GRAMMY award-winning Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit wrapped an eight-night, sold-out residency at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium Sunday, Oct. 22. The run of shows from Oct. 12-15 and Oct. 19-22 marked the group’s eighth residency at the Ryman, as Isbell reached a milestone of 50 career shows played at the revered venue. His residency has become an October tradition, with each night featuring a variety of openers and special guests including Adeem the Artist, Quinn Christopherson, S.G. Goodman, Izzy Heltai, Autumn Nicholas, Kim Richey, Lawrence Rothman, Satya and Amanda Shires.
Isbell celebrated the 10-year anniversary of his fourth solo album, Southeastern, playing the album from top-to-bottom during the residency. Released in 2013, the album solidified Isbell's influence on Americana and includes RIAA gold-certified tracks "Cover Me Up" and "If We Were Vampires." An expanded deluxe edition of the record was released in Sept. to further commemorate its impact over 10 years. In June, Isbell released his ninth solo album, Weathervanes, as Pitchfork observed its songs "reveal their intricacies slowly, the measured, almost leisurely pace suggesting that Isbell is confident that his audience will stick with the album as they learn its subtle pleasures."
Photo Credit: Eric Ahlgrim
About Ryman Auditorium
A National Historic Landmark, Ryman Auditorium was built by Captain Thomas G. Ryman in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle. A 14-time winner of the prestigious Pollstar Theatre of the Year award, the historic venue is well-known as the Mother Church of Country Music and is the most famous former home of the Grand Ole Opry (1943-1974). The Ryman’s thriving concert schedule hosts more than 200 shows per year, and the venue is open for daytime tours year-round. The Ryman has also been featured in numerous film and television projects including Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Johnny Cash Show, American Idol, Nashville and more. Ryman Auditorium is owned by Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc. (NYSE: RHP), a Nashville-based REIT that also owns and operates the Grand Ole Opry, WSM Radio and Ole Red. For more information, visit ryman.com.
About Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit:
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. 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.