Jason Isbell’s New Morning

Jason isbell felt a rush of familiarity when he watched the final episode of Mad Men on his tour bus.As he saw Don Draper go AWOL from his advertising job and embark on an aimless cross-country road trip, Isbell recalled his own life around 2008, after his first marriage had fallen apart and he’d been fired from the Drive-By Truckers due largely to his heavy drinking. Isbell bought a motorcycle and took off from his home in Alabama. “I drove down to Florida, back up through Georgia and visited some of the girls I had met on the road,” he says in a husky Alabama drawl. “It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself. I got home feeling and looking worse than when I’d left, just completely lost.” Isbell eventually went to rehab and turned his dark past into some of the best music to come out of Nashville this decade. On 2013’s Southeastern, he reflected on cocaine nights at Super 8’s, mistreating vulnerable women, and starting over. “I was behaving in a way that was deplorable on a lot of levels,” Isbell says, drinking Red Bull and smoking cigarettes on his tour bus, outside the Capitol Theatre in Portchester, New York, one recent afternoon.

Keith Richards “Trouble”

Spin this salty jam for the first time, and you just might think you’ve stumbled across a most excellent outtake from Nellcôte in the Seventies. Nope – it’s a promising preview of Keith’s  upcoming solo album, Crosseyed Heart, due this fall.