https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/ [login to see] /jason-isbell-weathervanes-profile
Luck favors the prepared, as they say, and young Jason Isbell was ready. He had honed his skills as a songwriter and guitar player since he started playing the mandolin back when his hands were too small to wrap around a guitar neck. He would sit alone in his bedroom for days on end, isolated and insulated from his parents' arguing, tearing through the classics. Playing local bars before he was even a teenager, and the Grand Ole Opry by 16, he went off to college but, famously, never completed his degree for want of a single required health studies class. By his early 20s, he returned to his home in the Shoals of Alabama, an obscure corner of the country that produced some of the greatest R&B in the universe, where he found work writing for FAME Studios.