As my friend and fellow Isbell fan Dan put it: This may be the best song Jason Isbell has written in a while.
“Cast Iron Skillet” is a marvel of songwriting—partly because it offers an update on the template of “Outfit,” one of Isbell’s most famous songs.
That song, written in the voice of Isbell’s father, combines verses about his various memories and misgivings with a remarkable chorus that lists a bunch of fatherly advice.
That advice comes in the form of negative imperatives—”Don’t” phrases, if you will:
Don’t call what your wearing an outfit, don’t ever say your car is broke
Don’t worry about losing your accent, a southern man tells better jokes
Have fun, stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister’s birthday
Don’t tell them you’re bigger than Jesus, don’t give it away
There’s a folksiness here, a charming but slight voice.
The voice of “Cast Iron Skillet” is a different:
Don’t wash the cast iron skillet
Don’t drink and drive, you’ll spill it
Don’t ask too many questions or you’ll never get to sleep
There’s a hole inside you, fill it
The first directive doesn’t bother with why—it’s received wisdom, plain and simple. The second is wisdom reset as a joke. The wry humor, though, vanishes with the third, where philosophizing is cast as a recipe for sleeplessness (or worse). The fourth goes further, asserting that we all have a “hole” inside us and that we need to “fill it.”
With what?
The narrator doesn’t say, instead offering us the first verse, which begins with further direction:
Shower up and shave, put flowers on the grave
And ask the Lord to save his soul although you know it’s too late.
What comes next is a dark reverie on the nature of violence—how a kid on Isbell’s childhood baseball team would grow up to murder someone in an awful way.
Isbell then returns to the chorus, which comes as a slight variation:
Don’t wash the cast iron skillet
That dog bites my kid, I’ll kill it
Don’t walk whеre you can’t see your feet
Don’t ask questions, just believe it
The verse that follows is less violent but still disturbing. The narrator reflects on a father who cuts off his daughter when she starts dating someone who isn’t white:
Jamie found a boyfriend
With smiling eyes and dark skin
And her daddy never spoke another word to her again
When Isbell returns to a final iteration of the chorus, he begins with the same cooking advice, but then drops the directives, offering a question and then a desperately sad observation:
Don’t wash the cast iron skillet
This town won’t get no better, will it?
She found love and it was simple as a weathervane
But her own family tried to kill it
The presence of the word “simple” belies the complexity of the simile there. How is love like a weathervane exactly? And what about any of this is simple?
How do these two verses align with the chorus and its variations? What is Isbell saying about the power of tradition? About how advice may or may not mean what we want it to?
The fragmentary composition of the song along with its keen but evasive voice makes it easily one of the best songs I’ve heard all year.
Taylor Coe 