A few months ago, mega-star and Czar of the Americana Empire Jason Isbell announced on social media that he was sorry to push back a few dates at large venues across the country to attend his daughter’s school play. In this episode, we discuss whether modern families — especially fathers navigating shifting expectations across their various responsibilities — achieve balance or if we should even try to achieve it.

In honor of this topic, we discuss work-life balance, the low bar dads have to live up to as parents and some Donnie and Dave’s favorite Isbell songs.

Donnie also tries to convince Dave it’s time to get a cowboy hat. 

Show Notes

02:26: Work-Life Balance: Before discussing Isbell’s decision, the guys talk about the term “work-life balance” and whether it has a place in modern family life. They touch on how this may apply to primary, stay-at-home parents and those who work completely remotely. Dave also sneaks in that he is a rocket scientist. 

08:47: What does balance look like now? Dave and Donnie touch on what kind of balance is prevalent today in a post-pandemic work, school and family environment.

11:58: Initial reactions to the Isbell news: Dave admits he was very uncomfortable about the news from Isbell — well more about the news about the news of Isbell’s announcement. 

17:36: Responsibilities of a Public Figure and the Low Bar for Dads: The guys touch on the similarities to the Eric Church Final Four show cancellations and how the “family first” argument is sort of a copout which leaves the bar incredibly low for dads. This gives Dave a little bit of the ick.  

31:02: There’s No Easy Right or Wrong Answer for Dads: Is Isbell’s situation so much different than the guys that they can’t understand his decision? Or is it that there is no easy, straightforward answer when dealing with these issues? It’s getting Meta on this podcast. 

33:12: The Dad Life Sound Check: In honor of talking all about him for more than a half an hour, the guys talk about their favorite Isbell songs for the Dad Life Sound Check.

40:41: Change My Mind– Dave Can’t Pull Off a Cowboy Hat: Dave asks Donnie to change his mind about why he, too, can wear a cowboy hat. 

Thank you for listening. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use. If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter: countrymusicdads.substack.com. You can find everything we do on our website: countrymusicdads.com. And we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram @countrymusicdads, or via email countrymusicdads@gmail.com.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Jeff Bezos Article
• Southeastern records social media post and Isbell response
• “Severance” on Apple TV
• Eric Church Final Four controversy
• Whiskey Riff article about Eric Church v. Kobe
• Scary Mommy post about Isbell
• Vanessa Bryant clip about Kobe playing hurt
• PBS documentary Nashville 2.0
• Drive by Truckers
• Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2014

References:

• Intro Music: “Dark Country Rock” by Moodmode
• “Cover Me Up” by Jason Isbell
• “Cover Me Up” by Morgan Wallen 
• “Speed Trap Town” by Jason Isbell
• “Live Oak” by Jason Isbell

Transcript

This is Country Music Dads, the parenting podcast with a twang.

We’re driving a highly subjective, comically contrarian, often irreverent conversation about fatherhood and country music for people who have a passion for both.

My name is Dave, and I’m a country music dad.

And my name is Donnie, and I’m also a country music dad.

On this episode, we’re discussing a recent decision by fellow country music dad, Jason Isbell, to reschedule several of his concerts.

A few months ago, Isbell announced on social media that he was sorry to push a few dates at large venues across the country off by several months in order to attend his daughter’s school play.

Southeastern Records announced the change, and Isbell followed up by saying, Sorry y’all, but the kid has school play performances that week, and I’m not gonna miss them.

A vast majority of the reaction online was positive.

A divorced country music rock star dad prioritized his child’s performances over concert goers across the Southern United States.

Kinda hard to be against that.

However, some folks, mostly politely, said that a star at Isbell’s Lelk, a multi-Grammy award-winning chart-topping artist with legions of fans, should prioritize his scheduled commitments over his daughter’s play.

This inconveniences thousands of people.

So one person, who made his money and achieved fame because so many fans, like those concert goers, purchased tickets, albums and merch over the years.

So in this episode, we get into the thorny issue of work-life balance.

Can modern families, especially fathers who are navigating, shifting expectations across their sets of responsibilities, be they work or family related, achieve this balance?

Is this something we should even try to achieve?

So before we get into the specifics of the Isbell discussion, I thought we could talk a little bit about the so-called work-life balance.

Does it make sense to use this term anymore?

What do you think about this, Dave?

I heard about work-life balance a lot in my former life as an aerospace engineer, and I have conflicted thoughts about that term because at that company, we did have lots of work-life balance.

There was lots of flexibility.

For the most part, you didn’t get questioned when you wanted to take time off or leave early, just as long as you got your work done, you got your hours in, it was fine.

But after a while, I started to get the sense that if you wanted to move up in the company, if you wanted the best projects and the most exciting work, you probably had to sacrifice the life part, a little more work, a little less life, longer hours, time on the weekends.

