Jason Isbell keeps working his songwriting craft

Jason Isbell opened his set at the Newport Folk Festival last weekend with "Cover Me Up," lead track from Southeastern, the sharply focused, strongest solo album to date by the former Drive-By Truckers guitarist and songwriter.

Isbell, who plays the World Cafe Live on Wednesday (with Amanda Shires opening), sang, "I sobered up and I swore off that stuff/ Forever, this time." The crowd, gathered to see the 34-year-old Alabaman, who quit drinking a year and a half ago, burst into applause.

"People always cheer for that line, at every show," said the singer, talking on the phone from his Rhode Island hotel room. He'd just finished his five gigs at the weekend-long fest. "It's great. I think people get angry at artists that they appreciate when they don't take care of themselves and wind up not making music after they're 27 because they're either irrelevant or dead. I know I get [ticked] off at people like Kurt Cobain or Hendrix. I think people are happy when someone gets their [stuff] straightened out."

And make no mistake, Isbell has his affairs in order. At the instigation of Shires, his then-girlfriend, now-wife (her solo album Down Fell the Doves comes out Tuesday), he went into rehab in the winter of 2012. "It was a serious problem for me, and if I call it something else, it might come back. The thing is, you never know how close you are to death. You never know."

Straightened out, he wrote the 12 songs on the alternately intimate and rocked-out Southeastern. The album is full of rich, psychologically complex narratives. Tracks such as "Live Oak" are as powerfully evocative as stories by favorite Isbell writers like Denis Johnson and Peter Matthiessen, who are thanked on the liner notes.

The album kicks off with the quietly gripping "Cover Me Up," a tune partially inspired by "Cover Me," by the late, unjustifiably obscure Alabama songwriter Eddie Hinton. While at Newport, Isbell performed a set before a screening of the music documentary Muscle Shoals, about all the great music recorded in his hometown in the 1960s and 1970s. About the film, he said, "I wished they talked a little about Eddie Hinton. Other than that, I thought it was great."

Southeastern is certainly Isbell's most personal record. He says, however, that before cleaning himself up, "I don't think I was running from anything on purpose. Probably to a fault I tend to write about what's going on in my life. Some people don't appreciate that. I wrote 'Goddamn Lonely Love' when I was supposedly happily married" to his first wife, Drive-By Trucker bassist Shonna Tucker.

"I was always trying to be personal and open with the audience. But the story has just got a lot more interesting. I think it's a lot easier for me to do the work that I want to do now. I feel more connected to the good things in the world. I feel like I'm on the right wave."

He's not worried that newfound sobriety and marital bliss will get in the way of his muse.

"I was talking to Amanda about that last night, about how happy we are," he says. "And she said, 'How the hell am I going to write songs now?' I said, 'You don't have to be a sad person to write good songs. There are so many stories out there to tell. 'Decoration Day,' 'Dress Blues' - those are not my story, but they're some of the songs I've written that affect people the most. Because I think the characters are well written and well constructed and they behave very naturally.

"You have to get outside yourself and concentrate on small stories. You have to keep the craft exercised."