We Try to Ignore the Elephant Somehow
On the wooded embankment in Lewiston, New York, in late July, 2023, I paused to gaze at the Niagara river pulsing by, muscular and silvered, its liquid music quieting the apocalyptic noise in my head. It had been an unsettling summer. Canadian wildfires on the other side of this river had burned so long and hard that the smoke made the air in Cleveland, where we live, smell like drying paint, day after day. In our backyard, we’d set up some furniture, hoping to enjoy hosting friends outside, since we’ve continued to mask inside after our eldest daughter began to struggle with Long Covid. A college athlete, she was exhausted, suffering from brain fog and tachycardia. With the toxic air, we began masking outside as well. A whole country of fire, burning. It felt like something big and unnamable was dying.
But that afternoon in Lewiston, the sky had cleared and the air was soft. Two couples and I, one from the U.S. and one from Canada, were hiking by the river, waiting for the Jason Isbell concert at Artpark to begin, talking over what songs we wanted to hear.
“I work in mental health,” Michelle said. “So, ‘Anxiety.’” “[His songs] live what we live. Day in and day out.” The other nodded.
It’s hard for me not to hear Isbell’s words, written in 2017, as a prophecy of our pandemic and wildfire terrors:
A crowded room is a burning battlefield
If I don’t move, I’ll come undone
My heart beats harder, a hammer striking steel
Will I walk now or be like “Wait and Run”
The song comes on hot and hard, almost too gloomy-grand for its intimate theme. But I get it. I’ve always had trouble breathing, and when I’m scared I breathe shallow, which makes me more anxious. Asthmatic since I was a child, I have spent too many nights struggling for air. Covid and wildfire smoke reared up before me this summer, day and night, like two horsemen of the Apocalypse, riding for the tender trees of my lungs, knocking back into bed. For the lungs of my girls, one already on her knees from Covid. I found myself crying every other day, inexplicably, as if some dam was disintegrating in me.
I’m not alone in this grief, this depression. According to a KFF/CNN poll in February 2023, 32.3% of adults were experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. For young adults like my daughters, the number is 50%. All of this grief, needing something to spill into.
“For me,” Howard, from Toronto, said, “it’s ‘Middle of the Morning.’” Isbell wrote this song as he felt his own depression, stuck at home in 2020 and unable to tour. The lyrics capture, at once, both the fear of being near others in public and the curdling of relationships at home from too much depression and proximity:
I know you’re scared of me, I can see it in your face
I can feel it in the way you move around this place
I know you’re scared of me, I can see it in your smile
Like an unattended child you can’t quite trust
Yet here, the song’s acoustic warmth and breezy electric guitar, provides a honeyed counterpoint to Isbell’s plaintive vocals reaching out in protect. As if the music had made it to the place the words could not.
“I can’t read poetry,” Howard said, trying to explain what drew him to Isbell. “But I’m very into lyrics.”
That’s what Isbell does, again and again. Like a true poet, he finds a music to enfold the predicament of being human right now. The suffering finds a respite in the arms of a melody. No matter how much we’re enduring, battling to keep our heads above the current, a good song can buoy us, keep us afloat.
“His lyrics are actually understandable,” Michelle’s partner said. He couldn’t name a favorite, but when pressed, he said, “King of Oklahoma.”
We got to talking, about life, about the shows they’d seen — Isbell, Drive-By Truckers, Neil Young. He worked in construction. On the side of that steep hill, looking out over the cliff, he talked about working on Toronto’s CN Tower, he said he wasn’t afraid of heights. When he has to climb a crane, though, sixty-seventy feet up, he holds on tight and focuses hard.
I couldn’t help but think back to the lyrics of “King of Oklahoma,” a song about a guy whose life is coming apart after he fell off a ladder and injured his back, getting addicted to pain meds.
The song is not so much a song as it is a classic short story, beginning in medias res, with our protagonist trying to steal copper from a worksite to pain for his addiction, then shifting to the cause of his thievery and dope-need—an ignominious piss on a tall ladder that led to a fall and back injury. He keeps thinking, if only I’d just gotten off the ladder to take a leak.
“King of Oklahoma” has the sort of soaring, full-blazing-light chorus of a country song, replete with its clichés of hard-working men and serving women:
She used to wake me up with coffee every morning
And I’d hear her homemade house shoes slide across the floor
She used to make me feel like the king of Oklahoma
But nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore
He may have once felt like a king, and now he’s just numb and a nobody whose wife has taken the kids and moved out. It’s a song about two falls — from a ladder, and from grace — but it’s hard not to read it as song about the plight of the American working man in general. This song’s the cagey son of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” which many took to be a patriotic anthem rather than the outcry of a man who was grieving the end of the dream.
*
Just outside Artpark, a middle-aged woman was standing by the side of the road, lifting a red donation bucket as cars passed into the park, asking concert-goers for donations to a local homeless organization.
Few cars seemed to be stopping. I was hoofing my way in town for some food, still waiting for the show.
She lifted the bucket and I put in a few bucks.
“Thanks,” she said. “It really makes a difference.”
There were two hundred and forty unhoused kids, she said, who were attending school in the area. Some were trying to cross the border, some down on their luck.
“We’re all just an accident away,” she said.
Just down the street, the restaurant patios were full. On one balcony, people were dressed up as if for an engagement party, their hand cozied up around bottles and glasses. Looking up, I was struck again by the invisible border between the haves and the have-nots.
Early in the pandemic, the first public messaging emphasized taking care of each other. But as the weeks ground on, and corporations and billionaires saw profits dwindle, the collectivity tune changed. The new lyrics said people needed to get back to work. The new lyrics said isolation was hurting people. Masking was hurting people. That our immunity needed to be built back, and that the virus was not that harmful now. Maybe it was even a hoax.
Despite the fact that more people are becoming disabled by COVID, the pandemic was declared over, and active public research and messaging evaporated. Meanwhile, a hidden country of people, a country among us, are living with the consequences. That country is growing.
*
On the hanging hammock of a blue-webbed installation called Murmuration, Ryan hung out, waiting for the show and his buddy to arrive. According to the artists, Murmuration, “echoing a flock of birds midair … appears to continually shift its shape as visitors catch glimpses across the rolling Artpark topography.” From a certain angle, it looked like ship masts, or blue waves, an ocean frozen in the air.
Hands behind his long-haired head and sleeveless black tee, Ryan looked like he was enjoying the ride. He rattled off his favorite Isbell songs: “Alabama Pines,” “Something More Than Free,” The Last of My Kind,” and “New South Wales.”
“I’m a sucker for good lyrics,” he said. “Tremendous songwriter. It’s very real. Very expressive and potent. I love his storytelling.”
“And Elephant.”
“The ‘everyone dies alone’ bit. ‘Try to ignore the elephant’ because that’s all you really do in that situation,” he said, pausing. “It’s heartbreaking.”
*
“Elephant” is a song that sneaks up on you. For this reason, reader, stop me if you haven’t heard that one before, and listen to it right now. Right now. I can’t do it justice on the page. It’s a short story in three and a half minutes and worth the pause.
*
You’re back? Now you know the title is a feint. Everybody loves elephants, but none of their elemental grandeur pads through this song. Its opening scene in a bar suggests love is in the air:
She said Andy, you’re better than your past
Winked at me and drained her glass
Cross-legged on a barstool, like nobody sits anymore
She said “Andy you’re taking me home”
But I knew she planned to sleep alone
I’d carry her to bed, sweep up the hair from her floor
If I’d fucked her before she got sick I’d never hear the end of it
She don’t have the spirit for that now
Very quickly, we know something’s very wrong. She’s sick, losing her hair, her weight: “sharecropper eyes and her hair almost all gone.” Then her voice goes. With each stanza, she’s disappearing right before our eyes.
It was the song that opened the door to Isbell’s art to me. I’ve never seen someone die of cancer up close. But he captures something about watching someone you love fade before your eyes. Of course, some people die with dignity. Of course, some people die surrounded by those who love them and feel loved. But the speaker of the song is so full of grief, so full of the loneliness of the grieving, he can’t imagine it. It is his truth. And we grieve with him, in his lonely grief.
I feel that lonely grief every day, seeing my daughter struggle with the impacts of a largely-unknown COVID condition, constantly exhausted, unable to know what to do or how to help.
One night, I dreamed that I had no arms, only hands at my shoulders, unable to reach out.
And every day, I continue to wear a mask to work, separated and struggling to connect with students and colleagues, who no doubt see me as an oddity, someone stuck in a traumatic nightmare that they’ve awakened from.
*
At Artpark, the parking lot had begun to fill, and the early birds were hanging out on lawn chairs, in open flatbeds, or open sedan trunks. Lance and Mary, an interracial couple from Rochester, said that they’d gone to see Isbell on the recommendation of their son.
