Rare example of sobriety and marriage causing great country music... Jason Isbell appears on the cover of Southeastern in a black-and-white, head-and-shoulders portrait, bearing the expression a man might when posing for a passport photo or a mugshot, or staring into the mirror of a hungover morning, wondering what he’s doing with himself. Whether or not this stark design was an artistic or budgetary consideration, it suits the album. Southeastern is in part about running away and getting into trouble, but mostly about figuring out where you want to be – and, more crucially, who you’d rather be with. The plaintive mid-paced ballad “Travelling Alone” is representative. The song is a creditable addition to the canon of lonely musicians’ laments, and/but the violin and backing vocals lending sunny counterpoint to the itinerant strummer’s angst are provided by Amanda Shires, as of this past February Mrs Jason Isbell. Southeastern is about many things, but it’s mostly, implicitly or explicitly, about her. Isbell’s previous album, 2011’s Here We Rest, was also a fretful rumination on homecoming, but the destination was Isbell’s native Alabama. Southeastern is a realisation that home is where the heart is; the albums would make more sense if they switched titles. Southeastern is not, however, a cloying collage of puppies and moonbeams. Isbell, to his evident amazement, is a contented man now, but it hasn’t always been that way; he was in rehab as recently as early 2012. Southeastern doesn’t flinch from the darkness, like Isbell wants a record of how bad it got, to remind himself not to go there again. Southeastern began as a solo acoustic album to be produced by Ryan Adams. It didn’t work out that way – it’s instead produced by Dave Cobb, whose credits include Shooter Jennings and The Secret Sisters – and it’s difficult to imagine how it would have. Though Isbell’s voice, at once husky and keening, grows ever more confident, and his signature lyrical backhanders and payoffs are honed ever sharper, both suit a more complex backdrop. Besides which, it would have been a shame to lose “Super 8”, a rollicking sequel/companion to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps”, foggily recalling an unruly aftershow party (“They slapped me back to life/And they telephoned my wife/And they filled me full of Pedialyte”). On most of Southeastern, the jinks occur at the lower end of the scale. Isbell can’t help measuring his new life against his old one, and wondering which is the real him. The sparse murder ballad “Live Oak”, suggestive of a Warren Zevon demo, wonders “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 with me”. The pretty, Paul Kelly-ish “Different Days” has the narrator’s father reminding him “The right thing’s always the hardest thing to do” (not the first time Isbell has quoted the old man’s wisdom – the line could be an out-take from “Outfit”, the high point of Isbell’s contributions to Drive-By Truckers). “Stockholm” and “New South Wales” are homesick postcards, the latter briskly uncomplimentary of the local stimulants (“The piss they call tequila/Even Waylon wouldn’t drink.”) All of which is bookended by two beautiful love songs, each the more powerful for their deadpan gruffness. Opening track “Cover Me Up”, which has something of Richard Thompson about it, crests on the entreaty “Girl leave your boots by the bed/We ain’t leaving this room/Till someone needs medical help/Or the magnolias bloom”. The closer, “Relatively Easy”, finds the courage to make a difficult acknowledgement in the context of country and/or rock’n’roll, both genres defined by a fixation with absolutes: that pretty good is actually really good (“Here with you there’s always something to look forward to/My angry heart beats relatively easy”). “Southeastern” is Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love or Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks with a happy ending, and it isn’t much shadowed by either comparison. It’s Isbell’s best album yet, and suggests that he’ll do better still. Andrew Mueller Q&A A lot of Here We Rest was about coming home to somewhere. A lot of Southeastern seems to be about coming home to someone. Is that a fair analysis? Sounds fair to me. Someone that sometimes might be a lover and sometimes might be yourself or your upbringing. Why is this a solo album rather than a 400 Unit album? I started out with the intention of making a solo acoustic album, but that got boring, so we called some folks in to play. Jimbo Hart wasn’t available. There could never be a 400 Unit album without Jimbo. You inhabit different characters on the album, but they’re all seeking and/or finding some sort of redemption. To what extent can they be read as once-removed autobiographies? Isn’t most fiction once-removed autobiography? That’s the beauty of writing songs rather than books: They aren’t filed based on what’s true and what’s fiction. Is the cocaine and tequila in New South Wales really that bad? Yes. Yes it is. The farther you get from Latin America, the worse those things tend to be. INTERVIEW: ANDREW MUELLER

