The first round of the 2020 NFL Draft was a strange one given that it was done virtually, with all personnel and players at their homes due to COVID-19, but despite concerns over the possibility of technical difficulties, it went off without a hitch.

ESPN and the NFL Network’s co-broadcast was handled about as well as one could have hoped for, with Trey Wingo doing yeoman’s work from the studio, running point and keeping things on track and the broadcast from being too awkward as they dealt with feed delays between all the remote analysts at home. The most intriguing part of the home draft, aside from the actual picks being made, was seeing everyone’s home setup.

There were some, like Kliff Kingsbury, that showed off their palatial estate, while other coaches and GMs had much more modest setups. Many family members made appearances, both planned and otherwise, but there were no controversies or disasters, a major win for the league. The one moment that caused a stir was when the Titans were on the clock, ahead of taking gigantic Georgia tackle Isaiah Wilson to replace Jack Conklin, when Mike Vrabel and his nearly grown children were shown, with one dressed as Frozone from The Incredibles.

In the background on the left, next to the costumed son, is a reflection that some thought was one of his other kids sitting on the toilet. Vrabel was sure to clarify that it was not an accidental live shot of his son going to the bathroom, but instead his son was just sitting on a stool.

We’ll take Vrabel’s word for it, but it is a good reminder to everyone with the remote camera that they need to make sure that their background is not only TV friendly, but isn’t going to reflect towards something that might not be.

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One of 2019’s stronger efforts, James Blake impressed many with his Assume Form album. Since then Blake has shared a deluxe version of the album, multiple videos for songs from Assume Form, including “Barefoot In The Park” and “Can’t Believe The Way We Flow,” and performances on both daytime and nighttime TV. Quite possibly closing the book on Assume Form officially, James Blake returns with a new single.

Following recent at-home performances, which that of which included a cover of Billie Eilish’s “When The Party’s Over,” James Blake shares his new single “You’re Too Precious.” The single, produced by Blake and Dominic Maker, serves as his first release since sharing the deluxe version of Assume Form and according to Pitchfork, the song was originally teased during an Instagram Live session Blake held during April.

These Instagram Live session Blake has held have been quite entertaining for his fans and a way for Blake to fulfill his goal of playing more piano. In a quarantine livestream late last month, Blake covered Radiohead’s “No Surprises,” Feist’s “The Limit To Your Love,” and Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed,” while also diving into his own catalog to play “Retrograde” and other hits.

Press play on the video above to hear “You’re Too Precious.”

The makers of Bad Education went into last year’s Toronto Film Festival hoping their film would be acquired by a major distributor who’d push an Oscars-qualifying theatrical run — based on strong dramatic turns from Hugh Jackman, Alison Janney, and Ray Romano. In a mildly disappointing twist at the time, HBO bought it for $20 million. It hits streaming this week, when closed theaters and quarantine-decimated release schedules all but ensure it being the most high-profile new release around. Silver lining?

The cast, outfitted in the finest Long Island aughts kitsch couture, faces pulled and bunched in an approximation of normie, practically ooze prestige, turning in committed performances from the headliners on down to the younger bit players (like Annaleigh Ashford from Masters of Sex, a favorite of mine). Performances aside, it’s hard at times to separate Bad Education‘s pretensions of nuance and moral ambiguity from your basic muddled storytelling.

With sumptuous direction from Cory Finley (previously of the 2018 arthouse darling Thoroughbreds), Bad Education tells the story of Roslyn Long Island school superintendent Frank Tassone (a tight-kinned Hugh Jackman with his Dracula wig set to “Italian”) and how Tassone came to be involved in “the single largest public school embezzlement scandal in history.”

That this all took place in the pressure cooker of the hyper-competitive college placement industry would seem to give Bad Education a timely hook — what with Laurie Loughlin et. al still fighting to stay out of prison — and the fact that it was all uncovered by an article in Roslyn’s own school newspaper makes it feel a bit like a real-life noir twist on Election (in my opinion the best high school movie of all time).

Yet where Election finds comedy in pathos, Bad Education only occasionally seems interested in laughs. It feels more like a patient, minute-by-minute exposé in which the characters only gradually reveal themselves. Finley’s direction feels incisive at times, using subtle shifts in POV to convey what each character is learning and what they’re attempting to obfuscate, but the script, by Mike Makowsky, a graduate of Roslyn himself, leaves somewhat ambiguous the question of what, exactly, is being exposed.

With such a detailed retelling of a 15-year-old corruption case that probably wouldn’t even make the resume of your average Trump cabinet appointee, there are the natural questions of why this story and why now. Truly great movies succeed by finding the humanity in all their characters (see: The Death Of Dick Long) but Bad Education seems uniquely twisted up between sympathy and scorn. It could be that the culprits themselves were the wrong lens for the story.

On the one hand, Tassone and his deputy, Pam Gluckin (Janney), seem like compassionate school administrators — taking the time to study up on all their students and parents in order to provide that personal touch. Tassone even encourages the budding journalist who eventually brings them down (played by promising newcomer Geraldine Viswanathan). On the other, Tassone and Gluckin are clearly political and opportunistic, spending school money on fast cars, second homes, and facelifts (Jackman’s makeup is particularly outstanding).

The vague title is a tell. There’s the general tone of uncovering something shocking and nefarious, but Bad Education is far more interesting when it’s sympathetic toward its stated villains. If Frank Tassone and Pam Gluckin personally profited from turning their affluent school district into exactly the kind of Ivy League feeder program the parents and local community all wanted, what, exactly, is the harm? Even Makowsky, who said he “received the best education of [his] life at Roslyn” seems to struggle with this question.

Bad Education seems aware that Tassone and Gluckin did something wrong, but, aside from two very brief shots of leaky roof tiles, it’s unclear on who actually suffered by it. The administrators themselves take occasional, brief stabs at justifying themselves — noting that good public schools are the foundation of the town’s rising property values — with Tassone belatedly pointing out how the townspeople treat them like faceless, interchangeable cogs in the admissions machine, but it never quite finds its crescendo.

It would’ve benefited Bad Education to see some of these thoughts through. Why are the local parents willing to pay for these grand, superficial improvements to the school’s facade when the educators actually mentoring their children are still expected to work for public servants’ salaries? If they game a broken system and no one notices the missing money, what is the harm? This is slightly more than self-justification.

Ultimately it’s hard to believe that Tassone and Gluckin were the good guys here — they were, after all, administrators, essentially politicians, and they seem to have diverted that excess money into their own pockets, not their school’s teachers — the people still working for 40 or 50 grand or so per year in a place where the average home prices were in the seven figures. Bad Education gives brief lip service to these factors but a few shots of leaky roof tiles are a weak substitute for the real victim’s actual perspectives. Were we supposed to empathize with the ceiling foam?

Bad Education plumbs the psyches of its two leads — the closed gay repressed philanderer Tassone and the oft-married, entertaining-obsessed Gluckin. This produces some great performances from Jackman and Janney (surely among the best of her generation) but ultimately I’m not sure their motivations were actually that complicated. They were greedy, vain, and consumed by maintaining their position, like politicians and CEOs everywhere. When Gluckin, exposed first, pointedly tells Tassone “I’m not the sociopath here” the film seems to suggest that perhaps the sociopath is Tassone.

But avoiding that kind of pat, unsatisfying takeaway is the entire reason to tell a story like Bad Education in the first place. Otherwise we could just read the news stories about a bad man who went to prison. During the second half of the movie I found myself waiting for that inevitable epilogue text at the end to just tell me what happened. That’s generally a clear indication that a storyteller hasn’t found the compelling insights they were seeking.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

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There’s a difference between a bad guy and a villain. A bad guy just needs to do bad stuff: rob banks, murder some people, kidnap the protagonist’s love interest or child or dog. Gus Fring, the drug-slinging chicken man from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is a great bad guy. He’s brilliant and ruthless and meticulous, he plans things out carefully and gives speeches about it all and his stare can lower the temperature of the room he’s in by 15-20 degrees. I love Gus Fring. He is not, however, a great villain.

A villain needs something more, a joy in doing bad, an infectious charisma, the sense that they really like being as evil as they can be. Justified was a show with a lot of good villains: Boyd Crowder, Mags Bennett, Wynn Duffy, etc. Even its secondary villains were great, your Limehouses and Quarlses and Dickie Bennetts. They all had great one-liners and personality for days and that intangible magnetism a good villain has. The Breaking Bad universe, an almost-perfect television empire, has not had great villains, historically. Bad guys galore, all of them conflicted and menacing, but missing that charm: Tuco (meth-addled maniac), Gus Fring (see above), the Nazis (uh… Nazis). Heck, even Walter White, destroyer of worlds and families, wasn’t really what I would consider a full-on villain. It was the one glaring flaw in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

Until the fifth season of Better Call Saul. Enter Lalo Salamanca.

If we want to be technical about all of this, Lalo made his debut in the fourth season. After Hector was poisoned and Tuco went to jail, he came in to fill the void in the spot above Nacho in the cartel. He was fun even then, cooking in the kitchen and smiling a lot and carrying around this sense of impending doom wherever he went, like that grin could disappear at any moment and be replaced with the narrowed eyes of a killer. A good character, sure, and someone to keep Nacho in constant fear and be a much-needed worthy adversary for Gus Fring until a certain bald chemistry teacher shows up. A chaos agent to introduce conflict on that side of the show. Fine, great, wonderful.

But this most recent season, as it progressed and the show’s two worlds started merging, with Jimmy becoming “a friend of the cartel” through his relationship with Nacho and Mike, both of whom are now firmly in Gus Fring’s orbit… hoo boy. Lalo became a star. He’s a back-slapping, charismatic terror, a thorn in the side of every main character on the show. He’s waging war against Gus and Mike, he’s now suspicious that Nacho conspired to assassinate him, he showed up at Jimmy and Kim’s door looking for answers. He has his giddy little fingers in everything and he is having the time of his life.

It’s not just that he’s a blast, although it is very much that, as the GIF above indicates. Tony Dalton and the writers of the show seem to be having a ball playing around with this lunatic, to a degree that is almost obscene. I’m still flabbergasted that they could just go out and create a top ten — top five? — character in the whole Breaking Bad universe almost 12 full seasons into their run. It’s witchcraft is what it is. We should consider burning them at the stake. Once they’re done making this show. And maybe a Lalo prequel. We can just have the stake ready. Put it in the basement for now.

But again, there’s more there than charisma. Lalo would be a good character even if he was mostly just comic relief. What makes Lalo great, though, is how staggeringly competent he is. His suspicions about both Nacho and Jimmy? Totally justified. Nacho very much did have a part in the assassination attempt; Jimmy lied through his teeth about his desert debacle. Lalo sniffed out both of these betrayals almost immediately, like he has a superpower for it. I made the argument a few weeks ago that he was basically Spider-man, between this hyper-sensitive sense for danger and his shocking athleticism. This last part cannot be overstated. Look at him burst through the ceiling in season four to kill the poor innocent travel agent who saw too much.

Look at him leap into a dang ravine to get a closer look at Jimmy’s bullet-riddled abandoned car.

And that was before the season five finale, when he pulled a Kevin McCallister by defending his home from intruders by using bubbling oil as a booby trap and secret passages as routes for both escape and ambush. It was a strange spot to be in as a viewer. We know he’s a bad guy. We know any success he has will come at a cost to characters we care about, like Nacho and Kim and Mike. And yet, there I was, nervous about sweet evil mustachioed prince getting hurt. I will be inconsolable when he dies. It’s fine. I’m doing fine.

And let’s be clear here: Lalo will not make it out of this alive, in all likelihood. It’s one of the tricky parts of a prequel. We know the fates of a set of characters who make it to Breaking Bad. Gus and Mike are both there for a while, thriving, and the look on Lalo’s face at the end of this season after he killed their assassins… well, it was not the face of a man who is prepared to consider it water under the bridge. It was the face of a man who wants to blow up the bridge and then leap like a jungle cat into the river bed to hunt the survivors.

It’s creating an awkward situation for me, personally, to have this future knowledge. I love Lalo now. I get excited every time I see him show up on the screen. I caught myself saying “Yesssss,” out loud, when he rolled up to Don Eladio’s pool party in the season finale. It’s gotten to the point that I have kind of started rooting for Lalo. Like, really rooting for him — to defeat Gus, to continue his bromance with Don Eladio, to survive this show and become the Big Bad that Walter White has to deal with in Breaking Bad. I know it won’t happen. It can’t. But still, that’s a fun show to play around with in your head for a while, one where Lalo replaces Gus. Those two are total opposites, fire and ice, improv and organization. Lalo is the kind of guy who shows up at a wedding reception and schmoozes and dances all night and has someone’s grandma doing tequila shots at one point. Gus has one drink (champagne) and leaves after dinner is served, tie still tied and top button still buttoned. It’s what makes them such fun adversaries right now. They would hate each other even if they didn’t have business disagreements.

I’m not joking about this, for the record. I mean, I am, but I’m not. I would pay good money to see an alternate future Breaking Bad where Walter has to face down Lalo. I want to see how he counters someone so unpredictable and captivating. It kills me that I will never know. I’m not ready to let him go. I don’t think I’ll ever be. Lalo is a murderous goon and he might be the reason Kim doesn’t make it to Breaking Bad either and yet, here I am, gushing about him and comparing him to both Kevin McCallister and Spider-man. If that’s not the sign of a good villain, I’m not entirely sure what is.

Long live Lalo Salamanca. As long as possible, at least.

Guapdad 4000 has been a force of consistency to respect across the music industry. Keeping up with his Falcon Fridays series, the Bay Area rapper has shared five singles over a five-week period to keep his fans satisfied and that wasn’t enough, Guapdad has also been keeping fans entertained with his Rona Raps series. Kicking fire freestyles with some of his talented rapper friends, the Rona Raps series has seen appearances from Buddy, Wiz Khalifa, Joey Badass, and more. Keeping things rolling for another week, Guapdad returns with a new Rona Raps episode and a new Falcon Fridays single.

After sharing a single for the scammers last week with “Embezzle,” Guapdad has now shifted his attention to the ladies on his new single, “Trade Places With Them Jeans.” Showing off a bit of his slick-talk, Guapdad tells the woman he has his eyes on that he himself will serve as a better comfort to her than the jeans she currently wears. Packaging the new single, as well as the previous Falcon Friday singles, into one project, listeners can now find the entire Falcon Friday series on his new EP, Platinum Falcon Tape, Vol. 1.

In addition to the new single, Guapdad’s latest Rona Raps episode has also arrived, one that sees appearances from Kota The Friend, Wowg8 of Earthgang, Murs, and Ramriddlz. With the biggest cast the series has offered so far, fans have plenty of Rona Raps to look forward to.

Press play on the videos above to hear “Trade Places With Them Jeans” and the latest Rona Raps episode.

Approaching the six-month anniversary of his death, fans of Juice WRLD have been able to live in his memory courtesy of a few features he worked on prior to his passing. Working with G Herbo, Eminem, and YNW Melly, other artists have revealed that the young star will appear on their upcoming projects. Looking to add on to Juice’s legacy, fellow Chicago rapper Lil Bibby revealed in mid-April that a posthumous Juice WRLD album is on the way. Bibby is an executive at Grade A Productions, the same label Juice was signed to, so news of the album came with a wave of hope from fans after Friday night’s release, it appears that the album is in close proximity.

Sharing a new song, “Righteous,” the track comes hours after his estate released a statement Friday announcing the single. “Earlier this week, Juice’s mother, Carmela Wallace announced the establishment of the Live Five 999 Fund which will receive additional support via Grade A and Interscope Records,” the statement read. “Tonight we will be releasing a song called ‘Righteous’ which Juice made from his home studio in Los Angeles. We hope you enjoy this new music and continue to keep Juice’s spirit alive. Stay safe everyone.”

Attached with a video that shows behind-the-scenes footage of a free-spirited Juice Wrld, the track serves as Juice’s first solo release since his 2019 album, Death Race For Love.

Watch the video above to hear “Righteous.”

Jason Isbell is extremely good at writing songs.

Not exactly the most controversial statement for a music critic to make, I know. After all, Isbell is commonly recognized as one of the best — if not the best — singer-songwriters working right now. He can write intimate character studies about fictional people who feel as real as your neighbors, as well as broader, statement-driven numbers that reflect the lives of millions of Americans. He’s the closest thing that millennials and young Gen-Xers have to their very own Bruce Springsteen. (If this were an era in which people like Springsteen became pop stars, he would be a household name.)

But there’s something about doing a deep dive into his catalogue — including the Drive-By Truckers albums he played on and contributed songs for before launching his solo career in 2007 — that re-affirms, again, that Jason Isbell is extremely good at writing songs. On May 15, his discography will grow by another album, Reunions, his seventh overall. It speaks to his consistency and reliability that one of the new LP’s singles, “Only Children,” deserves to be ranked among his very best tunes.

But what about his other best tunes? After greatly enjoying my recent swing through his back pages, I compiled this list of my 30 favorite Jason Isbell songs, which was accompanied by about 30,000 tears.

30. “Try” (2007)

Isbell’s first album after leaving Drive-By Truckers, Sirens Of The Ditch, unsurprisingly is the LP that sounds the most like his former band. This slow-boiling rocker is centered on precisely the sort of heavy guitar riff that would have fit perfectly on The Dirty South, which might be why Isbell tended to pursue less bombastic sounds on his subsequent records. But on “Try,” the riffage is more than welcome, providing an explosive counterpoint to the simmering romantic paranoia and fitfully contained rage of the lyrics.

