Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit / S.G. Goodman - Usher Hall Edinburgh, Scotland 20th November 2024

On this night, Jason and the 400 Unit had brought a slice of Americana and Southern Gothic goodness to Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh; specifically, the magnificent Usher Hall - a solid-stone, acoustically-perfect building opened in 1914, which stands literally in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle at certain times of the day, although on this day there was no sun to cast that shadow and it was -2° at show time.

Singer-songwriter, S.G. Goodman is the opening act on this tour and she kept a warm jacket on throughout her 30-minute performance. She’s from Kentucky and coincidentally her fellow Kentuckians Black Stone Cherry were playing on the same night along the motorway in Glasgow. It took me one song to get tuned in, but thereafter I enjoyed her solo guitar performance and plaintive vocals, starting with ‘Supertramp’ and including a fine version of John Prine’s ‘All the Best’. S.G. peppered her set with sardonic wit and humour. Apparently, she had enjoyed her day in Edinburgh apart from the weather; “Why did it have to be so cold? Y’all not got global warming over here”? S.G declared her own climate change mission was to warm up the crowd, “either by pissing you off or making you sad, so that when Jason comes it’s a relief!” She definitely went for the latter with her final song; apparently a new one, and possibly a work-in-progress, called ‘I’m in Love’, but somehow even that came with a melancholy undertone. She did her job and won a few new friends though. No-one was pissed off and the 2,200 people in the crowd were definitely toastie-ready for their audience with southern rock royalty by the time the six members of the band came on to start a 2-hour masterclass of a set.

Naturally, it was straight into the drama with a haunting but hard-rocking rendition of ‘Save the World’ – one of eight songs from the Grammy-winning album ‘Weathervanes’ that featured on the night. There had been a blast of Thin Lizzy in the pre-gig background tape and with star-in-his-own-right Sadler Vaden standing stage right, Jason had someone to join him in twin-guitar harmonies and trade savagely-perfect solos with not a single note wasted. It probably is “only” about 24-hours from Tulsa to Edinburgh but if there was ever any doubt that a Scottish audience would “get” Jason’s version of the American Dream, that was blown away by the crowd’s word-perfect backing vocals for the shit-faced Shakesperean tragedy of ‘King of Oklahoma’ - already a stone-cold classic and a highlight of the recent ‘Live at The Ryman, Volume 2’ recording - and the respect paid to the touch and feel of Isbell’s vocals and guitar playing.

With a lengthy back catalogue to honour, there was inevitably a fair bit of song rotation in the set over the course of a lengthy tour. Dispensing with any covers, early prime-cuts included ‘Last of My Kind’, ‘Stockholm’ the touching ‘Flying Over Water’ and a reverential singalong on ‘Alabama Pines’. The wild card in Edinburgh was the poetically devastating word-craft of ‘Elephant’ – a spine-tingling performance by just Jason and Denny deBorja that was observed in rapt silence, other than light lip-biting and a trace of partly-stifled sobbing from some folks in my vicinity.

When chatting on-stage, Jason recalled his first visit to our country at 22-years-old with the Drive-By Truckers and chose to celebrate that with a rendition of Decoration Day. He seemed genuinely pleased to be back in town and had spent some time in the afternoon walking around the ancient cobbled streets, declaring it to have been “a god-damn good day” and by the big smile on his face he really looked like he meant it.

With nearly two thousand years of history, Edinburgh has its fair share of ghost stories but it’s not a ghost town. ‘Overseas’ provided yet another beautiful gut punch – such a fantastic guitar tone and beautifully-crafted lyric but the part about the waiter brings me to my knees every single time and the emotional onslaught continued with ‘If We Were Vampires’. As a gentleman of a certain age in my 38th year of marriage, the emotions of that song are not necessarily ones I want to contemplate in a room full of strangers but it was yet another example of Jason Isbell going to “that place” in the dark canyons of the mind where “the dealers and the dancers” and a woman with a ‘Death Wish’ also reside, and that song was another welcome inclusion.

Scottish folks are not traditionally known for celebrating sobriety, but we cheered at the appropriate part in the devastating yet deeply profound ‘Cover Me Up’. I think it was because Jason Isbell is one of those previously vulnerable heart-on-the-sleeve performers, like Beth Hart, that digs into the hole in their soul and dredges up their demons every night for our entertainment, but we don’t know what damage that routinely inflicts and sustains and we genuinely care for the artist’s well-being, especially one who’s band is named for an Alabama psych ward. Tonight, you just knew everything was going to be alright. Jason looked leaner, stronger and more self-confident than ever, cutting a fine figure in black t-shirt, jacket and jeans, flashing that film star smile, singing beautifully, hitting the strings like The Devil just went down to Georgia and clearly enjoying his band.

And what a band. ‘Miles’ is another song that has quickly become an indispensable fan-favourite. I’ve read Jason refer to it as being reminiscent of Neil Young and Wings (“the band The Beatles could have been”), starting with scratchy Crazy Horse guitars and a “Shakey” vocal, before morphing through a McCartney or even Harrison-esque elegiac section into a full-on jam band onslaught with the twin-drummers, bass, keys, guitars and vocal building up to a harmonic crescendo and a virtuoso wall of sound. Stirring stuff.

After the benediction of an encore featuring ’24 Frames’, the Grammy Award-winning ‘Cast Iron Skillett’ and a triumphant finale of ‘This Ain’t It Baby’ that got very Allmansy at the end, it was time to head home in the cold and, with the heightened emotions of the evening mellowing into warm reminiscences, oh baby, it was truly a night to remember.