And the work-life balance became less of something that you would talk about if you wanted to keep on pushing in your career.

It’s probably true in any industry, but management would hang their hats on the work-life balance.

If I wanted to achieve certain goals in my career, it started to ring hollow a little bit.

It’s an interesting dilemma, right?

Because I’ve always been told work-life balance is a fallacy, because it’s not a balance between those two things.

It’s a balance between what you want to do and what you have to do.

And work is part of life, regardless of profession.

You have to do certain things to make sure that you’re able to.

You have to do the laundry so you have socks.

You have to do the dishes so that you don’t get animals in your kitchen.

You have to cook dinner so that you can eat.

And those are some things that people might not want to do, but you got to balance it out with what you enjoy doing more.

And in some ways, your life is going to be unbalanced at all times, but there will be balance in the longer term.

Some days, you’re going to have to stay longer at the office, if you’re in the office, and some days, you’re going to have to fold 17 loads of laundry because you didn’t do it.

Or the last week, it’s just not something that is achievable because there’s always going to be something that is heavier on one side or the other of those balances, and the weights will sometimes feel heavier, depending on what you need to get done.

It’s one thing to be willing to sacrifice aspects of your career to say, I’m just going to go on vacation for three weeks every year.

But eventually, that may catch up to you.

I’ve always thought it was a little bit of a fake concept that’s built up to make people feel better that they aren’t getting paid as much in their offices, to be honest.

I read this article about Jeff Bezos a long time ago, about work-life balance, and I liked his take on it.

The article hasn’t really aged well because I think Amazon’s reputation is that they worked their people really hard.

But his take at the time was that the problem with the term work-life balance is that it implied there’s always going to be a trade-off, like bad work and good life, and you have to find the right mix of both of those things.

He preferred the terms work-life harmony or work-life circle.

That appealed to me when I was struggling to find the balance that you’re talking about that might not even exist.

If there’s a season of work where I really need to be crushing it, and then later I know I can be confident that it’ll be a little bit easier and I can thank those hard work times and certain portions of my life when I can afford it.

I like that approach, at least.

I don’t know if it’s worked out for someone working for Amazon right now, but…

I think that is probably closer to how I view it.

My mom worked when I was growing up, and she would say things like that all the time.

Some days you’re in the office from 6 o’clock in the morning until 9 o’clock at night, and that’s the way it goes.

It’s not necessarily about making sure that you’re there at 8 and out by 5 every day with an hour lunch with the punch clock.

And that worked in some ways before and in some ways can work again.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you end up with something better.

The harmony aspect of that, I think, is the most interesting.

And I think that Jeff Bezos probably has a lot of harmony on his own, but perhaps not for the folks that work for him.

But I think the balancing act, I think, is constant.

It’s constant rebalancing, reassessing, making sure you’re taking care of what needs to get done and what you need for yourself, too.

And I think the implication that work is bad and your life is good is false.

I think that if you see work as separate from your life, you’re going to have some trouble with it.

You love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

I think that’s a bad flaming poo, because it’s just not accurate.

I wouldn’t say I love the work I do, but I find it interesting and demanding of my brain power, and I think I’m good at it.

But it’s not something that I could say is a calling or anything like that.

Work doesn’t need to be this crazy ging to the yang of life.

It just doesn’t.

And I don’t think that there’s some magical fix within that.

There’s a reason that one of the most popular shows on TV right now is Severance, where the premise is that you actually have a medical procedure in your brain to separate your work self from your life self, your outside self, because work is so miserable.

You just don’t want to remember it.

That tension between how you spend most of your day, whether it’s at work or doing something that you enjoy, spending time with your family is very relatable to everyone.

That’s why I was googling articles about Jeff Bezos and work life harmony back when I was working full time, and now I’m a stay-at-home dad, so work looks different for me.

It would be hard to severance yourself from that job, right?

It would, yeah.

I don’t know where I would go to make the transition.

If I don’t have an elevator, it would probably be like the bathroom, honestly, and I’d come out as a different person.

But that gets us to that question.

How does a stay-at-home parent understand this term?

Is it even something that fits within your lexicon?

It’s complicated.

In the at-home dad community, we talk about self-care and our mental health a lot, because it is hard to separate work and life.

Sometimes, everything feels like work, even when you’re spending time with your family all day.

A lot of that is hard work, especially when you have small kids like I do.

So you’re on call 24-7.

The weekends look the same as the weekdays.

They might even be harder than the weekdays because the kids are in school when they’re at a certain age during the week.

It is hard to strike the balance, even though as an at-home parent, I have a lot more flexibility than I did when I was in the workforce, because you gotta be in the office, you have your deliverables.

I’m making my own schedule as an at-home parent to some degree, but just the distractions and having to take care of other people being on their schedules can add up.

