Concert Reviews

The singer-songwriter’s vocals crackled with energy and emotion as he worked through a moving, melancholic solo setlist.

Jason Isbell at Groton Hill Music Center, Groton, Nov. 4, 2026.

“Damn, that was sad!”

Jason Isbell was referring to the searing version of “Elephant,” his heartrending 2013 song about a dying friend that he’d just delivered at Groton Hill Music Center. But he could have been talking about the show as a whole — for two hours Wednesday night, Isbell masterfully spotlighted some of his most wrenching songs about emotionally displaced men attempting, and often failing, to find meaning in, well, anything. 

If that sounds kind of heavy, yeah, it was — but also moving and, in a way, hopeful. In Isbell’s songs, the men are at least trying, and sometimes that’s half the battle.

Ironically, Isbell had plenty of reasons to be happy. The singer-songwriter is notoriously anti-MAGA, to the point where he’s been known to rankle the more conservative faction of his Americana fan base when he’s spoken his mind politically. Surely he was thrilled with Tuesday’s election results, and the crowd agreed: All Isbell had to say was “Last night” before the audience erupted in applause.

“It was a good night for a lot of reasons,” Isbell said toward the start of the show, noting that his home state of Alabama had elected its first openly gay sheriff. “If people know only those two things about me, I think it’s the sheriff part I’d keep to myself,” he winked. It was the first of many light and funny between-song remarks that leavened the songs themselves, which were generally the opposite.

Dressed in green flannel and black jeans and looking his age with his tousled salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rim glasses, Isbell, 47, stayed seated throughout the solo show, with just acoustic guitar as accompaniment. It was a mellow affair, but it was anything but sleepy.

Instead, Isbell’s worn and melancholic tenor crackled with energy and emotion from the get-go. “Hardly even know my name anymore — when no one calls it out it kind of vanishes away,” he sang on the set opener “Alabama Pines,” setting a mood of nostalgia with a tinge of despair that you could practically touch. Isbell tends to sing and pick his guitar with eyes closed and brow creased, as if he’s reliving memories in his mind — some good, a lot of them clearly painful.

Subtle lighting added to the mood of “Foxes in the Snow,” the spooky love song that serves as the title track to Isbell’s phenomenal 2025 solo album. He only did three songs from that release, but they stood out: “Open and Close” was laced with longing, and “Ride to Robert’s” featured not only some of Isbell’s most hilariously misanthropic lyrics (“God said, ‘Hold my beer,’ and he made a man so he could watch and laugh”) but also some of his most impassioned finger-picking, showcasing both his light touch and remarkable control.

“Hope the High Road” was the perfect vehicle for Isbell’s expressive holler, and was the one song that brought with it a feeling of catharsis from Tuesday’s political reckoning: Applause rang out mid-song when Isbell sang, “We’ll ride the ship down, dumping buckets overboard — there can’t be more of them than us.” (Groton Hill, it’s worth noting, was perfectly suited to showcasing his lyrical talents, its perfect acoustics accentuating Isbell’s every word.)

But the songs mainly steered clear of politics, instead focusing on lost fathers, sad children, and a longing for other humans that you’re not sure you can ever quite reach. In fact, it felt at times like you were hearing chapters in one long story — or even, as can happen with solo shows, one long song. The melodies and tempos weren’t especially distinct from each other, and it might have been nice if Isbell had pulled out one or two of his livelier numbers; it would have been fun to see him beat the hell out of his guitar on “Super 8” or “Cumberland Gap,” but it wasn’t that type of show.

Still, what we got — the setlist drew from Isbell’s solo output, his work with the 400 Unit, and even his early career with Drive By Truckers — was spectacular. He made the absolute most of the subtle emotions behind songs like “Cast Iron Skillet,” about a girl whose father disowns her when she falls in love with a boy “with smiling eyes and dark skin,” and the Truckers track “Outfit,” featuring fatherly advice that essentially amounts to “don’t end up like me.”

On the main set closer, the longing “Cover Me Up,” Isbell’s vocals — always stunning in their expressiveness — reached their pinnacle of the night. It was especially telling when the crowd applauded the line, “I sobered up and I swore off that stuff, forever this time”: Isbell is almost 15 years sober, and if the Groton crowd was any indication, his audience has been in his corner the whole time.

Isbell ended the show with “If We Were Vampires,” his quiet, not-quite-a-love-song about how sad it will be when one of the partners has to die first. It was haunting, and a reminder that with some artists you walk out of their concert humming the melodies, but with Jason Isbell you might walk out grappling with a full-blown existential crisis. And the people who love him clearly wouldn’t have it any other way.

Setlist for Jason Isbell at Groton Hill Music Center, Nov. 4, 2026:

• Alabama Pines (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Live Oak
• Open and Close
• Foxes in the Snow
• Hope the High Road (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Dreamsicle (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Last of My Kind (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Strawberry Woman (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Speed Trap Town
• Relatively Easy
• Elephant
• Goddamn Lonely Love (Drive-By Truckers)
• King of Oklahoma (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Cast Iron Skillet (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
• Ride to Robert’s
• How to Forget
• Traveling Alone
• Cover Me Up  

Encore:

• Maybe It’s Time
• Outfit (Drive-By Truckers)
• If We Were Vampires (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area, and is the author of Boston.com’s weekly Greater Boston news quiz. 

Source