The thing about legends is, they’re often a kernel of truth packed inside a snowball of bullshit.
Legends allow us, the audience, who are so far away from the truth of the artist’s life that we can never hope to know it, the illusion of imagining that we do. Legends play a crucial role in the context around Jason Isbell’s new album, Foxes In The Snow, the first following his high-profile divorce from fellow singer-songwriter Amanda Shires.
From the moment back in 2012 when Shires staged an intervention that led to notorious alcoholic Isbell finally getting sober, the legend surrounding their love story blossomed. Once Isbell sobered up, they got engaged, he wrote and recorded one of the great albums of this young century, they got married, the album came out to ecstatic reviews, and they had a child together. The ballad Isbell wrote about falling in love with Shires (“Cover Me Up”) became an iconic entry in his catalogue and frequent set-closer. Four years later he released an impassioned love song (“If We Were Vampires”) about wishing he and Shires could be together forever. Soulmates, bandmates, and co-parents: to the audience looking in from the outside, Isbell and Shires were living a fairy tale.
Until they weren’t.
Tensions between the couple became apparent during the recording sessions for Isbell’s 2023 album Weathervanes, as revealed in the perhaps too-honest documentary film Running With Our Eyes Closed. Their pending divorce went public in early 2024 and was finalized late in the year. That background makes it easier to understand why Isbell “didn’t really want anyone else in the room” during the recording of Foxes In The Snow; it was too fraught a moment to approach in any other way.
The album is both stark—just Isbell’s voice and a single acoustic guitar, start to finish—and full of life, thanks to his dexterous, inventive playing and keen ear for melody. This dichotomy feels right on an album that addresses what’s been lost with often-bracing directness, while also celebrating love and possibility.
If only that was the final word on this album… but let’s take the journey before we arrive at the conclusion.
First cut “Bury Me” opens a capella, reminding you what a terrific singer and crafter of vocal melodies Isbell is as he moves through a song about transitions and transformation, not to mention seizing the moment: “Still got so much to learn / Still feel alive.” His prodigious picking skills take center stage at the top of “Ride To Robert’s,” an atmospheric slice of life that’s full of great lines. “We all get lost out here / The deepest ditches line the righteous path / God said ‘Hold my beer’ and made a man so he could watch and laugh.” Still, he ends on an optimistic note: “Give your heart some time to heal / I don’t say things that I don’t mean / You’re the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
After that warm-up, Isbell moves from circling around the subject at hand to facing it head on. “Eileen” is an intense breakup song that reads like a message for Shires:
“It ended like it always ends
Somebody crying on the phone
You tell each other you can still be friends
You both know you're on your own
My own behavior was a shock to me
I never thought I’d have the nerve
I hope you're sleeping through the night, Eileen
I hope they're grading on the curve”
If that wasn’t rough enough road to travel, later on Isbell’s narrator comes across a note from his ex that reads simply “Forever is a dead man’s joke.
Next up, “Gravelweed” brings the album’s context into the foreground as Isbell sifts through the wreckage, trying to figure out what lessons he can take moving forward:
“I was a gravelweed and I needed you to raise me
You couldn’t reach me once I felt like I was raised
And now that I live to see my melodies betray me
I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.”
This hits hard because it’s true: first, that Shires rescued Isbell from himself, which seems to have contributed to a problematic dynamic between them, and second, that all the beautiful songs Isbell wrote about their relationship back in the day now land differently.
And then he moves on, temporarily… “Don’t Be Tough” offers a rhyming, witty, salty primer on maintaining good mental health that touches on the broader context of the album only in passing (“Don’t be tough until you have to / Take your heartbreak on the chin”). “Open And Close” find Isbell feeling vulnerable and wounded while trying to remain open to the possibility of new love—a possibility that arrives with the title track. “Foxes In The Snow” feels like a love song for Isbell’s new partner, artist Anna Weyant, whose painting graces the album cover. It’s playful yet sharp in that distinctive Isbell way: “For all the boys I could have been / All the fights I didn’t win / They put me here against her skin / She can see me.
“Crimson And Clay” is another vivid song about Isbell’s Alabama roots, bringing to life the good, the bad, and the ugly of growing up in the deep South. Just don’t mistake it for a sign he’s ready to move on. First comes “Good While It Lasted,” another scalding breakup song: “All that I wanted was all that I had / And it was good while it lasted.” And then you get to his last word on the relationship, “True Believer”:
“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
Well, I finally found a match, and you kept daring me to strike it
And now I have to let it burn to let it be”
After that brutal climax, Foxes closes with a fervent love song, “Wind Behind The Rain.” The beauty and ache of the song is that it isn’t entirely clear whether he’s writing about his new relationship or remembering his former one; there are lines that feel like oblique references to both “Cover Me Up” and “If We Were Vampires.” In the end, the message seems to be that he still believes in love, still believes that forever is possible.
Foxes In The Snow chronicles everything that Isbell lost in the last couple of years, including both his and Shires’ marriage and the legend that grew up around it, while holding on to hope for better days ahead. And while I missed the dynamics and versatility of Isbell’s superb backing band The 400 Unit, this is an album that Isbell probably did need to make alone in a room with just a microphone and a guitar.
Having said all of the above, I noticed many of the same troubling undercurrents on this album that my colleague Kent did. Consider these lines:
- “I needed you to raise me” (“Gravelweed”)
- “For all the boys I could have been” / “I love the way she sees the child inside the man” (“Foxes In The Snow”)
- “Now I feel like the boy who was caught being bad” (“Good While It Lasted”)
- “All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it” (“True Believer”)
A charitable way of viewing this sequence would be that Jason Isbell is being humble and clever and frank. The way it landed here is that he views himself as an innocent bearing no responsibility for whatever happened, and resents people holding him accountable for his actions.
For all its stark beauty and superb craftsmanship, Foxes In The Snow is a tough listen made tougher by the legend it puts under a microscope. Here’s hoping for peace and clarity for all involved.