I don’t think we use the term work-life balance, it’s more just mental sanity that we are pursuing.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

I think it would kind of jump on that and go slightly different direction.

I work from home all the time.

My company is 100% remote.

We don’t have an office.

We get together a couple of times a year in person.

My work day really doesn’t look like a traditional workday.

I’ll wake up when I need to and get the kids off to school.

Either I will take them or more often than not, my wife will take them.

And then 3.30 rolls around, 3.45 rolls around, and my productivity goes into the toilet, as there is homework to be done and baseball games to go to and Hebrew school to attend and play dates to go to.

And then they go to bed and then I catch up.

That’s on the rest of the work.

So the Balancing Act really is, I think, probably more prevalent in the post-pandemic, non-traditional office life than it may have been elsewhere.

Like we were talking about, there’s no elevator to go down.

And I go downstairs, I go into my office, which is our guest room, and I work there.

And the kids come in and their playroom’s right outside.

So it’s not, we’re all that separated.

And it’s much more integrated than it had been in the past.

The balancing act becomes making sure you’re creating time and space to separate yourself from all of those pressures that are responsibilities as opposed to just pure work.

It’s not just about getting your job done and then hanging out with your family, because those things can be hard to do and complicated.

You got to be able to have a little bit of fun.

You have to be able to laugh.

You have to have a good meal every once in a while.

So, it’s an interesting shift and I think that bringing us back to the beginning of this conversation, I think the work-life balance term doesn’t work anymore.

It doesn’t apply in the same way it did before.

Shifting gears, Dave, tell me what you thought when you first heard this news about Jason Isbell.

I was conflicted.

It made me very uncomfortable, because as somebody who has a podcast about fatherhood and a newsletter about fatherhood, and has made that a big part of who I am and what I like to talk about and think about, I felt like I should be celebrating that news, and I wasn’t.

That’s why we’re having this conversation, I think.

I had a very complicated reaction to it that wasn’t entirely positive.

Honestly, it made me feel guilty that I was having a negative reaction to the news.

I do want to caveat, before we get into it, that as a rule, I do not like to criticize fellow parents.

Unless it’s something that’s really damaging to kids, or is abusive or something, I do not nitpick how people parent their kids, because every situation is different, and we’re all trying our best.

I’ll maybe offer suggestions, but I’m not going to go drag a well-meaning parent behind their backs for the decisions that they make as a general rule.

In this case, I support Jason Isbell’s decision to cancel the shows, because he knows what’s best for his relationship with his daughter.

So he made the right call.

But there’s some other issues that I wanted to talk about surrounding that decision and the reporting on it and everything.

But yeah, that’s where I came out on it.

I wanted to have a positive reaction to it, but I didn’t.

I felt bad about it.

I was surprised when I brought it up.

I was like, hey, look, I thought it would just be something nice that we could share.

Hey, look, dad, doing the right thing, being there for his daughter, how great is that?

All positive.

And then your reaction is like, I don’t know about that.

I’m like, whoa.

As we started discussing this, I can see the nuance in your position.

And I think that it’s valid.

You don’t want to necessarily get on anyone’s case for doing what they believe is right for their kids.

And you also want to expect your rock stars to be rock stars.

Because I think that’s part of the reaction too, is that there’s an expectation that these people do what they say they’re gonna do.

And there’s almost a disappointment when they are more like rock stars and get drunk and do stupid shit.

It’s not like he’s getting drunk and doing stupid things anymore.

He’s pretty publicly sober.

I think that what’s getting to the core of perhaps your argument is that he’s using this seemingly as part of his brand and less so just because that’s what he should be doing.

Is that a fair assumption?

He is very public about his family approach and he’s outspoken about things he cares about.

I think he puts himself out there in good ways and it makes him a target for criticism.

My gut reaction came a little bit from the Eric Church NCAA Final Four incident from a few years ago.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, yeah.

He was going to take his son to the Final Four.

Yeah, it was Duke, North Carolina, once in a lifetime.

And yeah, he canceled some shows.

And at the time, I was writing for Whiskey Riff and I was really fired up about that one.

So I wrote an article about it, how that was a messed up thing to do.

And there’s some parallels, I think, between the two because Eric Church later, he explained that wasn’t just that he wanted to go to the game.

It was that he told his son that they’d go to the game if that ever happened.

And so it was part of fulfilling his commitment to his son and sharing this memory.

It’s a little bit less relatable because most average shows don’t have the chance to go to a Final Four game between Duke, North Carolina at the drop of a hat.

But part of my initial response to the Isbell News was that it kind of sounded similar.

Hey, fans, I’m going to be open and honest with you.

I’m making this decision for my family, and you have to accept that.

I’m going to push here a little bit because I think that he did do that.