They loved that he was a liberal country boy. Lance mentioned how Isbell called out Jason Aldean on Twitter for singing “In a Small Town,” a racist dog-whistle of a song whose video was shot in front of a South Carolina courthouse where lynchings have taken place.
“Write your own song,” Isbell had castigated Aldean. The battle of the two Jasons seemed like the battle for the soul of country, and the soul of the country. Country music has long been torn between patriotic pablum like Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and the antiestablishment pole represented by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine. Like the country at large, country music’s been divided, though its radio stations have long been ruled by sanitized, commodified, safe pop. When the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the Iraq War, they were banned from country radio.
Isbell has been riding that line for a while, his Americana alt-country a hybrid between country and alternative music.
Like Lance and Mary, their love so evident in how they curl close together in their open hatchback, like teenagers who’ve found themselves on the wrong side of fifty.
*
On the “Stopping By” Facebook page, RD Robinson wrote: “My late wife would say on occasion that she wished we were vampires … We were a couple for 41 years so when I heard Isbell’s song eight years after her death, “If We Were Vampires,” I cried a lot. Still cannot listen to it without crying.”
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind
It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
Ken Clayton responded to Rd: “my wife and I love this song too but for a different reason. We first met in 1977 and had an instant connection. Sadly she already had plans to move to another state. Fast forward to 2015. I get a Facebook friend request from her. We knew we didn’t have a long time to be together so that’s why we relate to the song. We are well aware of how lucky we are to have the time we have.”
*
The Artpark concert gates finally opened, and we went through security metal detectors. In this time of mass shootings and people throwing things at musicians on stage, we were allowed to bring in only a clear water bottle or a tiny purse. In Isbell’s song, “Save the World,” the speaker finds being in public spaces triggers fears of a mass shooting:
Balloon popping at the grocery store
My heart jumping in my chest
I look around to find the exit door
Which way out of here’s the best?
The kid’s looking for the candy aisle
School’s starting in a week
Lady says you have a lovely child
I’m too terrified to speak
How many of us walk with that terror, that trauma? Still, at Artpark, the mood and crowd felt festive. The average age of the crowd was pushing forty. The lone guy in the Trump hat seemed as at home as the old Drive-By Truckers fans, who’d caught on to Isbell back when he was part of the band.
*
In line for the merch table, Marlene, from Canada, was wearing a shirt that said PEACE. She loved Isbell’s storytelling, his voice, his guitar playing. The woman next to hear piped in, saying, “I like how he brings out the pain in his life. He doesn’t shy away from the describing the difficulties. And his words make it so you can understand and feel and apply the songs to your own experiences to things that you’ve had in your own life. So each song hits you in a different way.”
At the front of the line, I could see that the tee shirts cost $40 dollars.
That woman with the red donation bucket had gathered $60. I decided not to get a shirt.
On the ramp up to the lawn seating, I talked to Chris, a long-haired librarian at a Buffalo university. Chris was drawn to the music because he loves Americana, but also how honest Isbell was about his life.
At this point I should confess that I was going around Artpark telling people that I was writing a story about Isbell, not just because I wanted to write a story about Isbell, but because my family couldn’t join me. I was alone and lonely. Because COVID. Because the climate crisis. Because of the divisions in our country. Because of the borders and its guards. Because I wanted to see if people loved Isbell’s music the way I did, and maybe because part of its purpose was to help people feel less lonely.
Song after song, Isbell sings of loneliness. He gives Whitman and Chekhov a run for their loneliness money. Goddamn lonely love. Are you lonely tonight. So tired of traveling alone. Hardly even know my name anymore, when no one calls it out it just vanishes away.
Hello, I’m Phil, I’m writing a story about Jason Isbell’s music, how it brings people together. Would you tell me your name? Is there a song that speaks to you?
*
Artpark’s music venue has an interior stage and seating, but opens out onto a rising lawn. Sitting among the gathering crowd, I cast back, wondering the last time I was actually at an outdoor concert. Was it 30 years, the Replacements at Chicago’s Grant Park on the Fourth of July, when they suddenly called it quits?
Concert, from the Latin, meaning a combining of voices or sound. Or an agreement, accordance, harmony. It’s a promise of gathering, a place to see and be seen. Pare the technological elements away and it could be 10,000 years ago, around a nighttime fire, people with drums and stringed instruments and voices, calling forth something out of us that we translate into dancing.