29. “Soliders Get Strange” (2009)

Isbell’s second album, Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit, is the most underrated in his catalogue, with a sweet-sour combination of power-pop and bleak lyrics about addiction and self-hatred that recalls Wilco’s Summerteeth. Many of the songs unfold like Bukowski short stories, with alcoholic protagonists attempting to survive their own self-destructive natures in a haphazard pursuit of redemption (or, at the very least, a moment’s relief). The character in “Soliders Get Strange,” like the person in the similarly themed “Tour Of Duty” from 2011’s Here We Rest, is a veteran struggling to re-acclimate to civilian life. Is he about to become unhinged? As is the case in so many Isbell songs, “Soldiers Get Strange” takes place somewhere between the start of the story and the climax, hinting at bad things on the horizon without fully spelling them out.

28. “Cigarettes and Wine” (Live From Alabama version, 2012)

Another gem from Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit, “Cigarettes And Wine” is about a down-and-out loser who finds a temporary port in the storm after the bars close, in the company of a woman who “lives down inside of me still / Rolled up like a twenty dollar bill.” The gentle blues-rock of the studio version is nice, but this song achieves its full realization on the excellent Live From Alabama, the 2012 release that functions as a kind of greatest hits album for Isbell’s pre-Southeastern work. “This one is a country song, sort of,” Isbell says at the start, and his delivery does the hard-luck narrative justice.

27. “Last Of My Kind” (2017)

Since his early 20s, Isbell has been preoccupied as a writer with the passage of time, and accounting for what is gained and what is lost as we age. While he wrote great songs as a younger man working in this mode, the gravitas he attained in middle age shows in “Last Of My Kind,” the gently philosophical opener from The Nashville Sound. A meditation on the old Thomas Wolfe quote about how “you can never go home again,” “Last Of My Kind” is about coming to grips with suddenly being the adult in the room, and witnessing the world you once knew disappear before your eyes. “Daddy said the river would always lead me home / But the river can’t take me back in time / The family farm’s a parking lot for Walton’s five and dime / Am I the last of my kind?”

26. “Go It Alone” (2011)

The first of Isbell’s great “Alone” songs, “Go It Alone” is also an example of the “life on the road” genre that dominates Isbell’s pre-Southeastern songwriting. (Though he would continue to write classic “life on the road” tunes for that album and beyond.) Over a rollicking guitar riff pitched squarely between the early ’70s Stones and Neil Young’s “ditch” era records, “Go It Alone” front-loads plenty of sleazy rock ‘n’ roll exhaustion, setting the stage for Isbell’s narrative about a touring musician wearily eying a solitary post-tour existence.

25. “Traveling Alone” (2013)

It’s hard to hear “Go It Alone” now and not think of “Traveling Alone” from Isbell’s next album, Southeastern. It’s a more hopeful sequel, in which our hero is rescued from alienation by his soulmate. While “Go It Alone” is somewhat distanced from its writer, “Traveling Alone” (like much of Southeastern) feels like naked autobiography, in which Isbell chucks his former bravado to reveal a lonely man who’s “grown tired of traveling alone.” That Isbell’s wife, Amanda Shires, harmonizes with him on the folky, pleading chorus makes “Traveling Alone” all the more affecting.

24. “Sunstroke” (2009)

“I was certainly dealing with a lot of busted relationships, my career wasn’t really going anywhere, and I wasn’t very happy,” Isbell once said of his life in the late aughts. While Isbell had become a star as Drive-By Truckers’ equivalent to George Harrison — the third-ranked songwriter who contributed a small handful of heaters to each record — he struggled at first to establish himself as a leading man. Part of what makes Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit such a fascinating listen is how that disappointment is baked into songs. Take the piano ballad “Sunstroke” — the lyrics read like a disgusted diatribe directed at the face in the mirror, with a sneaky Dylan reference tossed in for good measure: “Are we supposed to get good at this? / What does it mean to give up? / Why did I call you? I shouldn’t be giving a fuck / Answer these questions for everyone / So maybe they’ll stop asking me / What really happened and where is your masterpiece?”

23. “Streetlights” (2009)

Another great “life on the road” song, “Streetlights” also bears an obvious John Prine influence, writing around the central theme — the feeling of being strung-out and alone at an ungodly hour of the night — with sharply observed narrative details delivered in an off-handed, conversational manner. In order to avoid dealing with himself, the protagonist takes out his phone and starts calling friends and family members. Finally, the bartender kicks him off and he has to figure out how to get to where he’s staying that night: “Think I blocked just a park away, but I can’t really say, it’s been all night. / How I wish you would call me here, but you just disappeared, it wasn’t right.” But there’s something in his voice that tells you that it wasn’t really her fault.

22. “Codeine” (2011)

This deceptively jaunty pop-folk charmer has long been a live staple for the 400 Unit. Isbell moves about the stage to waltz with his crack band, who flash wide smiles as he leans into the sing-along chorus. About that chorus: It’s about a woman slowly drugging herself to death, viewed from the perspective of a lover who can’t keep their relationship from falling apart. That is to say, it is the Platonic ideal for depressing Jason Isbell song subject matter, though the strummy, feel-good music can almost distract you from the tragedy unfolding in your very ears.

21. “Dress Blues” (2007)

This crushing ode to a person killed in combat is the first great song of Isbell’s solo career, and the one tune on his debut, Sirens Of The Ditch, that could sit next to his best work with DBT. Strangely, songs like “Dress Blues” — a nonpartisan, sloganeering-averse narrative that soberly and eloquently recounts the costs of war from an everyday human perspective — were hard to come by in the aughts. Most artists either avoided the subject, even as the country was mired in two major conflicts, or they resorted to simple-minded pandering to bumper-sticker patriotism. Isbell, meanwhile, in each verse just paints heartbreaking scene after heartbreaking scene: “Your baby would just about be here / And your very last tour would be up / But you won’t be back, they’re all dressin’ in black / Drinkin’ sweet tea in Styrofoam cups.”

20. “Hope The High Road” (2017)

The Nashville Sound was among the first rock albums that directly addressed the advent of Trump’s America, a topic that hit particularly close for Isbell given his fanbase and the heartland milieu of his work. The button-pushing anthem “White Man’s World” was among the LP’s breakout songs, tweaking the prejudices of many of his own listeners. But “Hope The High Road” has aged better, in part because of how Isbell leans on positivity in a time of extreme polarization. (The killer guitar lick doesn’t hurt either.) The song’s standout line is among the most quotable in any Isbell song, and perhaps his most Springsteenesque: “Last year was a son of a bitch / For nearly everyone we know / But I ain’t fighting with you down in the ditch / I’ll meet you up here on the road.”

