Stories from bad gigs are better than stories from good gigs. Jason Isbell’s been in the good gig business for a while, so we talk about that kind first.

Our phone interview takes place the morning after he and his band The 400 Unit finish a sold-out eight-night run at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, where they’ve been doing yearly residencies since 2014.

Last weekend, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” legendary director Martin Scorsese’s new film, which features Isbell’s first major acting role, hit theaters to rave reviews. (Note: Because of the ongoing actors’ strike, Isbell can’t directly comment on the movie itself.)

This summer, Isbell released his eighth studio album, “Weathervanes,” containing new shades from his folk, rock and country palette. Last month, a 10th anniversary edition of “Southeastern,” the 2013 album that changed Isbell’s life, added demos and live tracks to the original LP.

Earlier in the year, HBO’s documentary “Running With Our Eyes Closed” shed new light on Isbell’s band dynamics and the creative process behind his author/auteur lyrics. Also a deadly guitarist, Isbell was featured in Gibson Guitars YouTube series showcasing stars’ covet-worthy collections.

On Oct. 27, Isbell will headline Orion Amphitheater, a Huntsville, Alabama venue that’s hosted acts like Lana Del Rey, Snoop Dogg and Smashing Pumpkins this year. Isbell’s support acts are outlaw-country goddess Margo Price and Muscle Shoals talents Billy Allen and The Pollies. (Tickets for Isbell’s Orion show are available via axs.com.)

Huntsville’s about a 70-minute drive from Muscle Shoals, where Isbell’s from and got his start in the music business, as a as a songwriting guitarist phenom at legendary FAME Studios, before getting scooped up in his early 20s by older, punk-tinged Southern rockers Drive-By Truckers.

If you’re reading this sentence, you likely know the rest. About Isbell getting booted from the Truckers, starting a solid-but-not-rainmaking solo career, getting his life together, getting famous, winning Grammys, becoming The Best Songwriter Of His Era, etc.

Isbell’s work and words are taken seriously by a lot of people now. In conversation, he’s still the same laidback-smart-funny Shoals dude back when he was playing bars.

At the end of our scheduled 20 minutes, I ask one more question, about small gigs Isbell, now 44, played in the Huntsville market while paying dues. He then tells a couple of fun, gigs-gone-wrong stories.

At one point, the call drops. Some famous musicians would’ve let the interview end there. But Isbell has his publicist call back so he can finish the story. Edited excerpts of the entire phoner are below.

Jason, what’s a guitar solo you’re really looking forward to playing each night in the show right now?

Jason Isbell: Oh, that’s a good question. I love playing “King of Oklahoma.” That one’s really fun because it’s very loud and never played exactly the same way twice and it kind of feels like being in [Neil Young’s band] Crazy Horse for a few minutes.

You all have been closing some shows with “This Ain’t It,” a standout track from “Weathervanes.” Is that kind of a goal, that you kind of push yourself to have material that you can close [shows] with something new?

Yeah, I mean, it’s really nice when it works out that way, you know. I don’t know if I think of it when I’m writing a song or not. Maybe. There’s probably some part of my unconscious mind is that is trying to push me to write a closer. But yeah, that’s a really a really good feeling to be able to end a show with a new song. We play about 20 songs a night and usually we’ve been doing 10 of those off of the new album, and everybody seems to be really into it, so that’s a that’s a really good feeling after all these years and all these records.

“This Ain’t It” is kind of like your version of [The Rolling Stones song] “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

Yeah, yeah, that’s totally inspired by that for sure. And Sadler and I don’t work out any kind of [guitar] parts before we play it, but we play really well together and we listen to each other and so some really, really cool stuff happens. We played it almost every night of the Ryman run. We probably did it five or six out of the eight, and it was different every night and always fun.

Have you on past albums, or new stuff you’re working on, ever composed on bass or piano [instead of guitar]? Is that something you think you might do more in the future?

I’ve done that on piano on a few songs. I don’t know about writing on bass. I think it would be a good idea because I see why it works because you can only focus on, you know, the primary bones of the song musically. But the way I do it still seems to be working.

