- Southeastern/Thirty Tigers
- 2025
The first time I heard Jason Isbell's music, I was at Hangout, the music festival that used to take place on the beach in his native Alabama. (This year, in an extremely Trump's America™ development, they're replacing it with a fest curated by Morgan Wallen, the troublemaking country megastar who famously turned Isbell's "Cover Me Up" into a country radio hit.) The encounter took place in May 2013, a few weeks before the release of Isbell's career-altering masterpiece Southeastern. He was performing on a side stage a little ways back from the sand, singing earnest alt-country ballads backed by a small but skillful band. Between songs, he made it a point to talk up his violinist and backup singer, Amanda Shires, who he'd married a few months prior — not that I could have missed Shires, whose contributions added color and grace to Isbell's material. They seemed like a perfect match.
This was a pivotal moment in Isbell's history, and not just in the way newlywed life always is. At the time, he was a year into sobriety after years of abusing alcohol and cocaine, addictions Shires helped him kick. ("Cover Me Up" is one of his songs about that very subject.) The newfound clarity elevated Isbell's songwriting; Southeastern put him on a trajectory to his current stature as one of the world's most popular and acclaimed alt-country singer songwriters. Soon, few would refer to him as a former member of Drive-By Truckers anymore; they'd be more likely to refer to DBT as the band that incubated a young, wild Jason Isbell.
In the years to come, as their profile rose and their respective catalogs expanded, Isbell and Shires emerged as a power couple within their little corner of the music world. Working together and apart, they became leading lights of a mainstream-adjacent Nashville music community that stood in contrast to — often in opposition to — the Music Row establishment. They consistently spoke out for the left-leaning causes they believed in, via heartfelt protest songs and razor-sharp tweets, always seasoned with Southern wit. When the pandemic hit, they opened a window into their family life via frequent livestreams that became a beacon for some of their biggest fans. So it was startling when, about a year ago, Isbell filed for divorce from Shires.
Foxes In The Snow, Isbell's first album since the divorce, is out this Friday. Whereas his last three original LPs were robust full-band efforts credited to Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit, this time he returns to the solo billing of Southeastern and its 2015 sequel Something More Than Free. More minimal than those records, this one is a stripped-down acoustic affair, just the singer-songwriter and his guitar -- perhaps the obvious move for a Divorce Album, but one that pays off big time. For those who see Isbell as a smug MSNBC liberal, condemned his song about his late friend Justin Townes Earle's death as exploitative, or simply took Shires' side in the breakup, the barebones intimacy recenters the artist behind the persona and serves as a reminder that this guy can write a damn song.
It's not that Isbell abandons topical writing altogether. "Bury me in the last few lines/ Of an obituary for these trying times," he hollers on the opening folk song "Bury Me," at least alluding to the chaotic landscape in which he has often been a combatant. But mostly Foxes In The Snow comprises intimate portraits, some perhaps fictionalized, others clearly autobiographical. The tender "Ride To Robert's," full of gorgeous fingerpicking and brisk forward momentum, seems to be a memory of happier times, while the softly strummed courtship snapshot "Open And Close," with its unidentified woman from Calgary in a New York apartment, might be a document of finding new love in the aftermath. "Eileen," on which the narrator confesses, "My own behavior was a shock to me/ I never thought I'd had the nerve," could be a true story presented under alternate names. "Don't Be Tough" offers learned wisdom about love and life along the lines of "Don't be tough until you have to/ Take your heartbreak on the chin."
There's much to enjoy within the mysteries and subtleties. Yet the most powerful tracks are the ones that seem to directly address the dissolution of Isbell's marriage. The impassioned "Gravelweed," for instance, might elicit a wide range of emotions. I can imagine listeners feeling either disdain or a pang of recognition when Isbell declares, "And I was a gravelweed and I needed you to raise me/ I'm sorry the day came when I felt like I was raised." Surely, many will be overcome by a piercing melancholy when the chorus concludes, "And now that I lived to see my melodies betray me/ I'm sorry the love songs all mean different things today."
The closing trifecta of ballads revisits the breakup from more angles. On "Good While It Lasted," he tries to make sense of it all by concluding that it's better to have loved and lost: "All that I needed was all that I had/ It was good while it lasted." Isbell takes a more combative, heartbroken posture on the rawer and messier "True Believer," throwing a bit of extra vocal power behind the line, "All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart and I don't like it." Most affecting in context may be closing track "Wind Behind The Rain," which seems to be written from the perspective of the relationship's early days. "You see what I could become," Isbell sings, before expressing his lifelong devotion: "I want to see you smiling when you're 90/ I'll always see you like you are right now/ All my wild beginnings are behind me/ And I know that we can stick it out somehow." Knowing what came later, the naive optimism is one last stab to the heart.