19. “Only Children” (2020)

The early singles from Isbell’s forthcoming album Reunions have generally tilted in a broader, more rocking direction — more “Hope The High Road” than “If We Were Vampires.” The delicate “Only Children” is the exception, with lovely finger-picking setting the stage for a haunting story about two aspiring artists whose lives take different paths. Though I wonder if “Only Children” can also be read as Isbell addressing a version of himself from a different timeline, the one with “Hydrocodone in your backpack” who couldn’t ever get his act together. Again, the specifics are what sell this song so beautifully: “Heaven’s wasted on the dead / That’s what your mama said / When the hearse was idling in the parking lot / She said you thought the world of me/ And you were glad to see / They finally let me be an astronaut.”

18. “If It Takes A Lifetime” (2015)

Another fine example of Isbell working in John Prine mode, “If It Takes A Lifetime” is an easygoing southern rock song — the breezy rhythmic roll is straight out of Brothers And Sisters and Second Helping — about an everyman learning to adjust to the sort of mundane life that hopefully won’t send him to an early grave. If this doesn’t seem like compelling subject matter — one of the verses is about falling asleep with the TV on — the tension in Isbell’s performance suggests that staying on the straight and narrow can be a life-or-death proposition, in which the fight to keep inner demons at bay is constant and unyielding.

17. “Flying Over Water” (2013)

A thread that connects Isbell’s relationship songs concerns lovers who might be too broken to actually be together. The prospects for these characters brightens as Isbell moves through his career — people you would assume are doomed on his early albums often find solace on his later LPs. The couple in “Flying Over Water,” however, seem resigned to a less certain fate. As they hop on a plane on a whim, to escape old lives and familiar frustrations, the mood is similar to that of the famous ending from The Graduate. The world looks simpler from up here, but you can’t stay “up here” forever. “Did we leave our love behind?” the narrator asks. It depends on how much of a romantic the listener is.

16. “Cumberland Gap” (2017)

Bruce Springsteen’s best “political” songs are the ones that stay focused on characters rather than polemics. (See: Every song on Nebraska.) Isbell apparently closely studied this example before writing his “Trump era” album The Nashville Sound, as he steers clear of direct partisan callouts in lieu of crafting character studies about regular Americans who have been left for dead at the side of the late-capitalism highway. The guy in “Cumberland Gap” — a miner who wonders if his job will one day kill him — might very well have voted for Trump. But for Isbell, the character’s angst feels universal: “There’s an answer here, if I look hard enough / There’s a reason why I always reach for the harder stuff.”

15. “Songs That She Sang In The Shower” (2013)

What 1971’s self-titled is to John Prine, Southeastern is to Jason Isbell — the one in which pretty much every song is a banger and beloved fan favorite. Around this time, Isbell got sober, which along with saving his life had the nice side benefit of allowing him to re-focus on his craft. “The older I get and the more I practice, the more I realize it really helps if you do as much work as possible,” he told me in 2015. “When you stop drinking, that comes in handy, ’cause I can spend eight or nine hours on a song without feeling the need to go out and get drunk and shoot pool.” That attention to craft is evident in “Songs That She Sang In The Shower,” in which the tunes that remind the narrator of the partner who has just stormed out of the door — including Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” and Dusty Springfield’s “Breakfast In Bed” — are thoughtfully chosen, evoking the feel of a real person’s taste while also providing meta commentary on the song itself.

14. “Alabama Pines” (2011)

From here on out, I’m afraid it’s going to be straight tear-jerkers. Just hearing the title of this song is likely to send a resident of the Deep South into nostalgic hysterics. The set-up of “Alabama Pines” is straight out of John Denver: A guy is trapped in a seedy hotel, and it makes him long for home. But the execution is exceedingly graceful — so much so that it’s a shame that Alabama hasn’t put this song in every tourism commercial. “You can’t drive through Talladega on a weekend in October / Head up north to Jacksonville. Cut around and over / Watch your speed in Boiling Springs/ They ain’t got a thing to do. They’ll get you every time.” He makes his home state sound like heaven. That Isbell has also never shied away from calling out the sins of the region makes this adoring tribute seem all the more heartfelt.

13. “Yvette” (2013)

Isbell originally wrote about childhood sexual abuse on Here We Rest‘s “Daisy Mae,” but he plunged into a whole other level of darkness on this grimly hypnotic Southeastern deep cut. Over a dreamy folk-rock sway, Isbell dispassionately tells the story of a young girl horribly victimized by her father from the perspective of an obsessive classmate who follows her home one night. As the song unfolds, it becomes clear that the boy intends to violently avenge the girl by gunning down the father. But Isbell avoids writing a straight-up country revenge song by calling the mental state of the narrator into question — there’s something about his preoccupation with this girl that seems more akin to Travis Bickle than John Wayne. The result is one of Isbell’s most ambiguous and disturbing numbers.

12. “Danko/Manuel” (2004)

As a writer who has long been fascinated by the dark side of the touring musician’s life, it was natural that he would be attracted to the two most tragic members of The Band. “I was reading This Wheel’s On Fire, the Levon Helm book about his time with The Band. He talks about how they had this pact on the road — it was kind of a joke — that whoever died first, they would take his body, take him home, and bury him and all of that,” Isbell once told me. “I saw a lot of myself in that book.” In retrospect, “Danko/Manuel” seems prescient — he wrote it near the start of his career, and it seems to lay out the next decade or so of his life. “Then they say Danko would have sounded just like me / ‘Is that the man you want to be?’” Thankfully, Isbell found a different, better path for himself.

11. “Relatively Easy” (2013)

Along with allowing him to pay more attention to his craft, sobriety also imbued Isbell’s songs with a sense of wisdom that eschews easy resolutions. As the last song on Southeastern, “Relatively Easy” functions as a summation statement for the entire album. In short, life is hard, but it’s still life, which means it’s all we have. Whereas Isbell’s earlier work is marked by doom-laden fatalism, “Relatively Easy” posits that transcending struggle — if only in your mind — might very well be the point of existence. It’s hardly a moment of unfettered triumph, but it’s truthful, which makes this song especially nourishing.

