The Ukulele Alphabet: Molotov by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

May 1, 2025

Letter I, Week 1
“Molotov” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

I let my husband, Dan, choose the Jason Isbell song for this project, because in fairness he’s the bigger Isbell fan between the two of us.

But out of the shortlist of songs he gave me, “Molotov” had to be the one.

When I met Dan — even before I met him in person, even when we were just exchanging emails, then AIM conversations, then phone calls — I was 22 turning 23 years old and determined to burn out like a Molotov in a lot of ways.

As Sophie Lucido Johnson recently wrote,

The kind of hurting that I did […] was huge and kind of seductive; it stretched across my whole body and shoved its way into my orbit so that it bumped up against the people I loved. And I hurt now, too, but it’s different.

You know, typical young adult self-pitying and numbing confusion. Making self-destructive choices, desperate to be loved by a succession of mediocre boyfriends, and yet swearing I would never get married because I was a casualty of the havoc wreaked by my parents.

And so when I first crossed paths with Dan, I was broke and he seemed unbroken. And I truly thought to myself, well, shit. This is it. This is the end of my tortured 20s and I barely scratched the surface of them!¹

Even then I knew that he was the last one.

It was obviously a relief to know so quickly, so definitively, and I’ve never wavered from that certainty.

But back then, in that masochistic mindset, to be done with all the personal romantic drama felt a little bit like being cheated out of . . . something. More time to figure myself out. More copy for my writer’s life to unspool.²

This is all for the best, of course. I was already in love for life. I broke a promise to myself, a promise I couldn’t keep anyway.

It took me a very long time to mostly chase all the Molotovian impulses out of my system, to try and work past the defensive posturing and self-imposed emotional isolation that I thought would protect me somehow.

Time has flown for us as we’ve built our life and settled into middle age. The pain I felt in my college and grad school years has scarred over, though the ropy raised bump is still a little tender anytime I mentally run my fingers over it.

Do I miss the girl I once had time to be?

Well. I’m not sure many people would want a redo and mind-wipe themselves back to who they were at 22.

I miss my little beanstalk body shape and its metabolism, the energy I had to go to so many shows that started past 8:00 pm, my blithe disregard for so much of the future, but I would never trade that for who I am now.

Like Elizabeth Perkins says at the end of Big, “I’ve been there before. It’s hard enough the first time.”

But even with all those flaws and brokenness and mess, somehow Dan chose that girl. He saw something within my wistful firecracker chaos that he thought was worth holding onto. So I try not to forget that every time I think of those years.

I hope he still sees fire inside of me.