Elvis Perkins is so full of articulated doubt in our interview that I ask him a blunt question: Does he like being a songwriter, musician, and bandleader? Because it seems like a miserable existence for him.

"Is that how it sounds?" he replied.

As part of the three-headed songwriting monster of the Drive-by Truckers, Jason Isbell was overshadowed by Patterson Hood's grim, vivid, and vernacular Southern tales sung with an inimitable, scorched voice that could become a haunting howl.

That says more about Hood than Isbell, though. Isbell wrote some the Truckers' prettiest music, but the band has never been much about pretty. Its three-guitar attack and working-class outrage meant that Isbell's songwriting and singing contributions to Decoration Day, The Dirty South, and A Blessing & a Curse got largely lost. And the truth is that his vocals are probably better suited to the Eagles than the Truckers.

When Isbell in 2007 split from the band (by all accounts amicably), it freed his songs from the Southern-rock context and gave them the space to be appreciated on their own. And following a 2007 solo debut mostly recorded with his Drive-by Truckers bandmates, the new Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - released in February - represents a clean break.

Photos by Chris Jones. Click on a photo for a larger version.

Railroad Earth mandolin player John Skehan notes that most recording studios are set up so that even when musicians are isolated from each other in separate rooms, they can see each other.

But when the New Jersey-based bluegrass/jam band convened in a three-century-old farmhouse owned by Todd Sheaffer, the band's singer and chief songwriter, the setup was different. As they tracked last year's Amen Corner mostly live, the sextet didn't have the benefit of body language and visual cues. Bass was in the kitchen. The drums were in the dining room. Multi-instrumentalist Andy Goessling was stuck in a bathroom.

"We had a little headphone system where everybody could control their own individual level and everybody else's level," Skehan said in a phone interview last week. "And we pretty much barely had eye contact. We just went into our individual little rooms and put our ears on, and that was the extent of the interaction. ... It does put you in a place where you're just listening."