It’s important to note Southeastern Records is him.

He is that entity, and it is his organization.

He’s the only artist on the record label.

And it’s probably the reason he is as rich and powerful and capable of doing exactly what he wants to do because he has that much control over the business side of his music.

That being said, he did come out pretty immediately and say, you know, hey, I’m sorry.

It’s my kid’s thing.

I’m going to go to that.

I can’t miss this.

I also understand that everybody has family obligations.

Everybody does.

No matter what situation or scenario you find yourself in, you’re going to have those times when you have to make difficult decisions.

And it’s a little bit flippant if you don’t take that into consideration, as we said in the opening.

There are thousands and thousands of people that are inconvenienced so that he can go see his kids play.

Is that fair?

It’s a shame that when both of them, Church and Isbell, come out and use their excuses.

Family first?

They’re being honest.

Any of us, if we were in that situation, would have a similar conflict and would probably make a similar decision a lot of times if you’re looking at your kid in the face and want to come through for them.

I also feel like when you come out with the family first argument, at least in Isbell’s case, just the tone of it, I’m not going to miss that.

But you guys will understand it didn’t properly acknowledge the sacrifices that the fans also would need to make with the rescheduled date.

And also by saying something like that, it’s family first.

That’s the end of the argument.

No one who was a parent could argue with that.

And here I am arguing with it.

Well done.

It’s impressive.

But I feel like it’s important to get that out there.

I knew that the reporting and the public perception was probably going to be positive for that reason because it’s like, oh yeah, everyone understands family first.

Everyone can agree on that.

Scary Mommy, which is an online parenting publication.

They made a post about this kind of predictively that said, major green light dad energy coming from Jason Isbell with this news canceling his show for his kids.

And to me, that also kind of reinforces the low bar that dads especially have to live up to, to be considered a good dad.

So in this case, it’s he canceled some shows, and now he is a dad icon.

You might be able to speak to more of kind of his brand and what’s behind that.

I only know what he puts out.

But yeah, yeah, exactly.

So we don’t actually know.

To me, just seeing that, it’s just one tweet that says, of course, I’m not missing my daughter’s play.

You don’t know the full story.

And on the other side, his co-parent, Amanda Shires, who knows how many things she’s had to miss and would it be the same kind of a reaction if it was her canceling a show?

There’s complicated and unfortunate problems with being honest.

And you got to give him some credit for being honest and saying, hey, here’s the reason.

But the way that it’s reported, it does rub me the wrong way, Donnie, that he gets a lot of credit for it.

Yeah, that to me, I think is the most ridiculous.

And it’s pure play sexism without any question about it.

There’s just an expectation that dads get to miss things where moms don’t.

I have missed a couple of school performances and things like that for work events that I couldn’t reschedule.

I just couldn’t do it.

Granted, my oldest is like, don’t come, please don’t come to my singing performance.

I don’t like it.

Don’t be there.

Please don’t come.

But I still felt pretty badly that I couldn’t go.

And that to me was an unfortunate situation where I couldn’t make a different choice.

I didn’t have the flexibility to do it.

And if I did, I would have made those changes and I would have showed up and I would have embarrassed him and I would have clapped my hands and got up and be like, oh, good job, yeah.

That’s what dads are supposed to do.

Yeah, it’s what I’m supposed to do.

But there was no kind of question that if you can’t make it, you know, okay, that’s understandable.

Eight o’clock, nine o’clock on a weekday, not the most convenient time for a performance.

But you do it and you figure out how to make that work.

And if you can, you do.

And like that to me is at its core, that’s what he decided to do.

And taking at face value what he was doing, that’s the core of his decision.

The bigger picture that I think we’re talking about, or at least the Ick factor that you may be feeling is that this was done by someone who is very publicly progressive in his point of view, in his style and in his music and his politics.

And this comes across as, hey, look, I’m a great dad and I’m making sacrifices for my kid.

Whereas it really should be, you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing if you have that type of flexibility in your professional life.

It’s not like he doesn’t have the ability to make these decisions, but the lack of empathy in the presentation, or even just his understanding of that level of privilege within his flexible lifestyle that he has earned and created and done all of these things.

But it’s not like it doesn’t have an impact on anyone else.

Yeah, the word sacrifice, I think, is what I keep coming back to when I’m thinking about this issue.

Because we were talking about at the beginning about work-life balance.

You’re always going to have to make some trade-offs in your schedule.

We’re always making decisions each day with how we spend our time.

You’re working at home, I’m working at home all the time, and our kid asks, can you play with me right now or can you do this thing for me right now?

And you’re working and you have that decision.

And there’s all those Instagram posts that say you got to always choose your kid in those moments because eventually those moments will go away.

But you also have to get your work done sometimes.

Sometimes the answer’s got to be no, just to keep things moving in your life and in your household and in your job.

