ISBELL - Not so storyteller-oriented.

It's safe to say the Drive-By Truckers changed Jason Isbell's life completely. When DBT guitarist David Malone left the band in 2001 following the universally acclaimed Southern Rock Opera, the Truckers hired the then 22-year-old Isbell to replace him in the midst of the band's tour. Isbell had not yet finished college when he hit the road with the band, learning their songs in the van along the way. Three years later, longtime bassist Earl Hicks departed and the Truckers employed longtime friend Shonna Tucker, who would become Mrs. Jason Isbell.

In the present tense, Isbell continues to ring the changes. Earlier this year, his marriage to Tucker dissolved, and his six-year tenure with Drive-By Truckers came to an abrupt halt. On the positive side of the slate, Isbell's long discussed solo album, Sirens of the Ditch, has just been released, and he's out on the road with his new band, the 400 Units, to promote it. To those who bemoan the loss of a potent guitarist and a talented songwriter from DBT's ranks, Isbell offers a simple and understandable explanation.

"There were personal situations with the divorce and all that that made it difficult to have as much fun on the road as people should have," he says via phone. "But more than anything else, it was just a difference in priorities. Patterson [Hood] and [Mike] Cooley, they've got families and it makes it really hard for them to stay on the road all year long and keep touring when they've got kids waiting for them at home. I understand that. People who have put the hours in and traveled as much as anybody for 15 years or longer, they've earned the right to stay at home as much as they want to. I haven't really done that. I've been on the road pretty steady for five or six years now, but it's still something I want to do as much as possible, and I guess that's a good thing because I've got a pretty mean tour schedule coming up."

Sirens of the Ditch marks the debut of Isbell's solo career, but the majority of the album was recorded while he was still a member of DBT, having worked on the 11-song set piecemeal over the past two and a half years. Although the album still sports a healthy amount of the sound Isbell brought to the Truckers six years ago, it also highlights the full range of the guitarist's diverse influences.

"A couple of the songs could have worked on those Truckers records, but most of them are shorter and maybe more pop - I would say that but the definition of that word is so different than what it used to be," says Isbell. "If you're thinking pop like Big Star or Cheap Trick, it's probably closer to that. It's not necessarily as storyteller-oriented, although those things are in there, too. They're more personal, they're about me and people close to me rather than about bigger issues of class and culture. I don't see them as being too much different. They sound different because I made all the decisions about what got played and the length and what was written, but they're very similar to what I was writing with the Truckers."

One of the standout tracks on Sirens of the Ditch is "Dress Blues," a decidedly anti-war statement (based on true events surrounding the death of a high school classmate of Isbell's) that walks the line between supporting the troops being asked to wage the Iraq war and questioning the authority that's sending them in harm's way.

"It wasn't difficult technically, but it was a hard story to spend that much time with and to actually think about and write down," says Isbell. "It just pretty much came right out. I wrote it in about half an hour. It seems to have affected a lot of people in a certain way. I've heard a couple things about the fact that it was on Neil Young's Web site, and I've gotten e-mails from people who said that it wasn't appropriate to put the story on a protest-based Web site. But I believe in what he's doing, and he called me and asked me if he could put my song on his Web site, and I'm not gonna say no. It's like Stephen Colbert said at the Press Corps dinner, "Reality has a decidedly liberal bias.' I just tried to tell a story without being spun and just telling the story is in the spirit of protest. Telling the truth is often viewed as protest especially when dealing with the war. It's been decided that the public doesn't need to know what's going on or can't handle the facts. When that happens, the truth becomes protest."