Another night at the opera, with demos and live versions... Another year, another ‘remaster’. Techies may claim otherwise, but one suspects the best way to listen to The Who's ‘rock opera’ is still via the primal technology of unscratched vinyl and a decent valve amplifier. For those hungering to hear Pete Townshend’s tale of the deaf, dumb and blind kid turned guru in 5:1 surround sound, however, here’s the ‘super deluxe’ version at an eye-watering £80, which also buys you 20 unreleased demos from Pete’s vaults, a 1969 concert performance (dubbed ‘bootleg’ though garnered from an official recording), a 20,000 word book by chronicler Richard Barnes and a repro poster. The deluxe edition delivers just the original and concert versions at a more manageable £14. The sonics of Tommy have always been a singular case in The Who’s catalogue, eschewing the bright pop sound of their early work without embracing the heavy rock dynamics that were already the norm on stage and which followed on Who’s Next. Instead came what Townshend called “deliberate blandness”, with Roger Daltrey’s vocals foregrounded over Townshends’s layered acoustic guitars, a modest input of power chords and Keith Moon’s hyper-active drumming set back in a production Moon found “very un-Who like”. Richard Barnes’ account of the album’s creation reveals that manager/producer Kit Lambert, in a hurry to get to Egypt, left the mix to engineer Damon Lyon-Shaw, albeit with detailed instructions. The band’s fear was that Lambert was planning orchestral overdubs; instead, he simply wanted Tommy to sound uncluttered. The concert version (mostly from a single Canadian show late in 1969) prove Lambert’s ideas were right. The performances have their moments – Daltrey is mostly outstanding – but Tommy live is a very different animal, with Townshend’s guitar, often turned up to eleven, weighing heavily on the songs’ drama. No shortage of power chords here – check the noisy “Amazing Journey” – or of Moon’s kit-thrashing. There’s no “Underture” and the piece emerges, inevitably, more rock than opera. The demos are another matter. Firstly they show just how meticulously the 20 year old Townshend planned Tommy, at least musically. There are few surprises compared to the finished album; Pete’s reedy pipes replace Roger’s gutsy holler, but the musical parts are all in place, though often played on shonky piano rather than guitar. Lyon-Shaw describes recording proceeding with a minimum of fuss. “The band would listen in the control room, talk over what was required, and then go to into the studio and re-interpret the demos. It was usually quite spontaneous. Very few bands could grasp what was played on demos and re-interpret the ideas into a finished product." The demos’ notable departures include a substantial amount of reverse guitar on “Amazing Journey” – the genesis of the entire opera according to Townshend – and on something called “Dream One”, an instrumental psych ramble studded with feedback and whoopee whistle. Ah, the joys of a home studio. Also included among the demos is a band version of Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues”, a song that clearly wouldn’t leave Townshend alone, and which he hoped to include on Tommy alongside Allison’s “Eyesight to the Blind” (which became “The Hawker”). At under three minutes it’s a more concise and appealing take of the number than the pumped-up version on Live At Leeds, though still with Townshend’s guitar at its gnarliest. A find. The mini-book by Barnes, a friend from Townshend’s art school days, proves exhaustive and occasionally exhausting. It’s richly illustrated, prominent among the exhibits being the notebooks and envelopes on which Townshend planned ideas and jotted songs (a gloriously tatty “Pinball Wizard” among them). Tommy’s evolution from vibes-tuned autistic kid to pinball-playing guru was circuitous, receiving a vital shove from writer Nic Cohn, who judged what he heard “po-faced” and suggested the pinball motif. The ideas of Townshend’s adopted guru, Meher Baba, were always central, though fellow follower Mike McInnerney, who designed the artwork, rejects any idea of proselytising. “We’re not the Mormons!” he snorts. The opera’s plot, which bassist John Entwhistle claimed he “never understood before I saw the film”, remains unconvincing, but the spine of great songs on which Tommy is built – “Acid Queen”, “Sensation”, “I’m Free”, “Amazing Journey” among them – along with the catchy bridges and bravura playing, overcome its problems. “People who couldn’t get into the spiritual end of it could see it as a huge cartoon strip,” judged Townshend. Tired of playing crowd pleaser “Magic Bus” (“a nonsense number”), his opus renewed him. “With Tommy in our back pocket I felt I was riding two horses at once: a clod-hopping pantomime version on one hand, and a winged unicorn leading the heavenly host on the other.” Pete’s unicorn flew true. Tommy remains magnificent, the best (pace Arthur, Quadrophenia, Ziggy) of rock’s erratic operatic turns. Neil Spencer

Newly remastered and still astonishing... An album has approximately the same relationship to where it was made as a crime does to its scene – this one more than most. Not that you’d perceive that from the jaunty 2010 real estate listing that described 4295 Ensenada Drive, Woodland Hills California as “a charming Girard cabin with a famous rock ‘n’ roll history.” In the legend of Captain Beefheart, this is a location not noted for its charm: this was the site of the nine month regime of harsh discipline, welfare cheese and psychological warfare that ultimately gave rise to Trout Mask Replica. Time has a way of gentrifying even the most edgy location, but 44 years after its release, after its admission to the USA’s National Recording Registry; even after all those recommendations from Matt Groening, the Simpsons guy,Trout Mask refuses to become a domestic animal. It