Jason Isbell Will Play a Livestream Gig to Release His New Album

will officially release his new album, Reunions, on Friday with a live performance from the Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville. The show, an acoustic livestream concert, will air free fans.com at 8 p.m ET. Viewers are encouraged to make a donation in support of both Isbell’s crew and the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund.

Isbell’s wife and bandmate, , will join him for the concert, held in a Brooklyn Bowl devoid of an audience. The venue was scheduled to open this spring, but the March 3rd tornado in Nashville and the coronavirus pandemic has kept it shuttered.

Reunions is ’s follow-up to 2017’s The Nashville Sound. The new album was released a week early, on May 8th, to fans who ordered it from independent record stores.

In March, Isbell talked to Rolling Stone about the Reunions track “It Gets Easier,” which deals with his eight years of sobriety: “I’m always looking for ways to come at subject matter that haven’t been explored before. People will write a lot about the first stages of love or recovery or life-changing events. You write about the funeral; you don’t write about 30 years later, when Dad’s been gone. I’ve been sober for eight years, and the fact of it is, you still wish that you had that crutch sometimes. … I do still have those ‘slip dreams,’ as David Crosby calls them, where I’ll dream that I just had a drink. And I’m like, ‘What the hell did I just do?’ ”