Music Review: Jason Isbell’s ‘Reunions’ an Alt-Alt-Country Masterpiece

There has long been a chasmic disconnect between the creators and the consumers of Americana music. The Americana songwriter still wants to be Woody Guthrie, but the Americana listener stopped being Tom Joad about 60 years ago. Americana — or alt-country, or folk, or whatever we’re calling it this week — speaks most to the experiences of Red America, of a rural, blue-collar demographic that is overwhelmingly conservative, Christian, and Republican. The people who make the music, meanwhile, tend to be — well, the other kind of Red.

The advent of the Trump era brought the divide to clearer view than ever before. Muscle Shoals, a city rivaled only by Nashville in its importance to the genre, sits in Alabama’s fourth district — the only district in the entire country to vote more than 80 percent for Donald Trump in 2016. But soon after the people of Muscle Shoals came out in force to cast these votes, the anti-Trump sentiment of the creative class came to dominate the Americana scene. Son Volt’s Union (2019) was a train wreck of Trump hysteria — this from a band whose debut, Trace (1995), was not just an instant classic but an era-defining, genre-defining masterpiece. Drive-by Truckers, a homegrown Muscle Shoals band whose integration of Southern rock into alt-country has produced artistic successes that Ronnie van Zant himself couldn’t have dreamed of, delivered a schizophrenic flop with The Unraveling (2020). At least the title is appropriate.

About the Author

Declan Leary

Declan Leary is a junior at John Carroll University.

There has long been a chasmic disconnect between the creators and the consumers of Americana music. The Americana songwriter still wants to be Woody Guthrie, but the Americana listener stopped being Tom Joad about 60 years ago. Americana — or alt-country, or folk, or whatever we’re calling it this week — speaks most to the experiences of Red America, of a rural, blue-collar demographic that is overwhelmingly conservative, Christian, and Republican. The people who make the music, meanwhile, tend to be — well, the other kind of Red.

The advent of the Trump era brought the divide to clearer view than ever before. Muscle Shoals, a city rivaled only by Nashville in its importance to the genre, sits in Alabama’s fourth district — the only district in the entire country to vote more than 80 percent for Donald Trump in 2016. But soon after the people of Muscle Shoals came out in force to cast these votes, the anti-Trump sentiment of the creative class came to dominate the Americana scene. Son Volt’s Union (2019) was a train wreck of Trump hysteria — this from a band whose debut, Trace (1995), was not just an instant classic but an era-defining, genre-defining masterpiece. Drive-by Truckers, a homegrown Muscle Shoals band whose integration of Southern rock into alt-country has produced artistic successes that Ronnie van Zant himself couldn’t have dreamed of, delivered a schizophrenic flop with The Unraveling (2020). At least the title is appropriate.