ALYSSE GAFKJEN
BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE
JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT, LUCINDA WILLIAMS
WEDNESDAY 8/4. FIRST SECURITY AMPHITHEATER. 8 P.M. $45-$125. Were it two different venues that Jason Isbell and Lucinda Williams were playing at this particular August night, they’d force a difficult decision. As it stands, you’re spared. Isbell, whose biting wit on Twitter nearly rivals that on his post-Drive-By Truckers solo album “Southeastern,” is bringing his all-star band, named the 400 Unit after a psychiatric ward in his native Alabama, to Little Rock ahead of his run at Austin City Limits. For the uninitiated, you don’t need to go deep in the catalogs to learn why he’s hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of our time; the Grammy-winning “24 Frames” or “If We Were Vampires” should do the trick. (Or, for more of a sense of the pathos that likely got him cast in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon,” see “Yvette” or “Alabama Pines.”) He’s joined by Lucinda Williams — daughter of an Arkansas poet and immutable bender of sung syllables, and someone who we should have fallen in love with the moment Mary Chapin Carpenter recorded “Passionate Kisses” in 1993, but who instead won us over slowly and irrevocably in subsequent decades. And hey, Isbell’s former bandmate Patterson Hood showed up at this tour’s Montana stop; anything can happen. Get tickets at jasonisbell.com. ARKANSASTIMES.COM
AUGUST 2021 13