But you’re always going to make a sacrifice and if you do choose to go play with your kid, that means the work’s not getting done, either it’s not getting done on time or it’s not getting done in the most optimal time for you to do it.

You got to do it later, you got to do it tomorrow.

You might have to let somebody down at work.

In Isbell’s case, the personal sacrifice doesn’t look like it’s that significant to him because people are still going to love his music.

This is just going to be a blip in his popularity, maybe or actually maybe it’s given him a bump in popularity probably because of the positive reception.

The sacrifices he’s putting it on the fans that have to change their schedules and shift their priorities around.

Many of whom may be parents who had to set up child care or miss something at the tail end or schedule around something.

I mean, they even moved from sometime in the spring until close to Thanksgiving.

That’s not a very convenient time for most people with families and obligations.

Abby and I have traveled to see concerts that required setting up child care for us.

It was leaving them with my parents, but we still had to do it.

We had to get on airplanes.

We had to pay for hotels.

And we did it as cheaply as we possibly could.

And so that meant doing non-refundable tickets and non-refundable hotels.

And if they changed it last minute, we would have been screwed.

We would have been out a bunch of money and probably wouldn’t have been able to go.

I got this Jason Isbell hat at a concert that I went to in Oklahoma City.

I don’t live in Oklahoma.

It was a long trip to go see this show.

Was it worth it?

Oh, yes, it was.

Jason Isbell and Turnpike Troubadours at a arena show in Oklahoma?

Aces.

But I would have been really pissed if he rescheduled.

I would have been.

I would have understood, but I still would have been pissed.

I understand where you’re coming from on that side.

The part where I am tripping up is, of course, he made this choice.

It’s the right choice.

Of course, it’s the right choice, but it still would be annoying if I had those tickets to go to see his show.

There’s just a lack of understanding that it’s impacting others.

The whole vibe seemed a little bit off, but he still did the right thing in my book.

It’s how it’s getting played, I think, that is the most problematic.

It kind of blows my mind that Scary Mom is like, oh, he did such a great job.

Wow, and he did what he was supposed to do.

Isn’t that what we want?

Low bar, yo, low bar.

Exactly.

So easy, guys.

I know you challenged me to, I can’t put myself in his shoes.

What would you do if you were the famous artist or our podcast really took off or something?

And it’s tough to speculate, but I have the great benefit and privilege right now as the at-home parent in my house, where I am around for lots and lots of things that my kids do.

And I had to make a sacrifice in my career to have this opportunity and to be there for my kids more often than not.

And so I think that’s one reason why when I’m thinking about the sacrifices, quote unquote sacrifices, that it kind of rings hollow to me.

Because I feel like I did sacrifice some things.

I made some tough decisions about my own career to be there for my kids.

But also because of that, me not being around is the exception rather than the rule.

And so I feel like on the flip side, we’re talking about self-care and making sure you’re doing things for yourself.

Because I’m around all the time, if I have to do something or I have to tell them no, I don’t think that’s going to negatively affect them too much because I’ve already established the baseline is, I’m there for you, they understand that, they understand that I love them, and that I care about their stuff.

And if I miss some things, I think that I can explain it, that you know what, the whole world doesn’t revolve around you.

I’m going to have my own, my things that are important also, they’re not more important than you.

But, they are still important and deserve their own time.

And I think that as the kids get older, there’s probably more flexibility in that than others.

There’s obviously a balancing act that is done in this, too.

You have to find the value for your kid, understanding what they most care about when you show up.

And I’m trying to figure that out with our youngest.

I coach his little league team, and sometimes he’s real happy I’m there, and most of the times he much prefer me not.

Understanding that, and then also still just showing up anyway, is, I think, a big part of it.

It’s an interesting question, right?

And especially for Isbell, right?

He was married to Amanda Shires when he had his daughter, and they are now divorced in a somewhat public manner.

His latest album does include some very pointed songs about their relationship and some less pointed allusions to the songs that were about their relationship and how they mean different things now.

It’s intense, and I think that it would be hard for a kid who has some general understanding of what it means that their parents are no longer together, and some general understanding that their parents are megastars, especially within the world in which they operate.

I think it could be very challenging for that child to balance these things.

Maybe it’s just that he is aware that this is a very particularly complicated time and he needs to show up.

I can’t get into the mind of Jason Isbell.

If I could, I’d write much better than I do now.

As I was saying, sometimes my kid doesn’t really love it when I’m there for his baseball games, and my oldest really didn’t want me at his singing performance.

But I think it’s also important as a parent to understand what your kids want, even if they’re not saying it.

I think there’s something in there that we perhaps can’t understand as we are not yet super famous individuals.

And at this point, we are both happily married to our children’s mother.

It’s perhaps something we just don’t even understand.

