Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit with special guest Courtney Marie Andrews
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Doors: 7:00PM | Show: 8:00PM
The Kalamazoo State Theatre, one of the city’s most storied entertainment landmarks, is excited to announce Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit Saturday, June 22, 2024. Fans can get early access to tickets during an online-only local presale happening this Thursday, December 7, at 10 AM. General public ticket sales begin on Friday, December 8, at 10 AM.
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, will be performing songs from their new album Weathervanes. A Jason Isbell record always lands like a decoder ring in the ears and hearts of his audience, a soundtrack to his world and magically to theirs, too. Weathervanes carries the same revelatory power. This is a storyteller at the peak of his craft observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and then strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equaling four once you reach a certain age — and carry a certain amount of scars.
“There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell says. “As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.”
Weathervanes is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret, and redemption. Life and death songs played for and by grown-ass people. Some will make you cry alone in your car, and others will make you sing along with thousands of strangers in a big summer pavilion, united in the great miracle of being alive. The record features the rolling thunder of Isbell’s fearsome 400 Unit, who’ve earned a place in the rock ‘n’ roll cosmos alongside the greatest backing ensembles, as powerful and essential to the storytelling as The E Street Band or the Wailers.
Jason Isbell has established himself as one of the most respected and celebrated songwriters of his generation. The North Alabama native possesses an incredible penchant for identifying and articulating some of the deepest yet simplest human emotions and turning them into beautiful poetry through song. Isbell sings of the everyday human condition with thoughtful, heartfelt, and sometimes brutal honesty. Isbell broke through in 2013 with the release of Southeastern. His next two albums, Something More Than Free (2015) and The Nashville Sound (2017), won Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album & Best American Roots Song. Isbell’s song “Maybe It’s Time” was featured in the 2019 reboot of A Star Is Born.
About Courtney Marie Andrews:
Courtney was raised in Maricopa County by a single mother and a ragtag collection of Southwest eccentrics with a penchant for characters: bikers, Buddhists and cowboys. It was an unorthodox childhood, as a latchkey kid at the age of 7 and her mom working nights at Walmart and days at a call center in Phoenix she was often left to her own devices. Armed with a guitar her uncle had bought her for 30 pesos on a trip to Mexico, she spent this time developing her brilliant musical mind.
Her early pursuits led to her playing in punk bands in high school before becoming a touring member of Jimmy Eat World at just 18 years old, and from there Courtney went on to release a series of acclaimed albums. She garnered her first GRAMMY® Award nomination in the category of “Best Americana Album” for 2020’s Old Flowers. Meanwhile, the record closed out 2020 on year-end lists from Good Morning America, Magnet, and Uncut. The New York Times raved, “Courtney Marie Andrews’s luminous new album, ‘Old Flowers,’ anatomizes the aftermath of breaking up: loneliness, bittersweet memories, recriminations, regrets, temptations, lessons of experience.” Highlighting “Burlap String,” Rolling Stone claimed, “Driven by acoustic guitar, the song brings to mind classic Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, but Andrews’ bell-clear voice and fearless message of introspection are unmistakably her own.” Of the album, Stereogum attested, “up front in all of it is Andrews’ voice, wringing beauty out of pain and self-realization.” Along the way, she also unveiled her debut poetry collection, Old Monarch.
“When you listen to me, I hope you feel good,” she leaves off. “I spent so much of my career relating to the brokenhearted. There will always be that side of me. With this record, I hope you feel love on multiple levels. It doesn’t have to be romantic; it could just be self-love or hope. I’ve come into the full spectrum of my own creativity and selfhood. I want to keep continuing exploring that forever against the backdrop of summer.”