Danko/Manuel

Jason Isbell was twenty-five when he wrote “Danko/Manuel” — an elegy for The Band’s Rick Danko and Richard Manuel that became, in the writing, a self-portrait of a young musician terrified that he was becoming what he was mourning. The song arrived on the Drive-By Truckers’ The Dirty South, the album that established Isbell as the most gifted songwriter in Southern rock, and it remains the most quietly devastating thing he’s ever written.

Rick Danko died of drug and alcohol-related heart failure in 1999. Richard Manuel had hanged himself in 1986. Both were deeply talented musicians who had become casualties of the same compulsions that Isbell was already recognizing in himself at twenty-five. The song doesn’t announce this connection. It inhabits it.

“They say Danko would have sounded just like me / Is that the man I want to be?”

The question is genuine, not rhetorical. Isbell was drinking heavily when he wrote this; he got sober years later. The horn parts that give the song its particular sound — Isbell reported they came to him in a dream — have the quality of memory: warm, slightly muffled, reaching across a distance. The arrangement is simple enough to stay out of the lyric’s way.

Critics called it “a work of astonishing simplicity and undeniable beauty” when it appeared. At twenty-five, Isbell had already learned the hardest thing about songwriting: that the most devastating songs are the ones where the songwriter doesn’t protect themselves from what they’re saying.

Isbell eventually got sober. He became one of the finest songwriters of his generation. He has never written anything that cuts as close to the bone as this did when he was young and scared and drinking and writing about men who didn’t make it.