Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit Live at the Ryman, October 13, 2017: The Night the Music Was Perfect and the Rest Was Still Being Written

By JamFest | All Things Considered Live Radio Show

On JamFest, where every song we play is the live version, we bring you performances that captured something real in a specific room on a specific night. Tonight that room is the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the venue they call the Mother Church of Country Music, and the night is October 13, 2017. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit were at the height of their powers, freshly Grammy-awarded, universally celebrated, and by every visible measure, a band and a couple operating in complete creative unity. What none of us in the listening audience knew that night, and what none of them may have fully known either, is that the marriage at the center of the band’s chemistry would not survive the decade.

That context does not diminish the music. If anything, it makes it more interesting to sit with.

The Ryman Auditorium carries more American music history than almost any building still standing. Hank Williams played that stage. Patsy Cline played it. Emmylou Harris played it. The acoustics of the old tabernacle, built in 1892 for religious revival meetings, turned out to be extraordinarily suited to the kind of music that requires a listener to hear every word, and it has been producing that kind of listening experience for Americana and country artists ever since. When Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit stepped on stage on that October night, they were stepping into a lineage, and they knew it, and the performance reflects that understanding in every song.

The band that night featured the lineup that had made the previous few years so extraordinary. Jason Isbell on guitar and vocals, his voice carrying the specific combination of grit and tenderness that had made songs like “Cover Me Up” and “If We Were Vampires” feel like genuine dispatches from the interior of a life being honestly examined. Jimbo Hart on bass. Chad Gamble on drums, playing with the subtle, dynamic intelligence that has always been one of the 400 Unit’s most underappreciated qualities. Derry deBorja on keyboards, adding the lush textural layer that fills out the band’s sound and keeps it from ever feeling sparse even in its quietest moments. And Amanda Shires on fiddle and vocals, her playing hauntingly beautiful in the specific way that only she plays, her harmonies woven into Isbell’s lead with an ease that, from the outside, looks like two people who know each other completely.

Of course they did know each other completely, which is what made the subsequent years so complicated and so human. The cracks that would eventually widen into a divorce filing in December 2023 were there, or were developing, during the period when the band was winning Grammys and the marriage looked from every public angle like one of the great creative partnerships in American music. Shires’ 2022 album “Take It Like a Man” contained the song “Fault Lines,” which she has discussed openly as a reflection of the distance that had grown between them. Isbell’s 2025 album “Foxes in the Snow” processed the divorce itself, the new relationship with painter Anna Weyant, and the painful, necessary project of documenting a life undergoing enormous change with the same unflinching honesty that has defined his songwriting from the beginning. The divorce was finalized in March 2025. Both of them are making music. Their daughter Mercy is nine years old.

None of that was visible in the Ryman on October 13, 2017. What was visible was “Elephant,” the song about watching a friend die of cancer that remains one of the most emotionally demanding pieces in Isbell’s catalog and one of the most honest things any songwriter has committed to record in the past twenty years. What was visible was “If We Were Vampires,” which would win the Grammy for Best American Roots Song a few months after this recording, a love song about mortality and the strange comfort of knowing that the end is what makes the middle matter. In a room like the Ryman, with Amanda Shires’s voice in the harmony, that song hits differently than it does through headphones on a Tuesday afternoon. It always did. It still does.

All Things Considered Live exists to bring you performances like this one because the live version of a song is always a document of something that cannot be fully controlled: the room, the audience, the specific emotional state of the people on stage, the way a lyric lands when it is sung in real time rather than assembled in a recording booth. The NPR Music tradition of capturing these moments at iconic venues and festivals across the country has given us an archive of American live performance that is genuinely irreplaceable, and the 2017 Ryman recording of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit belongs among its finest entries.

What we know now adds to the listening rather than subtracting from it. Great Americana has always been about the gap between the ideal and the real, about singing toward something honest precisely because it acknowledges difficulty rather than pretending it away. Jason Isbell has been doing that his entire career, through sobriety and marriage and fatherhood and divorce and new love and the ongoing, unfinished project of trying to write the truth about all of it. The 2017 Ryman show is one of the finest examples of that work captured live. The years that followed are simply another chapter in the same honest project.

Tune in tonight on All Things Considered Live. Every note is the live version. The music is real, and so is everything that came after it.

JamFest | All Things Considered Live Radio Show, bringing you exclusive live performances from NPR Music at iconic venues and festivals across the country. Every track, every night, is the live version.