Hi Jason.
I’d like to welcome you to Rockford and I feel uniquely qualified to do so. My name is Beth Wagner Townsend and I’m a JI400 superfan, a Rockford lifer, and I love the Coronado Theatre so much it’s become kind of a job.
According to Setlist.fm, I’ve seen you live eleven times since 2018. My husband, Zach, and I have seen you at a lot of venues near us – Milwaukee, Chicago, Joliet, Ravinia Festival, Indianapolis. But we’ve also seen you at Red Rocks twice. We’ve been to the Ryman twice for you. We were at Radio City Music Hall.
It was nice of you to come to us this time, is what I’m saying. You were due for a visit. We’ll put the coffee on.
I think we’re fans that blend in with the rest of the fans pretty well, at any other venue. We have the poster tube to make sure the print makes it home. We get in line before doors open. I’m familiar with the parasocial reputation we have. But despite all of that, my Jason Isbell fan cred has nothing on my desperate, obsessive love for Rockford, Illinois and the Coronado Theatre, and I’d like to tell you a bit about that.
When you introduced “Crimson and Clay” in February in Chicago, you spoke about how much you love writing Alabama songs and how you hold it together until the last verse where you have to tell hard truths about your hometown, you have to acknowledge the bad stuff. I felt that. Rockford and I might have a slightly different dynamic though, because I have spent years leading with it and often confronting our bad reputation head-on. “Rockford doesn’t suck, you do,” said a t-shirt that I bought for my toddler years ago. “Bitch, please, I’m from Rockford,” says a coffee cup that I still regularly use when I’m on Zoom. When Forbes Magazine named us the #3 Most Miserable City in America in 2014, our Convention & Visitor’s Bureau shot back with a campaign called “Misery Loves Company.” Many of us put it right there in the first verse, in bold print on the t-shirt, because we know our reputation. God we love this place anyway.
I moved to Rockford as a kid, from a town of 300 people in North Dakota. It was hard to process the way that Rockford natives talked about this place sometimes, because holy shit, it was magic to me. It changed my life. The exposure to diversity and opportunity and the sheer size of this city and the things that became available to me and the life that unfolded before me – I can wax poetic about Rockford the way people do when they first experience NYC and decide it’s the greatest city in the world, and maybe it’s just because my scale was off, or maybe it’s because Rockford really is just that great.
I’ve always known that Rockford was scrappy as hell, driven to overcome its past and its reputation. I am 44 years old, so I’ve been here through some tough economic times on the national level, but I’ve also become deeply acquainted with the lore of our own rises and falls, the industries, the manufacturing, the glory days when the big buildings that are now boutique hotels and loft apartments were churning out rugged Rockford-built hardware. Before we left North Dakota, my Grandpa Don took me through the fasteners aisle at his farm implement dealership and pulled out box after box of screws labeled “Rockford Products” and showed me that Rockford, IL – the Screw City – was famous even in North Dakota. I have a pride in my city that goes back so much further than the date I arrived here, back before I was even born.
When I travel now, I find myself seeking out the places that, if I really think about it, make me feel at home in their Rockfordness. We love some grit in our vacation destinations. It’s like we open the map and pick a Rust Belt city and then say “Show me where everybody’s grandpa’s factory used to be and what you turned it into and why it has a Plus + Sign in its gentrified name. Tell me how you clawed your way back after the deindustrialization. Which auto industry manufacturer abandoned you? Show me the river where your hoodlums throw all of your Divvy Bikes.”
My husband owns a business a few blocks west of the Rock River – “Downtown” or maybe even the scare-quotes “West Side”. He’s a divorce, custody, and DCFS lawyer and in 2018, I left my 20-year job in HVAC and plumbing sales and marketing to come run his office for him. (It’s the same job for me. It’s just emotional sewage in the basement now.) We resisted the urge to name the firm Screw City Divorce despite our civic pride. I did buy the domain name just in case, though.
