For the last decade, Jason Isbell appeared to be bulletproof. After a wayward 20s as a prodigal yet self-destructive young musician in the alt-Southern-rock troupe Drive-By Truckers, he released his solo breakthrough, 2013’s Southeastern. The album kicked off a string of increasingly acclaimed releases as his star steadily rose. Everyone loves a redemption arc, and Isbell’s was potent. During his time in the Truckers, he would consume a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every night. Now he was sober and newly married to the respected fiddler Amanda Shires, who had been instrumental in getting him into recovery. He even cultivated a public persona that capitalized on the transformation — always ready with a quip on Twitter, taking goofy voice roles to counteract self-serious singer-songwriter trappings, espousing respectably progressive politics. Along the way, he nimbly dodged anything that could stain his reputation, quickly distancing himself from onetime friend Ryan Adams amid the latter’s abuse allegations. By 2023, Isbell had a prominent role in a Martin Scorsese movie, and his new album, Weathervanes, nabbed him his third Grammy for Best Americana Album. His ascension was unwavering, right up until he and Shires announced a divorce in February 2024.
That makes Isbell’s latest effort, Foxes in the Snow, a sort of inevitability: A respected songwriter and well-known wife guy returns to the bare essentials of his craft, presenting his first solo acoustic album following the implosion of a beloved celebrity marriage. The moment bears an uncanny resemblance to the career arc of comedian John Mulaney, whose sets regularly featured meditations on marriage — until 2021, when he got divorced and his own plot went askew. Yet at face value, Foxes is not a simple divorce record. Emerging from personal turmoil, the album is another deft narrative turn for Isbell. Equally populated by grief and new beginnings, it instead captures the messiness in moving on.
Foxes in the Snow arrives with heavy context though little explanation. For years, Shires’s and Isbell’s creative and personal lives were intertwined, with Shires in Isbell’s band and Isbell contributing to various Shires projects. But Isbell has been far less gregarious in detailing his divorce as he was his marriage. After candidly discussing marital strife as a past-tense struggle during the making of 2020’s Reunions, he has commented on the split only sparingly since last year’s news, roundly denying rumors of an affair and offering some abstract ruminations about how the divorce might impact his songwriting. “I think I can still manage to tell people who I am and what the truth is from my perspective,” he said on the Broken Record podcast.
The spare arrangements of Foxes in the Snow leave Isbell’s lyrics no room to hide. His commitment to remaining honest results in some bracing scenes — ones that don’t necessarily clarify what went on but play like rigorous self-interrogations along the whole spectrum of heartbreak, loss, resentment, and infatuation. “Eileen” is a straight-ahead breakup tale, with the narrator telling Eileen “you should have seen this coming sooner,” Eileen writing a letter saying “forever is a dead man’s joke,” and a note of finality: “You tell each other you can still be friends / But you both know you’re on your own.” At the same time, Isbell reiterates that the experience is worth the pain (“Let love knock you on your ass,” he insists on “Don’t Be Tough”) and depicts new romance earnestly in the title track, while the loping guitar figure suggests a touch of uneasy disorientation.
In Foxes’s most transfixing moments, Isbell manages to blur the lines. Over a gently rollicking guitar befitting the hallowed Nashville haunt it references, “Ride to Robert’s” is an invitation for a hang, but it’s unclear whether it’s addressed to a friend or paramour. The “woman I don’t know at all” in “Open and Close” could just as well be a spouse growing distant as a new fling. “Good While It Lasted” transposes Isbell’s history of addiction to a sick, dizzy love with a title implying better times, but a stray lyric saying “Last time I tried this sober I was 17” renders it a contemporary account of a divorcé’s foibles as he tries to find his footing again.
These aren’t the only moments when Isbell approaches loss and change from multiple angles at once. The fascination with feel-good stories like that of Isbell and Shires can grow into parasocial obsession, and Isbell is well aware of these pressures. In “Gravelweed,” he seems to address Shires directly. “I was a gravelweed and I needed you to raise me / I’m sorry the day came when I felt like I was raised,” he begins in the chorus. The apologies continue: “And now that I live to see my melodies betray me / I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” Though the song feels insular, it’s also inextricable from who Isbell has been as an artist and celebrity, both identities very much sculpted by his marriage. It magnifies personal loss to a career concern; any piece of art about divorce may reckon with the dissolution of a partnership and family unit alike, but it’s a more unusual moment when an artist tacitly acknowledges he may be letting everyone else down, too. In “Gravelweed,” he is contrite, almost as much to his fans as to Shires. Elsewhere, he’s preemptively defensive: “Take your hand off my knee / Take your foot off my neck / Why are y’all examining me like I’m a murder suspect?”
Those lines come from “True Believer,” a song in which the weathered love and warm recollections step aside for some bitterness. “All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart and I don’t like it / There’s a letter on the nightstand / I don’t think I’ll ever read,” Isbell sings in the chorus. There has been no shortage of dark moments across Isbell’s albums. Yet even when he wrangled with ongoing sobriety while noting those who didn’t make it, he was always seemingly singing from the perspective of someone who had. “True Believer” underlines the unique quality that hangs over Foxes in the Snow. From its skeletal songwriting to the weight of the divorce, we’ve never heard him singing from such a broken, vulnerable place.
Pop-music history is filled to the brim with breakups — endless tales of heartbreak, vengeance, and despair. However, divorce albums are a rarer breed, and they usually come with some different kind of gravity, as if they are inherently more adult. The stakes are higher when a would-be forever sputters out. There, too, artists have approached the subject in a variety of ways: everything from Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man looking back to simpler days as a newly single rockstar to Richard and Linda Thompson’s ragged Shoot Out The Lights chronicling their marriage crumbling as they were making that very album. Like any breakup jam, divorce albums can take on notes of newfound freedom as much as longing. Foxes in the Snow arrives to the canon without committing to any one of these iterations, instead gesturing to many of them at once.
Anyone who has followed Isbell’s story so far will find Foxes in the Snow as poignant and adept as his preceding work. But what makes the album most resonant is that he puts the past away and, as he strips himself of his band and identity alike, warily looks toward the future. He refutes anger with the promise “I’ll always be a true believer babe,” and it’s almost the final word before one more promise that’s equal parts gut-wrenching and hopeful. In closer “Wind Before the Rain,” he claims “I want to see you smiling when you’re 90 / I’ll always see you like you are right now,” before concluding “If you leave me now I’ll just come running after you / I’ll be the wind behind the rain.” In that moment, it no longer matters whether Isbell is singing to Shires or someone else, whether the scene is now or then. By the end, Foxes in the Snow becomes an album of Jason Isbell making sense of who he might become on the other side of it all — just as he did when he reintroduced himself to us on Southeastern. This time, he leaves it up to us to decide where we hear devastation and where we hear evolution.