You are Jason Isbell, and you are on a brutal tour with your band, the Drive By Truckers, touring their latest record, "A Blessing and a Curse." During this tour, the fighting with your wife, who also happens to be the bassist, has grown so intense that it threatens the very existence of the Drive By Truckers.

You leave the group after this tour, separate from your wife whom you later divorce, and the band goes on to record their best album, "Brighter than Creation's Dark." No longer playing huge shows, the shows with your current band, The 400 Unit, play to audiences a fraction of the size of your old band. So you head back home, to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, home of the famous studio, the sound of which has shaped you musically more than the imagined propensity for drink in your family.

You enlist various musicians ready to play your masterpiece. And you've got more than enough emotional material to start, and now the question is how to frame all that it is that you have to say.

You could directly confront the issue, forcing each critic to draw parallels between your lyrics and the disparate heartbreak found in your previous marriage, or you could instead bury your pain in the subterfuge of your songs, and maybe find a character that can bear the brunt of your disappointment, maybe in a soldier, who is still fighting a stinging war in Iraq.

Isbell does a little bit of both on this record, and the first time I listened to this record, the first song that really hit home for me was "This is the last song I will ever write," which is the track that closes the record. So I know, it's kind of like walking into a movie early and catching the end before it has a chance to really start, but the song did such a good job of announcing itself, the way the lyrics faded out, and into the freewheeling piano-guitar-bass-drum blues tribute that flies in afterwards. The narrator is a solider who is just about to breathe his last breath in combat. He could be a soldier serving in Iraq under the last days of George W. Bush, or he could be someone who is already dead. But its the breakdown in the song where the records pulls back and reveals its teeth, that blast of sound after we hear the last words from the narrator, the explosion where all the pistons in this 400 Unit really nail the emotional center of the song, and capture all of its melodic glory that is the soldier's last gasp struggle to hold on, to show the weight in the thrashes of a soldier's last breath.

It's a truly intimate moment because it feels like you trapped in a room with the band, which are hell-bent on staying true right through to the bitter end of the song.

As soon as I heard this song I knew that Isbell had really raised the bar on his music, and after "The Last Song I'll Ever Write" he has now grown in my mind from accomplished singer-songwriter to accomplished bandleader, and where his last record felt a little too stitched together, and sounded like separate set pieces, this one sounds like the complete movie.

Through these songs, Isbell and his 400 unit are able to grab the listener by the lapels of their denim jacket and even though the songs might be soaked in whiskey, they are just as heartbreakingly real as they are direct, offering up music that hits right to the heart, it's a drunken buddy being honest with you for the first time in years.

Isbell's not trying to reinvent rock and roll here, he's just trying to tell a story and make us feel what the characters been through, and no matter who the narrator is, he comes across as pure Isbell through and through.

"Soldiers Get Strange" is another favorite, and this one is again told from the perspective of a soldier, but this time the situation seems like it could have come straight from Isbell's sour mash life, "She tells you she wears your ring," He sings, "After a couple of drinks she's a little bit scared of you."

It could be a soldier trying to re-adjust to life, "to towing the civilian line, but their all scared of you." But it's easy to see the parallels in the armed forces and being on tour, and if touring to a musician is a battle every night, then what do they do when they come home and have to come back down from the lights and the cheers and the crowds? They have to get used to the silence.

"Its not the time that made it go south, Its not the liquor that burns in your mouth, its not that her figure has changed, Its just that soldiers get strange."

There are moments all over this record, moments where the righteous anger of Isbell's voice matches the ferocity of his band, on tracks like "Good", where he, sounding more like himself than on any other track, laments that he will always be a bad person, that his fate is sealed.

"I can't make myself do right, on a Friday night," he sings "With all of these shadows they get bigger, and bigger in the light" and in so doing makes an almost an direct reference to his own past, how in the swarm of all of this celebrations and revelry, he still feels paralyzed by the loss, like "petrified old wood."

There's a ray of hope through all of this desert dust, heat, whiskey and mortality, in the form of "However Long" that holds onto the light with a rousing chorus, while the stop on a dime percussion provided by way of double duty producer/ drummer Matt Pence (Pence, who produced the record, also plays in seminal Denton, Texas act Centromatic) drives the needle into the shot in the arm of the chorus, with lines that propel the track into the sweet kick that it delivers. "However long the night the dawn will break again." And after the pervasive sense of loss on the record, it's nice to know that some of this homespun wisdom isn't fatal.

Recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and at the same studio where many of the classic soul records were made, many by Patterson Hood's father, many by various members of Isbell's family. Music to Isbell runs as deep as the blood in his veins, as deep as religion, and that deep conviction can be felt all the way through "Coda", a fine two minute instrumental track with the whole band playing the melody they will go on to repeat on "Last song I will ever write."

"The Blues" is a straight up RnB number, and Isbell's ragged whiskey growl is perfectly matched by the swing the band deploys here. The melody might be disarmingly cute, but the lyrics cut right to the bone. The song is about what the blues does to us who choose to live it, and it's Isbell pulling out his emotional scars out with a bittersweet twang, and its surprisingly light in it's composition, with an up tempo swing that's really delightful.

The traditional R&B sound carries on in "No Choice in the Matter", replete with horns, whiskey soaked piano, and that great Isbell moan, lean close enough and you'd swear it was recorded in 1962.

At this point in Isbell's career, he has just produced a record that cements his status as a bandleader in full command of his musical powers. He has shown, at thirty years old, that he is a mature artist capable of employing a variety of styles in order to get the characters in his songs to really ring out. It's a record you'll play and play until the record's arc comes clear - from the homespun childhood reverie of "Seven Mile Island" to the last breath of a veteran in "The Last Song I Will Write" - Isbell and his 400 unit have released a solid collection that's full of heart, guts, heartbreak and regret, a work that cements his reputation as a bandleader while creating a truly riveting break-up-and-recovery record.