In the digital age, live music has become not only the main way that music acts make money. It’s also one of the rare public arts that has not only survived, but thrived the COVID crash and the suddenly change in how people engage with entertainment. Theater, dance, classical music, movies — all seem to be teetering on potential extinction. Music concerts have been particularly attractive to Generation Z, hungry for connection, for communion.
And just like that, a young guy came up to me, smiling, shaking my hand, also recognizing my college shirt. Andy, studying accounting. Happy to see his someone from his soon-to-be alma mater.
Next to me on the lawn, where a small group of the bourgeoisie had dressed up for a night out, a thick dude in a bushy red beard and black hoodie and sandals pitched himself down. It was the meeting of the two worlds, two social classes.
Guy in Stylish Glasses said hello to Redbeard, smiled, and offered him a beer. Redbeard took a drink, lay back and closed his eyes, one with the music and the lawn.
*
In line for the Port-a-Potty’s, two guys — one older, one younger — are totally lit. In the quiet line waiting for relief, the younger one’s talking really loud to his friend, in the buzz of his happy drunkenness, so loud that his friend shushes him.
“You’re the only one,” he said, “talking so loud.”
I asked them if they had a song they wanted to hear.
“Super 8,” they said. It’s a first-class alky barnburner, to be sure.
Somewhere halfway through, after “Death Wish,” they’d get their wish.
*
After the opening act, I checked my ticket and noticed that it was a seat inside the pavilion. Masking up, despite the fact that the breeze was blowing through, I found myself close enough to make out Isbell’s square face. Inured to packed club shows with sketchy but deafening sound systems, I found myself enjoying the show as a show, not simply as an earsplitting-song-delivery-in-a-beery-cave production.
In general, I find that the best concerts are alone, where you can sing or dance or rage as you will, with no onlookers. But the spirit was just right here.
*
One of the biggest cheers was for a line from “Cover Me Up,” a classic from Isbell’s breakout album, Southeastern, that heralds a love that helps him kick his alcohol and drug addictions: “I sobered up, I swore off that stuff / Forever this time.” And suddenly I heard another part of Isbell’s fan base echo back—those who’d sworn off that stuff.
On the Facebook group, John Kapral wrote: “Was going through one of the roughest patches of my life about 2010…separation and divorce, stalled career, drinking too much and caring too little. I heard this one song of his [“The Blue”], not really being too familiar with the 400 Unit work yet, and something about the words and music touched me and has stayed with me since. Now some 13 years past and I am remarried, sober, and doing the best work of my life … Wishing Jason best things on his own journey.”
I’m too scared to ask the right questions;
And too tired to fill the right shoes.
So I’ll take advantage of the blues;
I’ll take advantage of the blue.
*
For similar reasons, Rachael Joy loves “Only Children,” a song about a friendship with a creative guy who loses a fatal battle with addiction: “I was a weird kid with a few weird friends. We got in trouble, wrote songs and poems. The line ‘maybe these words will hold the beast back’ is likely going to be my next tattoo. I had a lot of friends who fell into drugs and several didn’t make it out. Writing, for me, held that beast back. It gave me something to focus on and helped me avoid the hard drugs.”
*
Isbell speaks to me, like so many other men, as someone who got the message to suppress their emotions, to be hard. Randy Kinney, on the Facebook page: “But I’ll go with ‘Hope the High Road.’ When JI said that he didn’t know what being a real man meant, I felt that big time. As a very non-stereotypically masculine male, I’ve long struggled with what it means to be a man. Like when I binged a ton of Hank Williams Sr songs in my 20s, listening to JI … reminded me that it’s okay to be a different kind of man: to be creative and vulnerable.”
*
There is just so much grief. After singing “Alabama Pines,” Isbell joked, “That’s the last of the happy songs,” and launched into “Death Wish,” about a partner worrying over a woman who wants to end her life, followed by “White Beretta” — another one of those songs you should pause and go listen to.
*
Are you back?
Maybe this essay is just a place to stop by and listen to music together, the way it used to before everything separated us.
*
“White Beretta” is told by a man looking back on a sad chapter of his life, addressing his long-ago girlfriend who had an abortion. The main character is haunted by what happened and reaches out to say he’s sorry. He doesn’t buy his own self-rationalizations — that he was young and didn’t understand. He knows exactly why they chose. But that doesn’t make it any easier, partly because he’s racked with guilt — not only about the procedure, but that she went through it alone. His only relief comes in knowing that she didn’t suffer remorse. Some part of him will always be reliving that sadness, as opening lines cycle back in the end: “We were running through the red lights / In a hurry to get to nowhere / In a white Beretta.”
