[Note from the author: we started (founded?) the Cultish Creative Music Club this past week. The first episode is about this song. Joseph Moore, myself, and "you" are helping us source the greatest songs about American life. Watch the video, listen to the song, and then I'll further explain myself.]
I know this song. I'm pretty sure I've even seen him do it live. In-person live. Not even just live on YouTube. Which is weird that you have to think that, right?
Isbell is well discussed 'round here. I've obsessed over most of his records, and most of the Drive-By Truckers records, and I can feel them as much as I can hear them. I bought a physical copy of Southeastern before I got a streaming copy. I've heard it all the way through multiple times. But did I ever pause and really listen to "Relatively Easy" the same way I studied "Cover Me Up" or "Elephant" or - still to this day, the way I get "Super 8" stuck in my head every single damn time I drive past a Super 8 motel?
I knew the song, but... I didn't understand the song.
Joseph Moore started telling me about his Jason Isbell Theory of Everything right after the first time we recorded together, when I asked if he knew the live version of "Outfit" off of Live at the Shoals Theatre - the one where Isbell's dad is in the audience and gets the dedication.
Joseph then told me there was another song, by Isbell, that even more perfectly described what it is to be American. We debated that. And now we have a podcast about it. This post is about that pitch.
The title says it all. As Joseph puts it, material scarcity is not our problem - it's been the problem for most of human history, so it's a generic humanity problem. 44% of people say they're not satisfied with their personal life right now. That's an all-time low. And yet if you read the stats, we live in this incredible world of abundance, where you can get wifi on planes and pick from drive-throughs or fast-casual pickup shelves and - misery. We are surrounded by misery. Which Isbell is uniquely gifted at spelling out.
What I hadn't caught before Joseph laid it out: the song opens with an angry heart and ends with a lonely one. Same guy. Technically better circumstances by the finish - he's in jail, so no more obligations, no more traffic, no more frustrating open-endedness of the free world. And yet the angry heart that was beating relatively easy at the start has become a lonely heart doing the same thing at the finish.
It's a Cool Hand Luke moral. Which cage do you want? The prisons come in layers - social and mental. And that's the idea Isbell seems to be sketching in the song.
The whole thing is relative. That's the point. He's not miserable in a vacuum - he's miserable compared to what he has, compared to what others don't have, compared to what he could have had. His buddy overdoses. Now, that's not a headline from across the world, it's his buddy, someone he knows and has known. I hate that you hear it and can think - well, that's Tuesday in America. And still, relative to being dead, he's got it easy - it just doesn't feel that way. Knowing you're relatively OK doesn't fix anything inside of him.
Abundance releases you to look at your worst demons. What happens next is on you.
Joseph's read - and I agree with it - is that this isn't a new American problem. It's the post-war novel version. It's the great feminist thought of the '60s. It's whatever Deidre McCloskey means when she talks about "betterment" - this world that just keeps getting materially better, which frees up more energy to obsess on the problems that previous generations didn't have the luxury to obsess on. Isbell wrapped all of that up in a song over a decade ago, and I had heard it dozens of times without fully clocking what he did.
That's the thing about songs you think you know.
Next episode, with my pitch, is out this week. The playlist for these songs lives here. And if you want to send a submission, come find me.