I guess there’s a question here of whether or not we just accept that he’s a father of a young kid, and he wants to show up for his daughter regardless of the business implications.

Or we just can’t separate those two things because there’s something bigger.

When you are a public figure, there’s expectations.

You’re making your money off of being a public figure.

You’re making your livelihood over being there and showing up and doing the shows.

That’s why it is so tough because I really feel like there is a responsibility as an entertainer like that where a lot of people are reliant on you.

A lot of people, they’re getting so much out of what you bring to the world that you have a responsibility to make those sacrifices, those personal sacrifices for your fans.

I was always a Laker fan growing up, but I was more of a Shaq guy than a Kobe guy for a long time.

Until later on, I heard a story that Kobe, when he was playing on the road in New York or Philadelphia or wherever, the Lakers would play at some of these places only one time all year.

He would play Hurt even though he could sit out a game and rest his injuries later in his career when he was getting older.

I think he told his wife that he was going to play Hurt because he knew that there was somebody in the arena that was counting on that day to watch him play.

That made me much more of a Kobe fan to hear something like that.

That he felt a responsibility as an entertainer and a performer to show up even when he wasn’t at his best and to be thinking about that person up in the 300 level of the arena that was counting on him to show up that day.

At the same time, it is cool that you have a story like Isbell’s story or Eric Church’s story where they are being public about that conflict so that we can talk about those things.

I’m sure there are also people, dads, that hear that news that, hey, this guy is being a good example of what it means to be a father who shows up even when it can be damaging to your reputation.

So I don’t know if there’s a real, a clean answer.

But I think that’s what the clean answer is, is that at this point in our lives, there’s no clear right or wrong for the most part.

There’s some pretty obvious rights or wrongs.

You shouldn’t kill somebody or steal their stuff.

But for the most part, there’s no immediate right answer.

Once you become an adult, there’s always going to be a negative or a con that is weighing against that decision.

You’re never 100 percent right or wrong.

There’s always a gray area.

And I think that’s what we’re pointing at here.

We only know what we know.

And our experience guides our understanding of these choices that other people are making.

And whenever you have a complicated or hard decision to make, there’s a reason for it.

It’s because there’s a good reason to do either thing.

And there may always be the opportunity to reschedule a concert, but there may not be an opportunity to go see your kids show.

But at the same time, a lot of things can change in six months.

There could be reasons why 50 percent of the crowd couldn’t show up.

It’s a hard thing to weigh.

There’s no clear right or wrong answer for these types of things.

There is just one that is more right and one that is less right.

And you have to figure that out on your own.

And I think that comes from all the things that we’ve touched on already, understanding your situation, understanding what your kids need, understanding what you need and how you can balance the guilt of not showing up versus doing your job.

And if your job is something like performing for thousands of people every night, yeah, show up.

Do your work.

But you also need to figure out that Tuesday and March is more important for you to be in a school auditorium watching a bunch of nine and ten year olds singing off key.

When you watch those nine and ten year olds sing off key, I think that at its core, he made the right choice.

And I don’t think that everyone else’s reaction is his problem.

It’s true.

Yeah, it’s very true.

So for this week’s Sound Check, we’re going to be sharing our favorite Jason Isbell songs.

I need to admit a few things before we get into this.

I am a very big Jason Isbell fan and have been since a long time ago.

I saw a PBS documentary called Nashville 2.0 in the early 2010s-ish time period, and he was singing Cover Me Up in a very cool loft space, looking very cool and Jason Isbell-y.

And I was like, dude, who is this guy?

I must know everything that he’s ever done, and did a wild deep dive, and was like, oh, drive-by truckers, I know their stuff, and it was over for me.

I am a huge Isbell fan.

So as a way to allow you to choose from the past, and to be able to do that, and to be able to do that, and to allow you to choose first, I will cede the floor to my friend who has been criticizing one of my favorite artists.

Um, I joke.

So that’s the reason you’re so shocked and perhaps appalled that my reaction was not glowing with praise for your hero, Jason Isbell.

I do like his stuff, though.

So I would say that I’m also a fan.

He makes some great stuff.

I’m not a super fan like you.

I have a confession to make, Donnie.

I learned about Cover Me Up from another artist who will not be named, okay?

His version is not better.

It’s not better, but that’s the first time I heard it, I’ll be honest with you.

But then I took a little deeper dive.

It goes to your original, the original changed my mind.

The rising bros bring all ships up or something like that?

The rising tide of bros raise all the boats, including Jason Isbell.

I am again shocked that you are able to say that.

If not for the artists who will not be named.

People are discovering Jason Isbell because of Cover Me Up.

So I was going to choose that song because for my middle son, my go-to lullaby was Cover Me Up.

It was Isbell’s version.

That’s what was going through my head when I was singing it to him, I promise.

