Jason Isbell Is Alone Again, Preternaturally, on a Superb Solo Acoustic Tour: Concert Review

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “I’ve grown tired of traveling alone,” Jason Isbell once sang, in a number that remains a favorite for fans in a lonesome mood.

But that’s one of his old songs that means something different today. He’s traveling alone and loving it, at least in the sense that he is hitting the road as a solo artist for a first-time national acoustic tour, reflecting the formal aloneness of his just-released album “Foxes in the Snow.” Or maybe the reflection goes the other way: Isbell has suggested that he was booking the tour dates first last year and the idea of recording a full record with no band was an outgrowth of that impulse.

Whichever came first, the chicken or the egg, the album and tour arriving in tandem are making for a terrific chicken-omelette dinner.

Playing a mid-tour show at Oakland’s Calvin Simmons Theatre (a juke joint as high-class as L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, where he also played this weekend), Isbell mentioned how he is coincidentally sharing a circuit with some musician friends right now, even if they, too, are more or less traveling alone. “I appreciate you guys not going to Sacramento to see Dave and Gil this evening, because I know that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are basically at the same places that I’m at on this tour,” he told the Oakland crowd. “We’re going back and forth.