Defending Jacob, the new Apple TV+ star vehicle for Chris Evans, does more than alright for itself in some ways. It’s essentially a serviceable and extremely expensive-looking version of legal and psychological thrillers that we’ve seen permutations of many times already. Think We Need To Talk About Kevin (where a parent worries endlessly over whether they raised a killer) crossed with Primal Fear (where an attorney crosses ethical lines to get his client off the murder hook), but the key variation here is that Evans plays both the parent of an accused murderer and an attorney. As such, he’s torn between unconditional love and his drive for justice. This dilemma presents opportunities for endlessly interesting twists, but oh boy, does this show take its time to get there.

There’s something to be said for a nice, slow burn. However, this approach requires enough character development to keep viewers intrigued while they wait for stuff to go down. That’s where Defending Jacob‘s eight-episode structure does it no favors. The project holds itself out, according to the synopsis, as a “character-driven thriller,” but it actually gets wrapped up in holding necessary details back for so long that it squishes its own character development. There’s a cast full of fantastic actors here, all raring to go, but the series simply teases viewers for so long that it never reaches full potential.

Notably, the supporting cast is stellar. J.K. Simmons (always great) and Pablo Schreiber (often suitably smarmy) are well-suited to their antagonistic functions. Betty Gabriel shines as a detective in an unenviable position, while Cherry Jones crushes her defense attorney role. When it comes to the main trio, Jaeden Martell plays the accused, 14-year-old Jacob, in just disturbing enough of a way to make viewers wonder about him. Michelle Dockery is fine as the mom, and Evans continues to prove his range as an assistant DA who not only has his personal but professional life turned upside down, even though perhaps the production should have worked a little harder to cloak those muscles from inevitably popping out. Maybe some bulky sweaters would have helped, but I suppose that Chris Meloni had fairly sizeable guns on Law and Order: SVU, so I can look past that issue. And the muscles do help paint the picture of a perfect family, which must either withstand immense public scrutiny or begin to show cracks.

More about the story: Defending Jacob fashions itself from William Landay’s 2012 novel of the same name. The teenage suspect in this story does a lot of typically unwise teenage things, and the series does a decent enough job of making the audience waver between deciding whether he’s capable of killing. Likewise, his parents struggle through several phases of self-torture as walls close in around them, although the script doesn’t dive anywhere we haven’t seen before with a family in this position. Really, it’s the little things that add up to feeling like this show squanders chances for weaving complexity. For instance, mom jogging through the neighborhood (for a long time) or chopping vegetables (in a normal way, simply chopping them) only fuels story inertia while telling us nothing about her psyche. She’s somber, but we know this already without languid stretches that water down the story. This may disappoint audiences who gravitate toward dark thrillers, which worries me more than a bleak miniseries arriving during bleak times. People realize what they’re signing up for when they push the play button on a legal thriller, but Defending Jacob plays out too slowly to deliver as promised.

With this miniseries, the biggest issue is that the target audience will probably feel like they’ve watched an eight-hour version of a network TV procedural for final reveals that go nowhere novel and don’t yield much of an emotional payoff. The show’s overpadded (and diluted with an abundance of red herrings) to a fault for the mystery that the story hopes to support. By the time the last few episodes roll around, the wildly chaotic final turns feel unearned without an aforementioned slow burn to get to that point.

Overall, Defending Jacob is a puzzling project to behold, since there’s so much talent involved, including director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), yet the final product feels uneven and bloated, which contrasts strangely with the miniseries’ visual design (full of sharp edges and minimalist decor at every turn). Add that to the inconsistency of schlocky subject matter and arguable junk science sprinkled into a project that genuinely can’t seem to decide whether it’s aiming for prestige TV or not. One could do much worse than watching Defending Jacob, but I can’t help but feel that the story would have been better suited as a lean-and-mean feature film. As it stands, there’s not enough of a fresh approach to this tale to justify an eight-hour time investment.

The first three episodes of Apple TV+’s ‘Defending Jacob’ will premiere on Friday, April 24. Subsequent episodes will drop each Friday.

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.