And when I’ve heard it live at the Palomino Festival, you were there somewhere, we didn’t know each other.

I actually cried when I heard the song live for the first time because it made me think about the countless nights with my son rocking him to sleep.

But I’ll pick another one.

My go-to for my youngest son, which is going on right now, is Speed Trap Town.

Very vivid images.

It’s easy and very soothing to sing.

And the themes of loneliness and loss and hope for new beginnings are exactly what I want my infant son to hear as he’s laying his head down to go to sleep.

I love nice, sad, challenging, borderline, disturbing lullabies for my kids to hear.

And I have three boys, so a lot of the images of a boy in his hometown and realizing there’s nothing left for him there, it makes me think about my own sons and how they’re going to think about their hometown here in LA.

And when I’m looking down at him and his eyes as I’m rocking him to sleep, wondering whether he understands any of these sad words I’m saying to him, I do think about his future and the song kind of helps me do that.

In a similar vein, my favorite Isbell song is a lullaby that I sang to both of my kids.

And it’s Live Oak because nothing says, go to sleep my lovely young baby boy, like a murder ballad.

And so, Live Oak is probably one of the most beautifully structured Isbell songs.

It’s highly poetic.

There are turns of phrases that shouldn’t work within it.

And after you sing them a million times, you get to understand why they’re there in their clunkiness next to phrases that roll so beautifully together.

It’s just such a great lyrical and melody structure.

They’re soothing, like many great murder ballads are.

They’re intentional like that, right?

The entire point is that it’s telling this horrific story and giving some context of why it’s horrific.

Some of the more awful murder ballads really are like, hey, I lured this girl into the woods and beat her with a stick.

That’s not this one.

So that’s not what I’m singing to my kids, but it’s one of these songs that I have wanted to hear live forever.

And I saw Isbell at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass before my oldest was born.

My wife was pregnant with our oldest at that event, so that was in 2014.

And I have seen shows in California and Oklahoma and yeah, those two states, but those are big states.

And I’ve seen more than one show in each of those places, and he’s never played it.

And one show that we were supposed to go to here in LA before we moved to Los Angeles, he was playing the Disney Concert Hall solo.

I never looked up the playlist until I recently wrote about this because I didn’t want to know.

We didn’t go because there was pneumonia in the house.

And so we couldn’t leave the kid and couldn’t go down, couldn’t get on the airplane and have the night to go.

And so I looked it up and played Live Oak and I didn’t get to hear it.

He’s playing another couple of these type of shows around the Western United States.

And I was like, maybe we should go.

And I looked up tickets and they were like, 400 bucks a pop.

And I said, you know what?

I’ve seen Isbell more than six times.

I think I’m good.

But I’d love to hear this song live in part for the same reasons why I’d like to hear it from him, from the person who created this storyline.

I want to hear it in the way that I got to sing it.

I want to hear how my oldest would call for the song.

He called the song, The Man.

He said, will you sing The Man?

Because that’s the first.

There’s a man who walks beside me, he is who I used to be.

And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him.

It’s these little things that you never know how they’re going to hit.

And the older one, it took him a while to get what’s going on, and I don’t know if he totally understands that it’s a murder ballad, and the little one likes it, too.

But I’m pretty sure he understands it, and that’s a little scary, because I fear for my life sometimes with him.

It’s a great song, though.

So beautiful.

Well, I hope someday he’s able to make that happen for you, so that you can hear it live, Donnie.

Yeah.

Spared no expense.

At this point, 800 bucks to see a guy I’ve seen eight times is probably a little bit high on the value, the value to cost spectrum.

So the next segment is a recurring segment that we like to call Change My Mind.

In a world where flexibility and opinion is seen as a weakness, we want to model good behavior to our kids and listeners as we respectfully and humorously try to change each other’s mind about pressing issues of country music, fatherhood, and other nonsense.

And this week, again, Donnie, I’m really counting on you to change my mind about this one.

It’s about cowboy hats.

Oh boy.

Because I really want to wear a cowboy hat, but I don’t think I can pull it off.

And I’ve thought about going shopping for it.

I’m just too self-conscious.

So Donnie, I don’t think I can pull off a cowboy hat because I’m not a cowboy.

Change my mind.

Oh Dave, I would be happy to.

Like I’ve come to the right place.

Yes.

Let me get my hat on.

So here’s the thing.

I too felt the same way for a very long time.

And part of it had to do with who I am, where I’m from, and what that means.

But I very much believe that the cowboy hat is a staple of American style.

It doesn’t just belong to cowboys.

It belongs to the American West.

It belongs to the American idea of the West.

And it belongs to anybody who really wants to wear one.

Frankly, they’re really great hats and they’re a lot of fun to wear.

And I think that there is a swagger that comes with this thing.