10. “Maybe It’s Time” (2018)

Isbell has said that he initially didn’t want to write a song for Bradley Cooper’s 2018 remake of A Star Is Born. When his producer Dave Cobb, who assembled the soundtrack, asked him, Isbell said, “‘No, Dave. I don’t have time for that shit.’ And my wife said, ‘You’re an idiot,’” he recently related to GQ. He had reason to be skeptical, though in the end Isbell is one of the only credible country-rock analogues to Jackson Maine that exists in real life. In a way, A Star Is Born is a bizarro-world version of Isbell’s story, only Isbell had the good sense not to self-destruct when he met his own Ally. Also, while Isbell has clearly carved out a successful niche for himself, it was nice to see him score an actual hit on one of the biggest albums of recent years.

9. “Super 8” (2013)

The best flat-out rocker in Isbell’s catalogue, “Super 8” is also his funniest song, even if it happens to be a three-and-a-half-minute tour of his personal hell. Essentially a compendium of drunken tour stories compressed into one terrifying night, “Super 8” barrels forward like a roller coaster that’s going a little too fast on a rickety track that appears to be on the verge of collapsing. All the while Isbell’s story keeps getting worse: He’s drinking and doing blow in his crummy hotel room, a guy busts in with a baseball bat, he wakes up bleeding, and now he’s having trouble breathing. Then comes one of the best lines in the song: “Well, they slapped me back to life / And they telephoned my wife / And they filled me full of Pedialyte / Saw my guts and my glory / It would make a great story / If I ever could remember it right.” There’s nothing funny about any of this, and yet Isbell’s desperation and bemusement that he survived it all turns “Super 8” into a classic black comedy, like After Hours set at the world’s worst after-party.

8. “24 Frames” (2015)

It’s one thing to write a compelling song about almost dying in a hotel room. That sort of thing is inherently interesting. But in “24 Frames,” Isbell writes about the existential fear that grips all of us in our daily lives, the mundane terror that’s difficult to put into words. “24 Frames” is about anticipatory tragedy. What happens when something terrible inevitably happens to you? What will that be like? How do you deal with it? Again, Isbell avoids platitudes and instead supplies truth with a side of empathy. “You thought God was an architect, now you know / He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow.” In the meantime, you just try to keep your loved ones close, so you can appreciate a moment of calm while it’s here.

7. “If We Were Vampires” (2017)

Is it dusty in here? Is someone chopping onions? Why do I suddenly feel like I am drowning in a sea of my own tears? This is Isbell’s greatest “anticipatory tragedy” song. It works because it’s imminently relatable — who among us with the good fortune of being paired up with a soulmate hasn’t thought about the day when this will all end? The line that always gets me is when Isbell sings, “And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind.” He’s choosing death over loneliness! I know I would do the same.

6. “Outfit” (2002)

Isbell is now one of the defining figures of dad rock — dads love his music, and he has assumed a dad-like stature in his songs, dispensing wisdom from a position of genuine gravitas. But when he was in Drive-By Truckers, he wrote one of the great anthems of son rock, “Outfit.” A fond remembrance of fatherly advice, “Outfit” is Isbell paying it forward: “Don’t call what you’re wearing an outfit, don’t ever say your car is broke / Don’t worry about losing your accent, a southern man tells better jokes / Have fun, stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday / Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away.”

5. “Speed Trap Town” (2015)

A low-key strummer from Something More Than Free, “Speed Trap Town” is one of Isbell’s best narratives, unfolding like a four-minute documentary about small-town life that feels like it was carved out of a larger, extensive, unseen history. The storytelling is masterful: “She said, ‘It’s none of my business but it breaks my heart’ / Dropped a dozen cheap roses in my shopping cart,” is a killer opening line, instantly inviting though also vague enough to not spell out what’s coming. Soon, we learn the guy in the song is grieving the loss of his father. We also learn that the dad was a state trooper who assaulted the women he pulled over, and ignored his kids until he got sick. We even learn about the local football team. All in the space of a four-minute song! And it never feels overly dense or heavy-handed.

4. “Cover Me Up” (2013)

It has happened at every Jason Isbell concert I’ve ever seen: Whenever he sings the line in “Cover Me Up” about how “I sobered up and I swore off that stuff / Forever this time,” everybody cheers. And I always get a little choked up. How could you not? There’s real blood and guts in “Cover Me Up.” The country singer Morgan Whalen recently covered this song — his version actually comes up on Spotify before Isbell’s — but with all due respect to Whalen’s reverent take it’s impossible for me to imagine anyone other than Isbell singing it. “Cover Me Up” is the sound of a man exposing the deepest, most vulnerable parts of himself, and expressing gratitude that he’s still around to sing about it.

3. “Children Of Children” (2015)

Relationships between children and parents have been an ongoing thematic concern for Isbell throughout his career, as it was for one of his primary influences, Bruce Springsteen. But “Children Of Children” is his best song of this kind, because it feels like a breakthrough in understanding that all parents essentially are children who are faking it at being grown-ups. (It’s Isbell’s “Used Cars.”) “I was riding on my mother’s hip / She was shorter than the corn / All the years I took from her / Just by being born.” As the tragedy of that lyric sinks in, the music swells like an early ’70s Nick Drake ballad, with a breathtaking string arrangement couching Isbell’s best-recorded guitar solo.

2. “Goddamn Lonely Love” (2004)

The highest compliment I can pay this song is that it sounds exactly like the title. Like, you can’t call your song “Goddamn Lonely Love” and not deliver the emotionally wracked goods without looking like a total chump. Isbell avoids this pitfall but perfectly evoking that “sitting alone on a barstool at closing time when you’ve been drinking all night for the wrong reasons” feeling. (I bet Frank Sinatra would have done an amazing version.) It’s absolutely beautiful without romanticizing this state of mind in the least. Isbell sounds like he’s about to jump off of a bridge the moment he’s done singing.