Foxes In The Snow is one person's side of the story, and unlike, say, Blood On The Tracks or Sea Change, we'll probably hear the other side presented in songs eventually. But it would be missing the point to reduce the album to fodder for litigating a celebrity divorce. Its tangle of sometimes conflicting sentiments add up to a kind of warts-and-all honesty — sometimes more humble and self-aware than others, but always painfully true to Isbell's experience. More than anything, the album showcases his ability to distill these kinds of poignant flashbacks into short flashes of beauty, to reframe and redeem his troubles in ways that help the rest of us make sense of our own. That sharpness and clarity is a gift Shires bestowed upon Isbell, one we all get to benefit from long after their love has died out.
Foxes In The Snow is out 3/7 via Southeastern/Thirty Tigers.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Lady Gaga's Mayhem
• Hamilton Leithauser's This Side Of The Island
• The Tubs' Cotton Crown
• SASAMI's Blood On The Silver Screen
• Bob Mould's Here We Go Crazy
• Vundabar's Surgery And Pleasure
• Neil Young's lost album Oceanside Countryside
• JENNIE's Ruby
• Benmont Tench's The Melancholy Season
• Alabaster DePlume's A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole
• JJULIUS' Vol. 3
• Star 99's Gaman
• Fust's Big Ugly
• Tobacco City's Horses
• evilgiane & Harto Falion's The Hurtless
• Divorce's Drive to Goldenhammer
• Jad Fair & Samuel Locke Ward's Pure Candy
• Frog Eyes' The Open Up
• FROGG's Eclipse
• Arny Margret's I Miss You, I Do
• HotWax's Hot Shock
• Franc Moody's Chewing The Fat
• Rose Betts' There Is No Ship
• The Lathums‘ Matter Does Not Define
• Clara Mann's Rift
• Lust For Youth & Croatian Amor's All Worlds
• Lacrimosa's LAMENT
• Monde UFO's Flamingo Tower
• Destruction's Birth Of Malice
• Spiritbox's Tsunami Sea
• Melin Melyn's Mill On The Hill
• Smith/Kotzen's Black Light / White Noise
• Consumables' Infinite Games
• Taxidermists' 20247
• Black Foxxes' The Haar
• TOKiMONSTA's Eternal Reverie
• Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate's The Uncertainty Principle
• This Gift Is A Curse's Heir
• Fractal Universe's The Great Filters
• Balcony's Paradise's Spot The Difference
• Will Stratton's Points Of Origin
• Violeta Garcia's IN / OUT
• Chase Petra's Lullabies For Dogs
• Moreish Idols' All In The Game
• Jethro Tull's Curious Ruminant
• The Wiggles' Wiggle Up, Giddy Up - With Friends!
• Annie DiRusso's Super Pedestrian
• Caylee Hammack's Bed Of Roses
• Kedr Livanskiy's Myrtus Myth
• ERRTH's ERRTH
• Staticlone's Better Living Through Static Vision
• Eilis Frawley's Fall Forward
• LAKE's Bucolic Gone
• Ingrown's Idaho
• JB Dunckel & Jonathan Fitoussi's Mirages II
• Michael Cera Palin's We Could Be Brave
• Nicole McCabe's A Song To Sing
• Combust's Belly Of The Beast
• Two-Man Giant Squid's Two-Man Giant Squid
• Matt Embree's Orion
• Disturbed's The Sickness 25th Anniversary Deluxe
• Split Moon's More Clouds More Stars
• Hong Kong Stingray’s The Deepest Shades Of Red (Part 2)
• Jerzy Mączyński's DO 555PS
• Gabrielle Pietrangelo's Back To The Heart
• Livingston's A Hometown Odyssey (The Story Continues)
• Daniel Seavey's Second Wind
• Andy James’ Happy People
• Siyahkal's Days of Smoke and Ash / روزای دود و خاکستر
• Freak Slug's I Blow Out Big Candles (But With A Cherry On Top)
• Astropical's Astropical
• Darci Phenix's Sable
• Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners' Colorado’s On Fire Again
• Pale Blue Eyes' New Place
• mssv’s On And On
• flypaper's big nada/another orbit
• Takuro Okada's The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line
• LO-PAN's Get Well Soon
• Frederikke Hoffmeier's The Girl With The Needle OST
• Machinedrum's 3RMX82
• Orchid's The Skull Sessions
• Red Snapper's Reeled And Skinned (30th Anniversary Edition)
• Yes' Close To The Edge Super Deluxe Edition
• John Mayall's Second Generation Box Set
• Forest Swords' Bolted (Deconstructed)
• Hannah Wicklund’s Live At The Troubadour
• Raq Baby's More Spill EP
• Swervedriver's The World’s Fair EP
• Turbo Diesel's Turbo Diesel EP
• Esme Emerson's Applesauce EP
• Pinch & Lorem's Red Rabbit EP
• Skip The Needle's Wake Up Wake Up Wake Up EP
• Crown Magnetar's Punishment EP
• Seasonal Falls' Improvised Sinking EP
• Thin Lear's A Shadow Waltzed Itself EP