While Isbell is leery of those who suggest his songs are always confessional, he admits that “White Beretta” is drawn from personal experience. But it’s not a mere confession. It’s trying to wrestle with the legacy of our upbringing, that “how you’re raised can sometimes prevent you from supporting people that you care about in the way that you should … I was raised in a very conservative place around a lot of people who were judgmental of those sorts of things. So when it came time for me to deal with real-world experience myself, I was torn, and I didn’t know —Are you doing the right thing here? I thought that was the question. The older I got more, I realized that’s not the question at all. The question is, what is my role here and how can I best fulfill my role? And I wish I had known that then, because I feel like I could have been a better partner.”
*
On Facebook, Craig Hill wrote that he lived “White Beretta”: “Every detail in it is accurate & right out of my life except the car was a Red Camaro & the city was Charlotte.”
William Koenning chimed in: “Craig Hill Same here … The line that hits me the hardest is “thank you for your grace/ for the dreams we got to chase/ for what you chose to do.” And later, “The lines about being 19 in 1990 & the Son Volt song were startling as if someone had been watching me. 😳”
I asked them if it was cathartic to hear the song, if it brought back bad memories, or both. Koenning replied, “Definitely both. It’s something that is difficult to talk about because obviously it’s a polarizing topic. But also because there’s shame and what-ifs and heartbreak involved. But to hear those words coming from someone else was cathartic.”
I was moved that these guys — total strangers — shared one of their most painful moments with everyone else on the “Stopping By” Facebook page. And with each other. Isbell brought them out of the shell of that grief.
And also the shell of my grief, watching a close friend go through this same shame many years ago, believing it was the right thing to do in his head and feeling like something was dying for the sake of his unwritten future.
*
One of the most intriguing responses to my request for favorite Isbell songs was from Majid Alsayegh, an Iraqi man who emigrated to the US years ago. He’s lived through two wars on his home country, but he’s found another home here. On his forty-fourth wedding anniversary, he adopted some lines from a medley of Isbell songs — “Live Oak,” “If It Takes a Lifetime,” “Overseas,” “Relatively Easy,” and “If We Were Vampires” — to write a tribute to his wife.
*
Seeing life and its sundry griefs played out in a song, on a stage, on a screen — that’s the weird tonic of art. How many times have I wept at artistic depictions that in life I walked through numbly, tearless?
Accessing those aching, tender places, letting them breathe a little, breathing through the touching of them, letting some of the hurt go. The best of art does that. Or it wounds into a new understanding, a wisdom borne of a new experience.
Isbell’s songs provide the language for saying something that so few of us can say on our own, whether we’re racked by guilt or shame or grief for all the things that life does to us, and we do to life. In the 2023 documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, Isbell says to his wife Amanda Shires, amid that very difficult time: “Of course, I want and need to be alone. I’m a man who came out of Alabama, damnit.” So many of us have been programmed into believing this aloneness is our fate.
I don’t know if Isbell is the greatest songwriter today, but I want to say so. Right now, he is for me. Because I listen and I feel more awake and alive and less alone than I did before I listened.
His 2025 album, Foxes in the Snow, wrestles with the breakup of his marriage to Shires and trying to start life over. His whole life — and the fairy story we told of it, of a man saved from the bottle by the lovely and talented Amanda, who’d joined his band — suddenly broke apart. One line, from “Gravelweed,” strikes like a slap to a cheek: “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” He keeps finding ways of telling the story of a life that isn’t a straight line.
No, Isbell’s music isn’t ending climate change or COVID denial or the fracture of American democracy or intergenerational poverty and addiction or genocide. We’re still living a loneliness that feels like the shadow twin of capitalism and its relentless desire. These little catharses — do the songs really do anything? Maybe they are just shots of relief in an otherwise difficult time.
But that’s not nothing. During the show, I’d sometimes look over and watch people’s faces as they listened, singing along. Not to empty pop songs, but to songs that help us deal with the elephants we know are with us in the room.
Maybe you were there.
Sometimes it feels like we’re still not unlike our Neolithic ancestors in a cave, seeing someone do something larger than life, something beautiful that holds us in its light, its melodic light.
When it was over, while waiting for the traffic to clear, I popped in a Jason Isbell CD, singing “somebody take me home, through those Alabama pines,” which became the soundtrack to my drive back past midnight — traveling solo, but not entirely alone.