About this Performance

Jason Isbell and Sylvan Esso often arrive at the same place via different routes. Whether he’s cranking it up with the 400 Unit or settling into a soft acoustic lament, Isbell’s songs radiate hard-won truths in straightforward language. Sylvan Esso’s intricately plotted electronic pop can feel like a futuristic dreamworld, but it’s built around songs of love and heartbreak. In a special co-headlining concert at the Bowl, both artists’ songcraft will be on display.

Over two decades and eight solo albums, Jason Isbell established himself as one of the sharpest and most emotionally in-tune songwriters of his generation. Isbell’s songs are firmly rooted in his Southern home, but they’re equally awake to the realities of everyday life in America, often to devastating effect: The characters in his songs take on death, loss, redemption, love, regret, and pain, always illuminated by the songwriter’s hard-won wisdom. The four-time Grammy winner’s most recent album, Weathervanes, was called “brutally beautiful” and “his strongest album to date” by Rolling Stone.

Sylvan Esso arrives at the Bowl at the beginning of a new era. The band’s 2022 album No Rules Sandy found them breaking new ground, incorporating new production flourishes—and less rules—in their Grammy-nominated electro pop. At the center of it all is Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath, whose lyrics keep these songs close to the ground and engaged with the complexities of life: “sad songs that sound really happy,” as Meath puts it. Or, as The New York Times put it, “lighthearted on the surface, purposeful at the core.”

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