You wear a hat like this around, people are gonna look at you.

Are they gonna think you look like a fool?

It’s possible.

But I honestly don’t care when I’m wearing this hat.

It’s a pretty cool piece of iconography.

And I really like wearing it for that reason.

I also think it looks pretty cool on me.

So, you know, hey, there you go.

It does look great.

It’s a good hat.

It’s a great hat.

And shout out to my mom.

She pressured me to get this hat.

She said, you’re getting a Stetson.

You’re getting one.

We’re gonna go get a nice Stetson.

We’re gonna get one for your birthday a few years ago.

And I got it.

And I didn’t want it.

I really didn’t.

I was not on board because I felt like it shouldn’t be for me.

I don’t need to wear a cowboy hat to be a Country Music fan.

I don’t need to wear a cowboy hat to go to shows.

I don’t need a cowboy hat to go to rodeos if I’m going to those.

I just don’t.

But boy, now that I have one, I love it.

And I love wearing it because it’s very cool.

They belong to the larger kind of fashion and cultural experience that exists in American culture, in large part because of the importance of this mythical concept of the cowboy.

We use the term cowboy as an adjective.

We use it as a noun.

And sometimes you use it as a verb.

It’s such a useful concept in American culture that the hat, I think, fits into that the same way.

And I think part of my fear, and I wouldn’t want to speak for you, but I don’t want it to seem like a costume.

I wear it to get dressed up.

I dress up when I wear my cowboy hat.

And I dress up for events.

And I dress nicely.

Or I wear it with other Western wear.

But I don’t wear it as a costume.

And I think that’s a legitimate fear.

There are times where I will go to parties or events or galas or things like that, where it’s cowboy themed or whatever.

And I’m wearing the real stuff.

And then other people will come in wearing jeans and lace up boots and a straw hat they got at the 99-cent store.

And that to me is almost disrespectful of the culture and the experience.

But that’s their expression.

It’s not mine.

And I understand it differently than they do.

But I think that people who are thinking this way about it, I don’t feel like I should wear a cowboy hat because it’s not mine.

You’re not going to be in that party.

You’re not going to be in that group of people who are wearing it for costume or just or anything else.

It’s such a cool thing, man.

Like, how often do you get to feel like just a total badass?

I mean, like, that’s just what this does.

It’s such a cool hat.

And it’s a cool part of American culture that we all, it belongs to everybody.

And whenever anybody puts on a cowboy hat, they look cool, unless it doesn’t fit.

And that’s a whole different story.

You go and you get a real hat.

It’s an investment.

You take good care of it.

You keep it in your box.

You brush it off.

You make sure your buckles are clean.

You add a nice little feather here or there, and you just take good care of your hat.

And it’s going to last forever.

There’s not many things in culture and fashion that are going to do that.

And this hat, and so many of them, like the great ones out there that are available to you, they’re an investment in how you want to feel.

And I don’t buy into that you dress the part, but I do buy into that you dress well and you feel good when you go out.

So I believe, Dave, you should get yourself a nice cowboy hat.

And I think we should go together and get you a cowboy hat sometime soon, because we might need to get you a straw hat for the summer.

We might need to get you a nice felt one for the winter.

Unlike me, you have a beautiful head of hair to keep your head warm, but frame it with a cowboy hat and it would look great.

I think you could do it.

Thank you, Donnie.

I appreciate the encouragement.

And I would like to make that happen.

I think that would be a lot of fun.

When you’re saying that when you wear a cowboy hat, people look at you as an introvert.

That kind of makes me nervous, but I’m getting used to it.

I want to give it a shot.

Especially with that mustache.

I know.

See, I’m already changing my look in many ways that cause people to look at me.

So the mustache is just a way to train myself for my future cowboy hats.

So yeah, we should do it.

Yep.

I’m glad that we were able to change your mind on this one.

I don’t think it was that big of a push.

I think you just were nervous.

And we’ll get you over that hump, and we’ll get you a nice hat.

I just want to play back this section of the podcast over and over again until I feel brave enough to go make it happen.

Well, we’re going to make it happen.

You’re wearing a cowboy hat.

It’s going to happen.

Perhaps not inside because it’s quite warm.

Cool off.

Cooling off.

Thank you all for listening.

The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use.

If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter.

It’s available at countrymusictads.substack.com.

You can find everything we do on our website, countrymusictads.com.

And we’d love to hear what you think.

So send us some comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram at countrymusictads or via email at countrymusictads.gmail.com.

Stay tuned for our next episode when we speak with Ted Russell Camp, a country music dad and one of the founders of the alt-country movement.

Very excited to talk to Ted.

So until next time, whether you’re at the dance hall, the playground or the school yard, we’re just folding some laundry again and again and again.

Thanks for tuning in.

We’ll talk to you soon.