The problem with piano is you don’t always have one, and I don’t always write at home. I wrote a lot of “Weathervanes” in Oklahoma while I was working on the movie and, you know, I didn’t have a piano or bass or anything with me.

I don’t like going into the studio and writing like a lot of musicians do. Wherever I am, I just pick up a guitar and start playing.

The piano problem, that’s the thing. Like, I wrote “River” off of [the 2020 album] “Reunions” on piano, and I made the mistake of letting [producer] Dave Cobb know that, and he made me play it and sing it at the same time in the studio, and I’m not a good piano player. So that was that was tough. It worked out nicely, but it was hard. [Laughs]

It was interesting watch you singing without a guitar [while recording a vocal in the studio] in the HBO documentary.

Yeah, that’s pretty rare.

What’s a song of yours that came almost like a straight shot in final form, from “Southeastern” to “Weathervanes”? And what’s a song of yours that you think benefited the most from working on it, honing it, over time?

“If We Were Vampires” was fast. That was one of those where you feel like you’re just sort of hanging on to something and trying to write it down before it’s gone. That was one of those where like, Friday afternoon, I was home, I was watching TV. Monday we were going in the studio. I was watching that show “Hoarders.” You know, it makes it makes you feel better about yourself to watch “Hoarders.” [Laughs]

And Amanda [Shires, singer, songwriter and musician, who Isbell is married to] said, “What are you doing? You’ve got to go in the studio in a few days.” And I was like, “Ah, I’ve got all these songs written. It’s fine.” She was like, “Anybody could be sitting here watching TV. You need to write another song.” So [”If We Were Vampires”] that’s what I ended up writing.

But that one was quick. I just started out, like, I didn’t have anything to write about and I thought, well, what if I just write about the things that I don’t particularly agree with, with other love songs. And it started from there. Like, well, it’s not this, that’s not really what it is. And then by the time I got to the chorus, it all just fell into place. And it happened really quickly. I don’t know if I did any kind of revision or anything on that song. Really, it just came out.

And then “Miles” [the closing track on “Weathervanes”] took a lot of work. That was one that was writing, and I think I always felt like the pieces of that song were going to fit together when I was working on them separately. That was out in Oklahoma. And, you know, I think you can hear that with that song, and it’s one of those that that was sort of built in stages, because that’s how it’s recorded and how it’s performed.

That one took a lot of finagling. I don’t know exactly how many days I spent on it – probably close to a week. But yeah, it just needed the transitions to be right, and I needed the themes of the song to move. Because you’re dealing with like a flash forward in time and that song is sort of a conversation with your old self in a way. It’s kind of like a cautionary tale from you in the future, you know, saying if you don’t keep yourself emotionally available to these people, this is how you can wind up in your life. And that was that one took a long time, definitely.

What did you learn from Leonardo DiCaprio? [As stated earlier, because of the actors’ strike, Isbell isn’t allowed to talk directly in interviews about “Killers of the Flower Moon.”]

Something I have learned from Leo is just how hard he works, for one thing. I was shocked. I mean, he works long hours every day and he’s the first person on the call list. He’s there before everybody else and usually there until everybody else is gone.

But, you know, from him and from all the other actors that I mysteriously have recently met, I’ve learned that they’re not really acting, you know, they’re being something. And that was shocking to me.

Because when you need to go somewhere dark and you need to be upset on cue, you’re not really acting. You’re keeping all of those negative emotions and painful memories as close to your consciousness as possible when you’re on the clock, and then when you need them, you just let them in.

And that is unbelievable to me, the potential that has for driving you insane. It’s almost as though, you know, if you do too much therapy and you self-actualize to a certain point, you might not be able to cry on cue anymore.

It’s not like any job that I’ve ever seen or tried to do. Because, you know, you just have to stay in touch with those emotions and call on them, and that was really eye opening for me.

With the 10th anniversary version of “Southeastern,” I love comparing the original album to the demos made before the album, and to the live versions of the songs from more recently. What’s something revealing fans will find if they dig into those demos? Like, on the “Cover Me Up” demo there’s no guitar solo and it’s a little different tempo.

