Last month, alt-country star Jason Isbell received some news most could only dream about. The Nashville Sound, an album he released earlier this year with his band, the 400 Unit, received a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album, and a song off the record called “If We Were Vampires” received a nod for Best American Roots Song.

But that day, Isbell, who is also a two-time Grammy winner, was nearly as excited about completing a relatively mundane, but important task: Signing up his family for an improved health care plan. “It happened at the same day as the Grammy nominations and I honestly don’t know which one I was happier about,” Isbell told MarketWatch in a phone interview about a week later.

The concern about health insurance is one of the many ways Isbell says his life has changed since he and his wife — acclaimed singer, songwriter and fiddle player Amanda Shires — welcomed their daughter Mercy Rose Isbell about two years ago. “In all honesty, it changes your priorities and it should,” he said.

That shift in priorities for Isbell and Shires has meant working together to navigate the tension between professional ambition and good parenting. Isbell alluded to the challenges inherent in maintaining this delicate balance in a recent tweet. Last month, Isbell responded to fans demanding to see Shires on his European tour (often the two perform together) with a tweet explaining that she was staying home because “we’re trying to balance doing good work with being good parents.”

Maintaining that balance meant thinking hard about the logistics of parenting a toddler as touring musicians, Isbell said. To protect that family time, they shield themselves from relying too heavily on touring as a revenue stream. Isbell owns his record label and has retained control over the release of his last three albums.

He says he and Shires try to keep as much of the publishing process under their own roof as possible. “That’s made a huge difference,” Isbell said. “I know some people who have sold the same amount of records that I have that are in a very different position financially.”

When Isbell and Shires do tour, they plan months in advance to make sure they both have the opportunity to do what they want professionally, while keeping in mind that “we have this mini human person and we have to put her at the top of our priority list,” he said.

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Often that means pushing back on the stereotypical roles that can be expected of men and women when it comes to both parenting and breadwinning, Isbell said. When Shires and Isbell tour separately, their daughter typically accompanies him because he travels in a bus and up until recently, Shires was touring in a van. “I’ve got a much safer place for the baby to ride, so I take the baby with me,” he said.

But becoming a parent hasn’t only changed Isbell’s life practically, it’s also renewed his sense of obligation to speak out on issues he feels passionately about, he says. Isbell resists the notion that having a daughter somehow made him more sensitive to the challenges women face in the workplace and beyond. That’s a decidedly different tone from many prominent men who have invoked concern over their female relatives as part of their condemnation of recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

“It didn’t all the sudden make me understand that women are humans,” he said of the birth of Mercy Rose.

Instead, becoming a parent and getting an opportunity to set an example for his daughter helped up the urgency Isbell feels to use his prominent voice to take a stand when he feels it’s important. With lyrics like “I’m a white man living on a white man’s street/I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet /The highway runs through their burial grounds /Past the oceans of cotton,” his latest album grapples with many of the issues dominating our national conversation.

“When she gets older, I would very much like her to know that I was trying on some small scale to make things a little bit better for her and for everybody,” Isbell said.

For now, he’s hopeful that the nation’s reckoning with sexual harassment will result in a lasting change. Still, he knows there’s a long way to go, given that we’re socialized from such a young age to treat men and women a certain way.

“To de-program that, it’s going to take a whole lot of time and whole lot of work,” he said. “People don’t understand that it’s not just about equal pay — it’s about looking at somebody and seeing them as a person.”