Jason Isbell pulled double duty on The Daily Show on Thursday (February 22nd), performing “Cast Iron Skillet” and sitting down with host Desi Lydic. Watch it all below.
The country artist first joined Lydic at the desk for an interview about his role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as his Grammy-winning album Weathervanes. Speaking about the film, Isbell joked about not needing a dialect coach because of his native accent (a story he recounted in our cover story, Jason Isbell: Man on Fire). He also recalled the time someone on set farted while he was doing an intense seen opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.
“I started laughing, and DiCaprio started laughing, and I thought, ‘Oh great! We’re doing one of those blooper reels!’ ‘Cause I’d never been in a movie before,” Isbell said. “I thought, ‘This guy farted; this is gonna be great.’ And then [DiCaprio] wove the laugh into his character, and all of a sudden it was Ernest laughing at Bill — and I was not Bill anymore. I was a redneck laughing at a farting man. And I realized this is why one of us has an Oscar and the other one is about a budget for an accent.”
Isbell also talked about getting cast in the film on his birthday during a Zoom call with Robert De Niro and Scorsese, writing Weathervanes on set during breaks, and how the movie impacted his songwriting. Diving deeper into the album, he touched on writing “Save the World” (“I think it’s something that is a capitalist issue at heart,” he said), and the “simple Southern phrasing” of “Cast Iron Skillet.”
He then took the performance stage to deliver a solo acoustic rendition of the latter track. Watch the full interview and “Cast Iron Skillet” performance below.
Isbell is currently on tour, with shows alongside Aimee Mann, Palehound, Turnpike Troubadours, Courtney Marie Andrews, and a stop at Bonnaroo on the docket. Get tickets here.