I put Zach through some musical paces before we got married, we spent about a year as platonic concert buddies. I wasn’t going to bother holding hands with, let alone falling in love with, somebody who didn’t wake up occasionally haunted by McMurtry’s “Song For A Deck Hands Daughter” or “Rachel’s Song“. We spent a New Year’s Eve with Lucinda Williams. When Wilco booked into the Coronado, we made a rush trip to Milwaukee to see Son Volt first, because that felt important to me. Wilco was a wild experience for me in my hometown – when I see them in other cities, I never have to worry about how my unpredictable burst of crying during “Misunderstood” is possibly going to happen in front of my insurance agent or my dental hygienist and I guess that’s going to be part of the experience for the JI400 show as well. “Come cry during Elephant in front of your kid’s social studies teacher,” the posters could say.
Zach passed the James McMurtry Test and became my permanent concert pal and the lead guitarist of my living room band. Among many guitars in our collection, he plays a Les Paul painted by Sam Bass that was designed to be a NASCAR trophy. We bought it at Carters when we were in town for your 2024 Ryman show with Matraca Berg. We drove 18 hours round-trip in less than 36 hours for that show, because we didn’t want to fly with the Les Paul, and I spent most of the 9 hours to Nashville reciting to Zach the plot of the novel that I started writing in my 20s that was partially inspired by “The Things You Left Undone“.
Zach and I were married in the Coronado Theatre. Just us and our kid and a 17th Circuit Judge on a Thursday in the mezzanine, in front of a massive chandelier and a wall of mirrors. The Coronado has had weddings on the stage before, elaborate setups where brides rise up from the orchestra pit. We selected a spot that we can go stand in again whenever we please, during intermission, on our way to last-minute balcony seats.
I’ve been on the board of directors for an organization called Friends of the Coronado for the last few years. We are the group that helped raise the funds and oversaw an enormous and inspiring movement to rescue the Coronado, before my time, back when I was in high school. But now I have the humbling responsibility to carry that work forward and help fund the continued historic preservation and community outreach projects. Every year, we bring the Rockford 4th graders to the theater for a field trip through our Reach for the Stars program, thousands of kids falling in love with art, dance, music, architecture, everything that a building like this inspires in little brains.
My work with FOC puts me in a lot of meetings about the kelvin ratings of LED light bulbs and what kind of vacuums you have to use on historic carpeting and what bass at high decibels can do to 97 year-old horsehair plaster. It’s a very different level of being a theater nerd than when I’m in the seat watching a show, staring up at the stars in the ceiling (which are arranged as the Rockford night sky would have been on the scheduled opening night in 1927, and the words catch in my throat a little bit every time I talk about that).
My time spent at the theater these days is logistics, it’s grit, it’s sitting at the grown-up table, it’s putting the work in. The photos that get published of the Coronado are the best that the marketing folks have to offer, but I have my own private collection of before photos and mid-project photos and I treasure those. The Coronado is so alive, and it’s so loved and well-used, it’s not a perfect museum piece that never gets touched. We do a lot of rock and roll here. We let kids bring drinks in. That means we have to patch some holes sometimes. It’s so real.
Jason, your name is on the marquee right now surrounded by scaffolding because of a restoration project that took a lot of dedication from so many different groups of people, and I wouldn’t have this photo any other way if I could choose it. My community is always improving itself. The scaffolding is part of my story. I’m lucky to have the work.
I can talk for days about the magic of this building and I hope you see it, I hope you have a minute to look around. I hope the excellent folks at ASM show you where the Grande Barton organ sinks into the orchestra pit and I hope they tell you some of our ghost stories. I hope you get to check out the Owner’s Apartment. I hope you look around the green room and fall in love with a piece of art from a local artist who is probably a friend of mine – our arts community is incredible. I hope you sound check with the lights on and look up to the balcony to the left and see the lone black-and-white checkered seat in the sea of red. That’s where Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick had his first kiss, he tells us. I kid you not.