1. “Elephant” (2013)

My favorite Jason Isbell song is not the one I listen to the most. In fact, it is probably among the songs on this list that I’ve played the least. When I listen to Southeastern, I often skip “Elephant,” because I know I simply cannot handle it. This song has made me cry every single time I’ve ever heard it, and most days I’m just not equipped to put “Elephant” into my life and allow it to devastate me. On paper, it might seem maudlin, even manipulative — it’s about a woman who dies of cancer, sung from the perspective of the man who loves her. But “Elephant” works precisely because Isbell doesn’t write it like a Terms Of Endearment-style melodrama. He inhabits the character in the song so fully that it feels like someone talking to you about his life from across the kitchen table. Which is why the part that always gets me — and I do mean always, like I’m tearing up as I type this — is the line where he sings, “If I’d fucked her before she got sick, I’d never hear the end of it.” It’s the precise lack of sentimentality of that lyric, and the well of suppressed emotion that Isbell vocal evokes, that just destroys me. Wow, now I’m a mess. Thanks, Jason Isbell! Time to put on some Imagine Dragons so I can go back to feeling a little more numb.

With the race becoming too close to call on Top Chef, this week gave us… (*gasp*) a double elimination. Going into this episode, there were two obvious candidates for that double elimination, but surprise surprise, they both avoided the guillotine’s blade (lotta that goin’ around lately).

Before that, there was a quickfire challenge in which the contestants were assigned to make “the perfect dish, using flour.” The twist? No all-purpose flour! Instead, they only had an assortment of no-purpose flours! Unorthodox flours only! Tapioca? I hardly know-ca!

They were only given 30 minutes to complete this challenge, which was somewhat disappointing considering that every sourdough-starting bandwagon baker bro in the country was probably hoping to see how those flours might rise. Are you kidding me, no crumb shot? This bread porno sucks. Honestly, how are you going to do a flour challenge where no one uses yeast? Oh, gosh you made a roux? How exciting.

To judge this challenge, they brought in Gru from Despicable Me.

I kid, I kid. Clearly that’s Chris Bianco, the world-famous pizza man. He joked that while he had dedicated his life to pizza, the contestants’ dishes did not actually need to be round. At this Bryan Voltaggio let out a hearty guffaw and wrote it down to save for later. “Ha ha ha,” he said, shaking his head. “What’ll they think of next.”

After that, the boys and girls drew knives, with each knife representing one of the five tastes — salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Dang, which one is a crudo? They paired off into teams of two and had to build dishes based on the flavors on their knives. That’s when Padma dropped the bomb: it was to be a dreaded double elimination challenge, in which two people would go home.

A conductor of the LA Philharmonic was brought in to help judge and the contestants got to tour the Walt Disney Concert Hall in order to inspire the proper quotient of bad music metaphors. “The sustain on these smoked peaches is superb, but I do wonder if the uni foam needed to be so fortissimo.”

POWER RANKINGS

10. (-5) ((Eliminated)) Nini Nguyen

AKA: Broad City. Aka Quipz. Aka Bolo. Aka Gwyneth.

Nini went full wellness in the first five minutes of this week’s episode (the slot the producers reserve for screwball comedy) charging up her crystals in the sun with Malarkey and Melissa. Did you get the sun on your yoni? I heard the crystals don’t work with a shaded yoni. Oh well, I guess this was inevitable in a season set in LA.

Nini’s banh xeo (a bomb-ass savory Vietnamese crepe, I highly recommend) landed her in the top three of the quickfire, but after teaming up with Karen in the elimination, the pair cooked up a poached cod in tomato broth, which the judges said was a beautiful dish, but ate more sweet and sour, rather than umami and sour like it was supposed to. Tom was incredulous, apoplectic that a professional chef could fail to roast their tomatoes for additional umami flavor. “Honestly, you should probably kill yourself,” Tom said.

And so Nini and Karen went home (pending the outcome of Last Chance Kitchen) in a double-elimination based on this season’s bitchiest nitpick. Pretty rough. This was the second time Nini has gone home during a double elimination, and this time got booted after placing top three in the quickfire.

9. (-3) ((Eliminated)) Karen Akunowicz

AKA: Good Witch. Aka Glenda. Aka Aunt Kitty. Aka Rosie The Triveter

Assuming you read the above you know that Karen was eliminated along with Nini. I am shocked, SHOCKED that Karen left the competition before Lee Anne, Malarkey, and Stephanie C-Monster. Karen didn’t make the quickfire top three like Nini did, though she did reveal a background in musical theater during the trip to the concert hall. Hold on, the contestant with pink hair and cat-eye make up was into musical theater?! Please, someone pick my jaw up off the floor.

It was a disappointing finish rendered disappointing-er by the fact that Nini and Karen are almost the exact same size.

RIP, Team Twinsies.

8. (+1) Brian Malarkey

AKA: Shenanigans. Aka Grandpa Fancy. Aka Squirrely. Aka The Imp. Aka Leprechón.

Everything in this episode seemed to be leading us to a Shenanigans Swan Song. First, he recharged his crystals with Melissa and Nini, because of course. Then he attempted ice cream in the quickfire. It turned out he nailed the ice cream but couldn’t finish the accompanying donut, which was disqualifying in a flour challenge. He nonetheless took the opportunity to brag about his ice cream and paint the judges a mental picture of his non-existent donut. You gotta hand it to him, Squirrely can sure talk his way out of a jam. Almost like he has lots of practice or something.

When the judges let the contestants choose their own partners in the elimination challenge, Malarkey and Lee Anne ended up being stuck together, on what I like to call “Team Stench Of Failure.” This after Shenanigans “threw Lee Anne under the bus” two episodes ago, by blaming her own dish on her. They fought the entire time, could barely agree on anything, and ended up making… the judge’s second favorite dish of the night. They called it the best food either had cooked so far and said things like “you could really taste the team harmony, you guys worked as a cohesive unit, and it really came through in the dish.”

C’est la vie said the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.

7. (+1) Lee Anne Wong

AKA: Frazzle. Aka Loud Mom. Aka 911.

