133 Quotes by Jason Isbell

There are definitely some nights where the show is over, and you're on the bus or a hotel room, and it's sort of a shock to go from being in the atmosphere of a club or a theater and be at your own show to being by yourself in a hotel room.

When I wrote those first songs for the Truckers, songs like 'Outfit' and 'Decoration Day,' those were strong songs, very strong songs. But had I been in the position of writing an entire album at that point in time, I don't think the whole album would have been of that kind of quality.

Something that really helps when it comes to writing songs is you start to notice how children learn and how we all had to learn in the first place, starting from the ground up. It gives you a new perspective.

I feel like people have a lot of the same good times and the same interests pretty much anywhere.

I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of good songwriters, and I try to actually work on the craft of writing a song rather than just leaving it up to inspiration.

I find the ones that have the most emotional weight, the heaviest songs. For some reason, for me, they're usually the ones I write the quickest. I put more work into uplifting material, I think, sometimes.

A lot of people make records where there are a couple songs worth listening to and you skip through the rest, and I don't want to do that because those records bore me pretty bad.

If I could write rock & roll songs on purpose, I'd do it all the time. But most of what I write comes out slow and sad because that's most of what I listen to.

I don't start a song with an idea of what ingredients are going to go into a song. It's not like a recipe. I will normally either talk from personal experience or I'll make a character and then try to allow that character to behave the way he or she naturally would.