You know, one thing that strikes me is that [the “Southeastern” song] “Super 8″ is not in the demos. There was never a demo for that because initially I hadn’t written it when I went in the studio, and I almost always show up with all of the songs written because I hate the pressure to write quickly, you know. I’d rather take my time with that part.

Everything else I’m OK doing on the spot, but I like to have the songs written by the time I get in the studio, and I didn’t have that one. And it’s such an outlier. It’s such a different type of song for that record. When people say that it doesn’t belong on the record, I totally understand that.

But also, we had worked for a week and Dave was like, this stuff is brilliant but it’s all so moody and quiet and that’s not the full breadth of the experience, you know. There’s something here that’s also really goofy and funny and silly and celebratory of the fact that you survived it. We need a big boneheaded rock song. And where’s that?

So I went home and wrote that [”Super 8″] over the weekend. And then I came in on Monday to cut it and Will Johnson [then of the Texas band Centro-Matic, an Isbell favorite] was passing through town. think he was playing in Arkansas or somewhere that night and he had sort of a long drive, so I was like, man, you should come in and sing [backing vocals] on this song. He said, well, if I do it, I’m gonna have to do it at like 9 o’clock in the morning because I’ve got to go all the way to Arkansas for the show.

So I got up early as shit and met him in studio and he sang on it and then he went on and did his thing. And 10 years later, he’s joined the band [as a multi-instrumentalist]. So now finally, after all that time, you have the person of actually singing on record singing live on that song.

“Super 8″ is such a great live song, one of my favorites in your live shows for a long time. It brings that kind of “Casino Queen” [by Wilco] and early Black Crowes thing.

It fits a good spot in the set. Because in those days, I mean, we had the songs before it, but “Southeastern,” everybody really wanted to hear it, and it was nice to have something that could sort of pick the mood up in the room, in the middle of all those sort of sad, lonely tunes.

If I’m not mistaken, you guys [Isbell and the 400 Unit] were to be part of one of the big Van Halen shows with [David Lee] Roth, [Sammy] Hagar, the whole enchilada. What can you tell us about that? Because we all love Eddie Van Halen and Van Halen, any kind of insight into that, or how you guys are going to be involved, I think people would love to hear.

We were supposed to open at least the Nashville show and maybe more than that, I don’t know. But they just asked me if it was something I wanted to do, and of course my agent and my manager knew that was something I would want to do. So I was very, very excited. And then, you know, Eddie got sick and that was that. And that’s really all that I ever knew about it.

But I was so excited. I was really over the moon about it because I went and saw them when I was a kid, when Sammy was fronting the band, and Mom would take me. We went to a couple of different shows. I think both of them were up here in Nashville at Starwood [Amphitheatre] back in the day, and I was I was probably 12, maybe 14.

That was a huge part of my life I had the car that I drove when I was a teenager — the white Beretta [a song off “Weathervanes”], coincidentally — one of the speakers was out. The passenger side speaker was out, and I couldn’t afford to have it fixed. And the way they recorded those old Van Halen records, I had them on cassette, and the guitar was panned hard in stereo, so you would get Eddie’s guitar on one side, and then the reverb from Eddie’s guitar on the other side. It was so frustrating because all I could hear was the reverb from Eddie’s guitar when I listened in the car. [Laughs]

But yeah, that was a huge moment for me to be invited to do that and we were extremely excited. And it didn’t happen, but yeah it would have been nice.

Speaking of guitars, some music fans know how a ‘59 Les Paul sounds, but most of us will never hold one. What does your ‘59, [formerly owned by Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist Ed King and nicknamed] Redeye, actually feel like? Because a regular Les Paul feels pretty damn good, but that’s like a holy relic, man.

I’m really lucky to have it, you know. The profile on the neck is really, really good. It’s not too big, and it’s not too small. And then also there’s a little scar from Ed’s wedding ring which is really nice, so every time I play it on the bottom of the neck there’s that little scratch all the way down from Ed’s wedding ring.

