Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm in the studio with Jason Isbell.

One of the greatest songwriters of his generation, one of the greatest songwriters of the century

and he has a great new album coming out May 25th called Reunions.

I love the new album.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I'm not tired of it yet, which is good because it hasn't come out yet.

When you're writing for a new album, are you writing towards an album or are you just writing songs and then gathering them? How does it work for you?

Well, I start off just writing and then you start to see certain themes and sometimes those inspire other songs.

I try not to conceptualize it too much because I feel like that can be a distraction for me sometimes.

Usually my job is just to write the best songs that I can write, period.

But with that being said, after I got a couple of songs written like Only Children and

overseas, I started thinking, okay, I see what this album could be sonically and topically and right from there.

Yeah, it's kind of, there's a certain amount of nostalgia,

there's a certain amount of

of hauntedness that pervades at least some of the album and that

particularly those two songs. I mean only children. Who is that about if you don't mind saying?

It's about a bunch of people. People always ask me that who is that about?

It's so specific, that one.

Yeah, it does, you know, it doesn't matter, right?

It's about me, you know, it's about you, Brian. It's about all of us.

But it, you know, I'll tell you a little bit of what was going on when I wrote it. I was on, this is going to sound so ridiculous. This is like the least American of thing in the world, but I was on the island of

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