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The first time I caught Jason Isbell it was at a free show at Snowbird to a few dozen people seven years ago. He'd split from The Drive-By Truckers and was launching his solo career, pudgy and sweating and taking long pulls off a big bottle of Jack Daniels.

So even though he still played his defiant anthem "Never Gonna Change" in his encore at a sold-out Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre on Thursday night, it was clear how much Isbell has matured.

His newborn daughter, Mercy Rose, was strapped to the nanny backstage and after his much-publicized turn to sobriety, Isbell looked lean and healthy this time out, in a camouflage jacket and dark jeans.

"I gotta say, we always get real excited to come to Salt Lake," Isbell said in his Alabama drawl, recalling the first time he came to the city, playing the long-defunct Zephyr Club with the Drive-By Truckers in 2002. "That was a good damn time, that's what that was."

Isbell pulls no punches in his songwriting, with his evocative narratives of hardscrabble heartbreak and despair telling the story of his Southern culture the way Springsteen has done for blue-collar factory workers throughout his career.

Take Thursday's gut-wrenching performance of "Speed Trap Town," from his most recent album, "Something More Than Free," the story of a young man abandoning his boyhood home while his state trooper father lays in a hospital bed, suffering a heart attack during a fling with another woman.

Isbell captured the melancholy of that tale and others throughout the night with a sincerity and earnestness that he punctuated with mind-blowing dirty guitar solos.

He and the 400 Unit hit its stride early, with the soaring "Flying Over Water" off of "Southeastern." Five songs in they played crowd favorite "Decoration Day," an old Truckers song about a good-old fashioned family feud with the Hills boys that saw the Lawsons, including the narrator, beat one boy so bad he couldn't walk and his father catching a bullet in the chest in retaliation.

He followed it up with the bouncy "Teach Me How To Forget," and then another Truckers song, "Dress Blues," a tribute to Matthew Conley, who was killed in the Iraq war.

The night was brisk — although thankfully not as freezing as his last Red Butte show two years ago — and toward the tail end of the evening Isbell played a tender version of "Cover Me Up," an intensely personal song dedicated to his wife, Amanda Shires — who opened at Red Butte recently for Ryan Adams — about falling in love and getting clean.

"If she can't be here," he said, "I'm glad she's out playing her own damn songs for some people."

Isbell finished his set with the Dust Bowl ballad, "Children of Children," reflecting on the years he cost his mother "just by being born." His encore featured "Elephant," about the tender friendship between "Andy" and his friend dying of cancer, before wrapping up the night — all before 9:30 — with "Never Gonna Change."

Which of course isn't true, Isbell has changed, but what he's grown into and what was on display Thursday was perhaps the greatest songwriter of his generation in his prime.