For the second week in a row Lee Anne managed to go without getting the paramedics called on her or her family members, which was a victory in itself. As if that wasn’t feat enough, she snaked all the endive to sabotage Eric and Bryan, and then her and Shenanigans’ “beef with miso anchovy hollandaise and bitter greens” (Umami/Bitter) damn near won them the episode. Just veteran move after veteran move from Lee Anne this episode. She’s right, one should never apologize for gamesmanship. Remember where Ned Stark ended up after all that time moaning about honor — headless in a mass grave.

Lee Anne tried to keep Shenanigans from buying carrots and tomatoes, only to end up feeding him carrots in the winner’s circle. Goes to show, sometimes you just have to pat Malarkey’s flanks to keep him calm (if you blow a whistle behind him he pees on the ground).

6. (even) Eric Adjepong

AKA: Ghana. Aka Thesis. Aka Uncle Rico. Aka Kanye West Africa.

At this point, you might be noticing some weird things happening in this week’s rankings. Look, what can I tell you about Eric? He’s been coming on strong for the last three episodes and the first half of this one, but as soon as I saw his and Family Bry’s bone dry pork loin I thought they were going home. Pulling sweet/bitter, they spent hours making a maafe lacquer (*Borat voice* Ma afe!) for their pork loin only to discover that, yep, it was still a pork loin. There’s only so much you can accomplish with a pork loin crust when your crust-to-meat ratio is like skin-of-grape-to-rest-of-grape. Sure, Lee Anne swiped their endive but endive doesn’t put fat in pork loin am I right, guys?

Again, I’m shocked they didn’t go home. So does Eric rise in the rankings or plummet? I can’t bring myself to put him below Malarkey and Lee Anne or above anyone with high finishes this episode so I guess he holds steady at six.

5. (+5) Stephanie Cmar

AKA: C-Monster. Aka Underdog. Aka C-Truffle.

Speaking of funky rankings, what do you do with C-Monster? She was paired with Gregory, almost certainly the favorite of this competition, and they received solid reviews on their brothy fish. She has to be above the challenge losers (Nini, Karen), the perennial basement dwellers (Lee Anne, Brian), and arguably Eric, who almost got sent home for his dry ass pork loin. So the C-Monster shoots up to number five, even though she was merely competent. Is this a new beginning or a peak? I guess we’ll C.

4. (even) Bryan Voltaggio

AKA: Flatbill Dad. Aka Bry Voltage. Aka Kyle Shanahan. Aka Linkin Clark Griswold. Aka Family Bry

Most days Family Bry exudes the energy of an active flatbill dad in the Kyle Shanahan mode, looking to grill up some burgers and down a few Bud Light Limes between longboard seshes. This week, he seemed more like Kyle Shanahan after blowing another Super Bowl lead and going on a three-day bender in Vegas, complete with five o’clock shadow.

First, he blew the quickfire by cooking a delicious dish that used flour only in a crumble. He ended up in the bottom three alongside the other Brian. Then he hooked up with Eric in the elimination challenge for the aforementioned moisture-free pork loin debacle. Bry Voltage opened this competition looking like a favorite, but this is three or four lackluster finishes in a row now. I still have him at number four but I admit he’s skating by on reputation at this point.

3. (even) Kevin Gillespie

AKA: Hops. Aka Oops All Kevins. Aka Bachelor Fried Rice. Aka Thicc Kev.

While the new wave hippie contestants were recharging their crystals in the sun this week, I like to imagine Southern Good Ol’ Boy Kevin was snorting a line of crushed pork rinds and sleeping inside a charred bourbon barrel for aromatherapy. Kevin has been nearly flawless these past few weeks, but he can’t quite pull ahead of prohibitive favorites Melissa and Gregory.

Paired with Melissa, Oops All Kevins turned in a “fish sauce caramel roasted cabbage with pork and apple crumble” for salty/sweet that ended up winning the challenge. But what can I do, put him ahead of his own partner? Or Gregory, who wins the quickfire every damn week? Kevin feels like the Charles Barkley of this competition, or maybe the Dan Marino, depending which sports metaphor you prefer.

2. (even) Melissa King

AKA: Zen Master. Aka Dimples. Aka Shutterstock.

Melissa is so put together and casually confident that she can even make believing in magic crystals seem reasonable. She landed in the top three of the quickfire for her financier (think Proust, not Mnuchin) but lost a squeaker to her only real competition, Gregory. Before you could say “fish sauce caramel” she was back on top thanks to some crafty cabbage work (between this and the charred endive in episode one she clearly knows how to char some veg). Should Melissa be number one? Ehhh. She and Kevin were a number two and three (based on last week’s rankings) going against a number one and 10. I don’t know much about math or sports or odds or how to apply those to cooking competitions but it seems to me like she and Big Kev had the advantage all along.

1. (even) Gregory Gourdet

AKA: Kravitz. Aka Hepcat. Aka Lids. Aka Pollos Hermanos.

Gregory dropped a bombshell of an advantage in the flour challenge: he’s been gluten-free for 10 years! I’ll be honest, I have nothing but respect for vegetarians and vegans but when someone tells me they’re non-Crohn’s disease gluten eschewers I mentally dismissive wank a little. As my ancestors would say: You donna like-a grandmama pasta??? VA VONGOOL!

This probably guarantees I will develop a gluten sensitivity in the next 10 years. Anyway, Gregory basically cemented his place at the top of these rankings when he won yet another quickfire cooking tapioca pancakes. He won with fucking pancakes! I haven’t ordered pancakes and not been sick of them after more than three bites since I reached puberty and this slick son of a bitch is beating entire baseball team worth of expert chefs with them. How do you even compete with a guy who’s winning challenges with fuckin’ tapioca pancakes?

Gregory is going to underbite smile his way across the finish line without even breaking a sweat. I’m not sure he even does sweat. Much like Melissa, this is a dude so chill he can pull off a studded leather vest with fringe.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. Read more of his cooking commentary and mom jokes in UPROXX’s Cooking Battles. For past Top Chef Power Rankings, go here.