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JASON ISBELL:
For a comparatively brief moment in the mid-1960s, Muscle Shoals, Alabama was the unlikely epicenter of a major American songwriting renaissance. Here are some of the names: Arthur Alexander, Donnie Fritts, Eddie Hinton, Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, O.C. Smith, Joe South, Tony Joe White. Toss Bobbie Gentry into that mix, on style if not geography, and the list is not complete, regardless.
Style matters, for in those turbulent times these writers and their collaborators fused the vocal passion of African-American soul and gospel to an Anglo-Saxon storytelling tradition which goes back at least to Beowulf: Tough, hard, passionate, unflinching songs, unrepentant in their sense of place and direct in their stubborn Southernness.
That is a powerful pile of names to spade across the work of Jason Isbell, as his second solo album, named for his band, is, well, only his second solo album. And he's almost 30. It's not simply that he lives in Florence, Alabama, just outside Muscle Shoals, nor that he recorded Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit at the famed FAME studio there. That guarantees nothing.
The songs will stand on their own.
CHUCK PROPHET:
His emails are all aptly signed with the Mark Twain quote, "As soon as you realize it's all insane, it all makes sense". In an industry filled with heroin-shaped prima donnas and blood-leeching businessmen, Chuck Prophet is a thorn tree. He's a thorn tree in the gardens of a game that he's played and that's played him; ultimately refusing to give up on what makes him breathe: rock and roll.
Chuck Prophet's career in music began much like the careers of others. He was a kid with a guitar. Here's the difference: by the time he was fifteen years old he could do more with it than most would be able to do in a lifetime. Legendary producer and musician Jim Dickinson (The Rolling Stones, The Replacements, Big Star, Bob Dylan) was once asked how this kid could pull off the stuff he did. 
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