Something on that one that’s really special I think is the neck pickup [which is rounder and less trebly than the bridge pickup]. And it’s one of those accidents. Like when I got it, I took it in to Tim Shaw, who works for Fender now but worked for Gibson for a long time and was sort of responsible for bringing back the right kind of pickups in Gibsons. He was the guy that did that in the early 80s.

So I took it him and snuck it into Fender offices after hours and he wanted to listen to it clean and really loud and he was shocked. He covered his mouth with his hands, and he was like, how is that possible? He took the pickups out and put the meter on them. And apparently, the neck pickup on the guitar is overwound. But the magnet is underpowered in the neck pickups.

So either time or the particular type of magnet they used or whatever caused the magnet to be just a little bit weaker than it’s supposed to be. But then when they wound it too many times, they just left it on the bobbin longer than they were supposed to.

It works like a sewing machine, you know. They’re pumping it with their foot, and it’s turned in a circle and they’re putting the wires on the pickup. And then the magnet picks up the movement of the string and it goes through those winds and goes down eventually out your output jack on a guitar. And they overwound it by like three-or-four-hundred winds.

So it was a complete accident. It was one of those things where it just happened to even out perfectly. The two sort of quirks that that-guitar has electronically caused it to sound really, in my opinion, better than most of the other ones. But it is a unique thing.

And that’s how a lot of the ‘59s, ‘58s and ‘60s [Les Pauls] they have their own little quirks that make them individual. Like the one that was [original Fleetwood Mac guitarist] Peter Green’s that [Metallica guitarist] Kirk Hammett has now, one of the pickups was reversed, the polarity if it reversed, so that middle position sounds really strange and really good.

That’s the thing about those guitars. The people who were making them, you know, were just craftsmen. They were just working a normal 9-to-5 job, but they took a lot of pride in it, they just didn’t have the technology to make everything exactly the same. So they’re all well-constructed, they’re just a little bit different from one to the other.

Just to give some context with the big shows you do now at places like Ryman Auditorium and the Orion Amphitheater, what are some of the small venues here in Huntsville back in the day?

You know what, when I was playing with Bo Bice, early on before he was on the TV show [the fourth season of “American Idol” in 2005″], he was playing Huntsville all the time.

And we had a gig at, what was it called, Mr. C’s lounge. It was like the ballroom of that old hotel [on South Memorial Parkway], and that place was wild. I mean, we didn’t make hardly any money, but we had a blast playing that place.

I remember one night, the power went out in the middle of our set and the whole place was just dark. And we’re just in this old hotel ballroom and it was pitch black and, you know, people were in there drinking having a good time.

Nobody had a flashlight or anything and I found way up to the piano at the front and started playing the Michael Myers theme [from the horror film “Halloween”] and it scared the shit out of everybody. [Laughs]

But yeah, I played there and then where else do we play? Of course, with this band [The 400 Unit] we played a whole bunch of venues in Huntsville.

What was that bar right around the corner from Crossroads? It was Humphrey’s [Bar & Grill]. Anyway, me and Shonna [Tucker, Drive-By Truckers and Muscle Shoals bassist to whom Isbell was formerly married] played a gig there once.

She was playing upright [bass] and I was playing acoustic guitar. And we were playing in the alley behind the courtyard outside. It was in the summertime, it was really nice.

And when we started, the first song I broke a string and when I did, the end pin on the bridge [which holds the string end opposite from the headstock into the guitar], came out and went between my feet and through the [drainage] grate [on the alley ground] and disappeared. And I didn’t have another one.

So I have five strings on the guitar and I did not have a way to put a sixth string on because I didn’t have an end pin, so I put a new string on and pulled it through the sound hole and I tied it to a big butterfly knot, just hoping, you know, because we had like three or four hours to play and we were making like 100 bucks apiece or something. It was pretty important.

And so I pulled it back through and I tuned it up to pitch and somehow, I got it to stay, and it stayed for the whole set. I didn’t have a tuner and I didn’t realize until we got home that I had been almost a half a step sharp the whole time, so I was singing everything up a half a step and also putting more stress on that string. And somehow it still held. I’ll never forget that. The butterfly knot held, and it was a Huntsville miracle.

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