Rockford folks all have Cheap Trick stories, we can all walk you through how we’re related to or neighbors of Rick or Robin. My brother is a drummer who owned a set once owned by Bun E., of course. My husband is not a Rockford native and one of the first things I told him was that you should expect to see Rick Nielsen as the special guest for every musical act. He wasn’t surprised when Rick popped in for a song with Blackberry Smoke. He was a little more surprised when Rick hit the stage with Rob Zombie. When Rent came to the Coronado’s Broadway series, I joked with Zach that I’d heard Rick was playing Maureen. When we arrived, Zach found out that I had put him in Rick’s Seat. It’s inescapable but as much as we joke about Cheap Trick – we fucking love it. We absolutely do.
I have a friend from Atlanta who talks about Drivin N Cryin the way that I talk about Cheap Trick. All of her friends have a Kevn Kinney connection. I only know of them because I listened to the back catalog after you released Georgia Blue and seeing Sadler do “Honeysuckle Blue” so often. When Miles Nielsen opened the Music Box in Rockford and booked Kevn Kinney for its first show, I grabbed tickets immediately and Kevn started the show by saying that Rockford was like a second home to him. I thought, well, that tracks, and texted my friend in Atlanta immediately to say “I’m drinking something called ‘I Want You to Want My Margarita’ and watching Kevn Kinney and this is the crossover event of the century.”
Writing a “Dear Jason” blog post and spamming your social media accounts with it is an expectation that many people have of me. But I think I’ve gotten old and boring, in the parasocial celebrity worship context. When I was in my early teens, I thought I discovered Rosanne Cash’s secret AOL account under her married name – she had actually published the email address in many places and it wasn’t secret at all – and I wrote her emails and sent her AOL IMs telling her how my entire life had changed because of the Interiors album, which had really launched me into my wearing-all-black pre-teen “edgy” years. When Rosanne published Bodies of Water, I obsessed over the location details in scenes in Paris, and when I was 17, I packed the book in my backpack and I found all of those places while I was a nanny in France. I was certain that “The Summer I Read Colette” from 10 Song Demo was as much mine as it was hers. I designed a tattoo which I never got inked based on a poem about being halfway through life – I was not even 20 yet. When Twitter became a thing, I tweeted at Rosanne so many times during the Ann Arbor Folk Festival that she finally replied to tell me to stop and breathe. We started exchanging messages pretty regularly. When Composed entered the NY Times Bestsellers List, she announced it with a tweet that quoted and tagged me – “Squee!” as Beth says – the breathless expression of joy that she credited to me. About a year later, I gave my newborn daughter the middle name Colette, and when people ask me where it’s from, I don’t say “the French author”, I say “the Rosanne Cash song about the French author”.
(It feels both off-topic but also relevant that when I was 5, I named my little brother after Jeff Hanna from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I was in a real “Partners, Brothers and Friends” era and by the time he was born, I’d told so many people that I was going to have a brother named Jeff that the situation had gotten out of my parents’ control.)
Ada Colette is 13 now, and with every passing day we’re veering apart but in the good ways, because I feel like I’ve done my job as a parent to launch a whole intact autonomous person into the world. She’s had a very different musical experience in life than I did. I cobbled together three chords and the truth on the guitar as much as I could from tabs I printed and transposed from internet message boards, and Ada has been in piano, voice, drums, marching band, jazz band, and theater lessons in various combinations since she was 6 years old. Right before the pandemic, she had a fascination with an older Zydeco band that played in a bar/restaurant near our house every Thursday night, and we ended up having to order her a child-sized washboard from a guy in Louisiana. My kid was born cool and gets cooler every day.
For the past couple of years, Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour grainy livestream videos dominated her world and I wasn’t sure she’d ever make room for other artists. We had a playlist for car trips that we called “The Getalong Shirt” and it was half Taylor Swift/half JI400, and we’d hit shuffle and get what we got. Nothing like a transition from “Cruel Summer” to “Yvette”, I tell you what. When Ada got really into making and exchanging Taylor Swift lyric friendship bracelets, she made me a one-off that says “Til the end of my shift” instead of a TSwift lyric.