has aged, but it hasn’t mellowed. Unfairly to the music, it is a hip barometer; a gauntlet thrown down, daring you take up its challenge. Tom Waits, a fan, recently described it as like “a glimpse into the future; like curatives, recipes for ancient oils.” Even Elliott Ingber, a Magic Band guitarist and very out-there human was floored by it: “After you put it on,” he said to me last year, “everything was shambles.” As if to confirm its under-the-radar quality, this new version (deriving not from the Warners-held original multitracks, but remastered by Bob Ludwig from “safety tapes” from the archive of album producer Frank Zappa) came out with no advance publicity in May. (You mean you didn’t sense it was coming?) Some may even question how a record so inextricably linked to the rawness of the environment which gave rise to it can possibly benefit from such sonic buffing. In fact, this remaster re-affirms the value in the kind of repeated, attentive listening which Trout Mask Replica (a record that abuts beat poetry to musing on the holocaust, to field recordings, unschooled jazz and, occasionally, swinging psychedelic rock) has required since its release. Zappa originally intended to capture the fraught intensity in the “Trout House” and record in situ. Beefheart, thinking his old friend was attempting to save money, refused, insisting on a studio production. Trout Mask Replica lost nothing for that. A record of disorientating pace and abrasiveness, the teeming “Frownland” begins a 78 minute outpouring of chaotic-seeming but meticulously-planned composition. It is a record of disorientating juxtaposition and violent collage. One track (“Pena”) is actually a recording of the Mothers Of Invention. Others (“Hair Pie, Bake 1”, “China Pig”) are indeed field recordings from the house. For all his avowed rehearsal brutality, Beefheart himself busts out of the confinement of the blues and r’n’b idiom with a winning charm. His vision is surreal (“Fast and bulbous!”) and devastatingly lyrical (“the black paper between a mirror breaks my heart…”). Taken all at once, it’s a journey into a thorny, hugely varied, but irresistible landscape – once you have noted the dangers, you can begin to observe the beauty. Trout Mask Replica does still contain beauty, and the job that Bob Ludwig has done has been to create mastering that suggests and reveals it, rather than insists on pointing it out. This is not often a question of increased volume (but when it is, as on the a capella “The Dust Blows Forward And The Dust Blows Back”, it is so we hear more clearly the huffing and puffing of the Captain declaiming live to tape). Though subtle, the new sound suggests a greater crispness in the level of detail in songs like “Pachuco Cadaver” or “Sweet Sweet Bulbs”. The latter, a stealth classic of the record, is a song of massive groove and here we can hear freshly-articulated the depth of immersion in classic r ‘n’ b playing in the interactions between the Magic Band’s two 20 year old guitarists Jeff Cotton (“Antenna Jimmy Semens”) and Bill Harkleroad (“Zoot Horn Rollo”). On the likes of “Bill’s Corpse”, it seems that the refit has subtly adjusted the Captain’s disproportionate volume in relation to his band. After all, as befits an album where he didn’t so much lead the band as dictate to it, Beefheart’s vocals were recorded in presidential isolation, then dropped later on top of the extant music. The band, meanwhile – berated by Beefheart and then schooled in their parts by drummer John French (“Drumbo”) were told by Zappa that to record their double album, they had just six hours. They did it in four – a testament to the musical accomplishment that The Magic Band for all they endured, brought to Beefheart’s vision. Still, as arduous and unforgiveable as the process of making the record must have been, all Magic Band’s pains and psychological torments, were not quite in vain. If they can never get over Trout Mask Replica, it’s worth noting that nobody else will, either. John Robinson Q&A JOE TRAVERS “VAULTMEISTER” of ZAPPA RECORDS Is Trout Mask a project you’ve wanted to realize for a while? Trout Mask was not really ever a priority for me, simply because the opportunity seemed so far out of reach due to the master tapes being owned by a different company. In 2012, that situation changed. As soon as we got the tapes, we transferred them only to find that it had suffered over the years from age and many plays. So, the restoration had to be put in full swing. What, to your ears, has Bob Ludwig achieved? Because we had to generate new masters from safety elements from the Vault, Bob had better sounding sources to use for the current remaster. Almost all of the entire record is remastered from an alternate source than the main master tape that has been used so many times in the past. Bob is very musical and we have a great understanding about the fine line between loudness war brickwall-type mastering and dynamic audiophile-type mastering. Bob achieved that with the new Beefheart master, keeping the integrity of the original mixes and presenting them in a modern way, maintaining a rich, full sound yet not overblowing it! Are there any other Zappa/Beefheart treasures awaiting? Absolutely. Someday there will be a fabulous compilation of stuff found in the vault that contain various nuggets of things from all eras of FZ & Beefhearts' time together. From the Cucamonga days, up until the Bongo Fury era. INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON