Going it alone. Songsmith Jason Isbell performs at two acoustic, sold out shows.

Jason Isbell

8 p.m. Dec. 15 at the EKU Center for the Arts, 1 Hall Dr. in Richmond. Sold out. ekucenter.com, jasonisbell.com.

8 p.m. Dec. 16 at the Mountain Arts Center, 50 Hal Rogers Dr. in Prestonsburg. Sold out. macarts.com.

There is a tune tucked in at the half way point of Jason Isbell’s 2015 album “Something More Than Free” and reprised on the newly released “Live at the Ryman” that could be viewed as somewhat prophetic.

Titled “The Life You Chose,” it outlines a Southerner coming to grips with becoming a “victim of nostalgia.” The story is told from a vantage point of romantic uncertainty, where a run-in with an old flame forces a reality check on the past while raising a massive red flag over the future. The song also rocks, especially in the “Live at the Ryman” version, with an assuredness that matches the lyrics’ dark, rural cast. One can’t help but think if William Faulkner had taken up rock ‘n’ roll, this might be what the results would sound like.

But isolate the first lines of the song’s chorus and it can very well be viewed as a reflection on Isbell’s career and his possible placement as a rock ‘n’ roll Faulkner. “Are you living the life you chose? Are you living the life that chose you?”

If you have followed Isbell’s music over the past 17 years, from the records he cut as a talented but troubled guitarist/songwriter with Drive-By Truckers up through his last three studio albums, all of which chronicle a stable and sober lifestyle that further heightened his gift for literary detail, your answer to the aforementioned lyrics would be in the affirmative. Both times.

There is no question Isbell chose a rock ‘n’ roll life. That may well have contributed to the crippling substance abuse that nearly derailed his career, not to mention his life, until an intervention and subsequent recovery cleaned matters up in 2012.

It was that December — nearly six years to the day of this weekend’s sold out concerts at the EKU Center for the Arts in Richmond and the Mountain Arts Center in Prestonsburg — that Isbell, violinist and soon-to-be wife Amanda Shires and his long-running 400 Unit band rocked Buster’s (now the Manchester Music Hall). That performance came on the heels of “Live from Alabama,” a home state-recorded concert album that summarized Isbell’s music from the Truckers days up through the first recordings cut under his own name.

That record was as much of a mile marker as the new “Live from the Ryman.” The latter was devoted to performances of songs from his three most recent studio albums — 2013’s “Southeastern,” the aforementioned “Something More Than Free” and 2017’s “The Nashville Sound.”

The difference? On “Live from Alabama,” Isbell was solidifying his musical voice along with a keen knack for spinning a story. “Live at the Ryman” looks back on a more contained period where connections were made with his audience (where his concert sales soared while his records won four Grammys), his peers (concerts and collaborations with the likes of John Prine) and himself (his hard fought sobriety and subsequent fatherhood).

That evolution played out through numerous Lexington appearances through the years. We heard it in club shows with the Truckers and on his own at the long-gone Dame, in a surprise guest appearance as a duet partner with a very pregnant Shires when she opened for Prine at the Singletary Center for the Arts in 2015 and in his first show (also a sellout) at the EKU Center in 2017.

This weekend’s Richmond return is hardly the end of the Central Kentucky connection. Isbell will serve as the headline act for the 2019 Master Musicians Festival in Somerset. Performance dates are July 19-20.

But here is the big news about Isbell’s Kentucky return this weekend, other than the fact that both shows are sold out. The performances won’t be rock show outings with the 400 Unit but solo acoustic presentations. Isbell minus the electric crunch? Well, if you don’t think that will work, then you need to revisit the country-esque narratives and graceful melodic make-up of tunes like “Last of My Kind,” “If We Were Vampires” or the crowd favorite that sums up Isbell’s life-saving transition into a family man songsmith, “Cover Me Up.”

The songs’ intensity in no way diminishes during these more intimate settings. They still possess an accessibility, affirmation and plain speaking everyman candor that places Isbell on the same mantle as Springsteen, Petty and other American rock ‘n’ roll classicists.

“You have to focus on getting away from your own image of yourself and protecting how you want to appear to your audience,” Isbell told in me an interview prior to his 2015 performance at Rupp Arena with the Avett Brothers, referencing his songwriting and performance approach.

“You have to stop protecting that and just start telling the truth.”