snap another B-string 

And you finish off the set with only five 

And for a minute there, you're still alive

Half ecstatic vision, half grounding exercise: Isbell centers himself in the sensory memory of playing a show with JTE, and suddenly a song about death has become more seance than eulogy. But seance is by nature just a distraction, and “When We Were Close” returns to tragedy in the final, slightly-altered chorus.

I am the last of the two of us 

But the Fort Worth Blues isn't through with us 

You've travelled beyond the Great Divide

Oh, but why haven't I?

Why haven't I?

Isbell re-enters the referential mode here; "Fort Worth Blues" is a memorial song that Steve Earle wrote for Townes Van Zandt after his death. Earle expertly imitates the finger-style guitar playing and abstract, depressive lyrics of Townes, and the song is deeply affecting.

Somewhere up beyond the Great Divide
Where the sky is wide
And the clouds are few
A man can see his way clear to the light
Just hold on tight
That's all you gotta do

Isbell cribs directly from these lyrics as he says that Justin “traveled beyond the Great Divide,” and he wonders again: “why haven’t I?” The question is repeated as guitars whine, closing the song in a painful state of ambiguity.

conclusion

The idea of tradition in outlaw country music is a loaded topic. The most famous musicians in the genre, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, both used the Confederate flag as a signifier of their rebel identity in the prime of their careers. Cash is dead, of course, and Nelson has stopped using the flag and apologized for his past. But the history is still there, and it isn’t pretty. A lesser outlaw country artist named David Allen Coe released an album in 1982 that included a song called “N—r Fucker.”

But this stuff is complicated, it really is. Cash and Nelson weren’t known to be bigots, despite their idiotic use of the flag. Townes Van Zandt wrote a racist (and just plain dumb) song called “Talkin’ Karate Blues';” on the other hand, he also started out by touring with (and obsessively revering) the black blues country musician Lightnin’ Hopkins, and covered numerous songs by black artists throughout his career.

But we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? The history of outlaw country music is pockmarked by racism, but it also contains a wellspring of artistic achievement we can’t overlook. Perhaps “tradition” isn’t the right word here. Maybe what I’m interested in - what I’ve written about here - is closer to genealogy.

There is a specific, closely-linked family tree of country music that runs through “When We Were Close,” rendered through Isbell’s careful word choice and explicit references to the songs that inspired him and Justin Townes Earle. This is a half-century long legacy of painful addiction, of cathartic songwriting, that Isbell draws upon to great success.

Now, you could say - there are people who say - that Jason Isbell doesn’t even make country music. And I would tell those people to fuck off, that it doesn’t matter; that Jason Isbell is a man who knows who came before him. He is deeply in touch with his web of musical influences and personal heroes. And in making “When We Were Close,” he has drawn on them to put together a nakedly emotional, jarring presentation of what it means to lose someone that you loved far too much to like.