Since splitting off from the great Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers in 2007, Jason Isbell has made six records — three with just his name on the label and three that are credited to Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.

With the same musicians usually involved anyway, what’s the difference between those records?

“Well, if we win any awards they get to go, too — that’s nice,” says the singer-songwriter from Alabama. “So everybody’s going to the Grammys this time; it’s really exciting. Thankfully, the Grammys are on the East Coast this year.”

It’s a good thing because Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit will be at the Grammys on Sunday and then resume their East Coast tour the following night in Pittsburgh at Heinz Hall, Downtown.

Mr. Isbell won best Americana album (“Something More Than Free” and best American roots song (“24 Frames”) in 2016, and now he and the band are nominated in those two categories once again for the album “The Nashville Sound” and the the poignant love song “If We Were Vampires.”

His more serious answer about the 400 Unit’s inclusion on the label of “The Nashville Sound” is that, “I felt like the band really deserved that qualification on this album because I don’t think it would have been the same without their help, and I realized that about a week into the process of making the record.”

It’s his third album with producer Dave Cobb, this time recorded at the newly restored RCA Studio A — where Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Charley Pride recorded classic hits — inspiring the title of “The Nashville Sound.”

“They called that RCA studio the home of ‘the Nashville sound,’ and they used to print it on all the albums that came out of that studio,” Mr. Isbell says, “and recently a good friend of ours and some investors bought the studio to keep it from being torn down and put Dave Cobb in there to make records and really breathe new life into the place. I think it’s busier now than it ever was, even in the ’60s and ’70s, so I wanted to honor that place in some ways.

“Chris Stapleton made most of his last two records there, my wife [400 Unit singer/​fiddler Amanda Shires] is finishing up a record there right now, and I wanted it to reflect the time and place and also the fact the city where I live has changed so dramatically over the last decade, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the music that comes out of Nashville now. There are a lot of great artists who really don’t have a lot to do with the world of commercial music.”

Over the course of his brilliant solo career, Mr. Isbell has separated himself from the mainstream country artists not only with a more gritty Americana sound but also a richer narrative writing and a deeper dive into the characters. Starting with “Last of My Kind” and “Cumberland Gap,” “The Nashville Sound” checks in with working-class people who are feeling left behind and trying to find their place in a world quickly spiraling away.

“I think that’s sort of the theme of the day,” he says. “I think we’re all trying to figure out how to be happy and still possibly move things forward a bit, and that can be harder for people in places like where I grew up in north Alabama or rural parts of the country. It can be difficult for people to understand that type of change — social and cultural change — and really figure out their place to fit in.”

The fourth track on the album is the provocatively titled “White Man’s World,” on which he calls on the more privileged among us to recognize the struggle of people fighting for basic rights: “There’s no such thing as someone else’s war/​Your creature comforts aren’t the only things worth fighting for.” The song, like others on the record, was a product of the current political climate, as he was writing during the election cycle.

“It’s pretty obvious on the record, it was definitely causing me a lot of stress and anxiety,” he says. “I think it was for a lot of people I know. As a culture, as a society, I feel like we’re still climbing the ladder. We didn’t fall off of it, but when you fall back that many rungs, in a lot of ways, it can be a little bit depressing, if you let it.

“And I think your job is to stay hopeful in those situations and try to find your role, your place and how your perspective can influence other people to be more open-minded. That was really the struggle for me. It was like, ‘Who am I? I’m a white man. I’m an American from the South. How can I take all these things and find an angle by which to show how I view the world and how I think I could improve it and maybe lead by example?’”

Mr. Isbell takes some personal departures on “The Nashville Sound,” like on the Grammy-nominated “If We Were Vampires,” a melancholy song about the preciousness of love in the face of mortality. He cycles back to the idea of displacement, ending with a hopeful message to his very young daughter in “Something to Love”: “I hope you find something to love,” he sings. “Something to do when you feel like giving up.”

“I wanted to end the record on, I guess, a high note as far as the attitude,” he says. “I wanted to leave people with something positive, and that song’s probably as positive as anything I’ve written. There are a lot of situations on this album where being a father informed my motivation. I don’t think it necessarily changed my opinions on a lot of things, but it certainly motivated me to be more vocal about those and gave me a new perspective as a writer, because when you have a child that you’re raising you see really how many steps go into learning the process of being a human.”

In the song, he talks about being a kid learning to play music on the porch from “Old men with old guitars smoking Winston Lights.” By the time he was a young teenager, he was playing in country and garage bands, and at 22 he joined Drive-By Truckers for a six-year run that ended in part because of his troubles then with drugs and alcohol.

Now, as he heads back for a second trip to the Grammys, does he feel like the split with the Truckers worked out the way it was meant to?

“It’s a lot like when my parents divorced,” he says. “I was 12 years old, and it was horrible, the worst thing in the world at that point in time. Now, looking back, I’m infinitely grateful that my parents aren’t still married to each other because I can’t even conceptualize that in my mind. They’re so very different, and I’m really glad they split up when they did, but at the time it was traumatic for me.

“I think when you have good people on both sides, people who are trying to do the right thing, make music for the right reasons, on both sides of something like that, I think that everybody wins in the long run.”

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.

First Published: January 24, 2018, 2:33 p.m.