Last fall, we took Ada to her first JI400 show, at Ravinia Festival, and we sat on the lawn. She looked around and said “So Jason Isbell fans don’t really dress up like in themed outfits or anything, huh?” We made the agreement that I’d run to the stage with her if you played her favorite song, which I honored.
Jason, it was “Death Wish”.
My 12 year-old’s first big favorite Isbell jam was “Death Wish”. I was instantly, instantly taken back to my moody all-black Rosanne Cash middle school days when we tore across that lawn in Highland Park, jumping over people’s picnic baskets and wine, so that she could see the stage and scream-sing “WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE IN A BREAKDOWN AND A BREAKTHROUGH??” at the top of her lungs.
It feels like it happened overnight – literally, probably, because she’s a nocturnal teenager – but she’s done the New Fan Back Catalog Deep Dive already. She knows the words to songs I’m barely familiar with, she has favorites like “Brand New Kind of Actress” that make me double-take. We also have different favorites and different skips on Foxes in the Snow. Her only two live shows so far were Ravinia and the Chicago solo show for FITS – neither were stand up and sing kind of shows – and yet she knows exactly when to raise the volume and raise her hands for “Alabama Pines” and that’s when I decided she’s really one of us now.
My relationship with “If We Were Vampires” probably starts off sounding a lot like everybody else’s. Zach and I hold hands and sing it to each other at the live shows and send texts of lyrics from it randomly in place of “I love you”. We put it on the vast list of “our songs” that amazing Rockford loop artist Andrew Robinson learned for our wedding reception. Sometimes, 7 years later and counting, we walk into a local bar and Andrew is playing and “Vampires” starts up as if we have a walkup tune.
I put a lot of thought into the line “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today” when Foxes in the Snow came out, really when the first grainy YouTube clip of “Gravelweed” showed up. I sat with it for a long time, I sat with the all of the feelings of the parasocial reputation, and the selfishness of feeling ownership over that song that went so far beyond you, and I thought about what it would be like to possibly never hear “Vampires” live from you again if you chose it to be that way, and how maybe Andrew’s cover is more “mine” now anyway. Andrew will also be in the audience on Saturday night and it makes me smile to feel like everything has come full circle.
Last night I sat on my living room couch while Ada plunked away at her ancient piano in the corner. She played a few hesitant notes, then a few more, picked up speed, stopped. “Mom, do you recognize it yet?” she asked. I didn’t. She kept going, building confidence, until “Vampires” erupted forth. And another new meaning of the old love song is born. This kid who has watched us dance and sing and be her embarrassingly affectionate parents singing love songs to each other has decided to give Andrew a run for his money with a “Vampires” cover she taught herself from Tiktok videos.
For my family, the JI400 show in Rockford on Saturday is in the middle of a pretty epic concert run. We saw Nas last week, and our upcoming tickets are for Maren Morris, Cynthia Erivo, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. We’re having a pre-show get-together for our friends and family in the Friends of the Coronado office space inside the theater because it’s a special occasion. Our tickets on Saturday night are good enough that I would think you could see us from the stage. I’ll be near the front, standing next to the teenage girl who knows all the words to “Live Oak” already, somehow.
I realize that you’re in the middle of a pretty epic run of shows yourself, and I know that you have been to a thousand towns and theaters and in every city, there’s a fan like me with a story like this one. I can’t tell you how special it is to see you on that stage on Saturday. The Coronado is closer to my heart than if you were in my living room. I work harder for it, and I share it with an amazing, scrappy, imperfect city full of beautiful hard-working souls. I hope you love getting to know this city and this venue, and if you had the chance to get to know me, you’d love me too, because – and I have a few t-shirts that aggressively declare this – Everybody Loves a Rockford Girl.
If you don’t have your seat for Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit at Rockford’s Crown Jewel, the Coronado Theatre this Saturday, July 12th, 2025, get your tickets here.
