Day 11 (March 30): Jason Isbell - 24 Frames

It has come to my attention that, for a blog about music with 'song' in the title, I have spent more time navel-gazing about life in the time in corona than I have actually discussing music. Sorry about that. We're working out stuff on the fly here.

In the interests of talking more about music, I have picked a good song by a good artist, unlike all the other days. That good artist is Jason Isbell, who you may possibly know as the accidental instigator of the "30-50 feral hogs" meme from last year. I could spend more time reminiscing about the pure joy of Feral Hogs Day, but this song is, I promise, not about the feral hogs.

It was between two songs from Isbell's 2015 album Something More Than Free, 'Children of Children' and '24 Frames'. Using science (I made a Twitter poll called which called them "that one" and "the other one", which got four votes), I picked out '24 Frames', which is, well, just a very good song.

I like how Jason Isbell's music exists in a strange nether-space between upbeat and melancholic, and the oh-so-catchy, oh-it's-sad quality of '24 Frames' captures that recently nicely. Some of its lyrics do not make enormous degrees of sense, but it makes emotional sense, damn it. Who doesn't feel that everything they know has gone up in flames in 24 frames lately?

24 frames, by the way, is the frame rate of an average film. This is unless you are discussing The Hobbit trilogy, which also had 48 frames per second versions, but that's honestly a complex topic unto itself and we have spent enough time on this blog for today. Let's mark down "discuss the high frame rate versions of The Hobbit" for a sufficiently desperate day, like Day 17, or something.