10 Years of Southeastern, 10 Years of Everything
I process emotions through music. I always have. Whether it’s a well written song, a live concert, or 100,000 people signing Rocky Top in Neyland Stadium, those moments touch feelings in me I either can’t perceive or communicate for myself. I’ve learned later in life this sensation is typical for folks on the autism/neurodivergent spectrum. (I was late to figure that bit out about myself as well.) As best as I can describe it, listening to a song can open a portal in my head or my heart. “I have been feeling those emotions, but I’ve never figured out how to relay them to others!”
It’s probably no coincidence, then, I’m using the anniversary of this album as the catalyst of an extremely personal piece. I’ve always got to have a distraction from the meatier emotions.
A lot can change in 10 years. A lot has changed in 10 years.
Jason Isbell’s magnum opus, Southeastern, was released in June of 2013. I’ll use words from the man himself, celebrating the anniversary on Instagram: “Some people work their whole lives and they do everything right and it never happens. For some it happens too soon and it destroys them, or too late and they don’t get to enjoy it. I remember standing in a parking lot of a club in St. Louis ten years ago and wondering where the hell all those people came from, and then it hit me: it worked.”
The story has been told by countless people better suited to tell it than me, but the long and short of it is that Isbell was a raging alcoholic until 2012. His personal life suffered, his career suffered, and he suffered because of it. He got clean, wrote large portions of Southeastern in rehab, and that redemptive arc found an audience he had never reached before. Among many things, it was proof the work of sober living was worthwhile.
It was around this time I became aware of Isbell’s music. 2012 and 2013 are a blur for me in a lot of ways, but only because so many life altering events happened in the same short span of time. I graduated high school, turned 18, and prepared to go to college (although “plan” is probably a misnomer, I had no real plan.)
June 14th of that same summer in 2012, I received word my dad had overdosed and was in the emergency room in Knoxville. The instructions from the ER tech were simple: “get here as soon as you can.” I had been mentally preparing myself for that day for some time. I knew my dad didn’t have long before the cost of hard living would catch up to him. We had been largely estranged from each other for the better part of six years. A phone call every three months or so if my brother and I were lucky.
The last time I saw him in person was about a year before, and he was so messed up from the handfuls of morphine and hydros he had eaten like candy an hour before arriving that I had to pick him up out of the floor multiple times, pick his head up out of his plate of food, “nurse” him through his high. This was not traumatizing or atypical for me at the time — I had seen him in that shape my whole life. But it was embarrassing. We had friends over that night who had never met my dad (and possibly never seen anyone put themselves in such a pathetic position.) At some point we had enough, and my brother and I instructed my dad’s “friend,” the man who drove my dad to see us, to load him in the car and take him somewhere else. We weren’t going to deal with it anymore.
That’s easier said than done, especially for a then 17-year-old boy. You want your dad around. You want his love. You want his attention. It’s natural. So, while putting on a stubborn and cold exterior, I was always hoping he could turn himself around. Always wishing for a time when he’d prioritize something, SOMEONE, other than getting high.
That didn’t happen.
He died in the early morning hours of June 15th. His body so riddled with pain pills and heroin that the nurses were still pumping toxic bile out of his stomach 12 hours after he arrived. He had no vital signs — his brain was so deadened his pupils wouldn’t react to light. I’m convinced the doctors pulled the plug to prioritize an open bed for a more worthy patient in their critical care unit. I don’t blame them.
This entire ordeal threw my short- and long-term future in jeopardy, to say the least. Any “plan” for college was squashed — I needed to get a job to help pay for my dad’s funeral expenses, tombstone, cemetery plot, etc.
I was shaken by the sudden change in plans but tried to make the best of it. The disappointment of losing a summer or losing the immediate college option was nothing compared to the heartache of losing the idea of the man you wanted your father to be. There was always an opportunity to get better — until there wasn’t.
The good news is unpredictability ain’t all bad. I don’t know if things happen for a reason, if there’s some sort of divine plan or what, but the same summer I was sulking around feeling bad for myself and the unfair hand I’d been dealt, the best thing that has ever happened to me, the reason for every bit of happiness I’ve felt in the past decade, and the thing that has given me every ounce of purpose I can muster, walked into my life as well.
Isbell credits his wife with getting him sober — or more to the point, with making him realize his choice was either to get clean and keep her around or keep drinking and lose her. She staged his intervention. She was the driving force behind his change for the better — and by transitive property, she is the driving force behind his success.
I’m not going to pretend my situation was totally analogous. I’ve never had a problem with substance abuse of any sort (partly dumb luck I’m sure, but also taking care of parents with addiction problems often makes you want to stay far away from it.) What I needed was someone to show up for me, to care about me, to get me out of the mental rut, to show me I could be something. Kesney gave that to me when I was most desperate for it, whether I recognized it or not. I fell hard and I fell fast. I’m proud to say she is my one and only serious romantic relationship, and I plan to keep it that way. I am eternally grateful for her and all she has given me, and I hope to keep putting in the work to show that appreciation.
In the context of everything that was happening to me at the time, it’s easy to see why Southeastern hit me so deeply the first time I heard it in 2013. Not only is it an album inspired by someone doing the work to get clean — something I so desperately wanted my dad to do — but it’s an album about new love and how scary and intense it can be to give yourself up in service of someone else.
For the first time in my life, an album, front to back, spoke to the internal dialogue I had running in my head but could never verbalize. The authenticity of it is what drew me — and countless others — in like moths to a flame. Not every word is autobiographical, Isbell has admitted as much, and not every song totally applies to my (or your) situation, but every emotion is genuine. That’s why it worked.
We were lucky enough to be in attendance for the anniversary taping of Southeastern at the Bijou Theatre late last year.
To end this thing, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some of my favorite lyrics from the album — again, phrases and lines I wish I would have been able to verbalize for myself. Passages that hit me like a ton of bricks in reference to my now-wife and dad circa 2013.
Home was a dream
one that I’d never seen
‘til you came along
Once a wise man to the ways of the world
Now I’ve traded those lessons for faith in a girl
There’s one thing that’s real clear to me
No one dies with dignity
We just try to ignore the elephant somehow
Still, compared to those a stones-throw away from you
Our lives have both been relatively easy
Take a year and make a break there ain’t that much at stake
The answers could be relatively easy