Jason Isbell has earned his reputation as one of America’s greatest living songwriters by writing detail-rich tales about family schisms, working class struggle, and Southern identity, but it’s his gift for gut-punch love songs that has cemented his legacy. The Alabama singer swore off his demons under the nurturing care of a lover in “Cover Me Up,” masterfully juxtaposed professions of eternal love with inevitable death in “If We Were Vampires,” and created a tale of devotion so unshakeable, in “Flagship,” that Jimmy Carter’s grandson referenced it in his eulogy for the president.
On the new Foxes in the Snow, a solo album that benches his longtime backing band the 400 Unit in favor of just his plaintive voice and Martin acoustic guitar, Isbell seems to realize that not every song needs to be an opus. To be sure, there are some here — with such talent, he can’t help himself — but the majority find Isbell enjoying the well-earned freedom of writing about the everyday and not the grandly metaphorical. He discovers beauty in the mundane: cups of tea, dogs curled up in laps, sharing closet space for your partner’s shoes.
However, there is an elephant in the writing room: Foxes in the Snow marks Isbell’s first album since filing for divorce from his wife and bandmate Amanda Shires in 2023, and beginning a relationship with a New York painter. While he’s often prided himself on prioritizing characters in his songs (“King of Oklahoma,” “Decoration Day”), he leans hard into main-character syndrome on Foxes, with jarring results. It’s impossible to miss the allusions to Isbell’s personal life over the 11 tracks; its first single, the cowboy trail song “Bury Me,” now sounds like a misdirection.
Repeatedly, Isbell practically shouts from the rooftops that he’s newly in love. In the bluegrassy “Ride to Robert’s,” he envisions his missus visiting him “when everything’s green…Tennessee at the end of June,” and squiring her to downtown Nashville for a night at the legendary honky-tonk. They take seats in the balcony and gawk at tourists in cowboy hats and “bachelorettes that don’t know where they are.”
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In the title track, Isbell goes full Elizabeth Barrett Browning, all but asking “How do I love thee?” He counts the ways by declaring love for “my love,” “her mouth,” “the way she turns the lights off in her house,” “her golden hair,” “her bite,” and “the way she disassembles me at night.”
A few lyrics on the album are so unguarded, so vulnerable, and so candid that they reinforce Isbell’s songwriting bravery (“My own behavior was a shock to me,” he sings in “Eileen”). Others, for the very same reasons, might make you cringe. In the gauzy “Open and Close,” he spies the doorman of a New York building fast asleep and ponders waking him. “He’s always so sweet,” he decides, “letting the right people in, the real friends.” In the most ick lyric of “Foxes in the Snow,” he shares that he loves “the carrot” — “but I really like the stick.”
If the bulk of the tracks nod to Isbell’s new romance, the devastating “True Believer” seems to take stock of his high-profile broken relationship. “All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart,” he howls, connecting the dots with assorted lyrical clues (hearing “God in the Ryman,” the Nashville theater he played annually with Shires; comparing his stubbornness to the wine “stain on your teeth”). Despite it all, bygones are bygones, at least to him: “When we pass on the highway, I’ll smile and wave,” Isbell sings, “I’ll always be a true believer babe.”
And yet, despite Foxes’ tendency to indulge Easter eggs that hardcore fans will parse (an easel and a Steely Dan reference, among them), the album contains a pair of Jason Isbell masterpieces: “Eileen” and “Gravelweed.” The former dissects the splintering of a union, putting the onus squarely on the narrator: “Eileen, you should have seen this coming sooner/Do I mean to be alone for all my days?” In the latter, he makes it clear that things have changed — not least among them, his most well-known songs. Isbell apologizes (to his girlfriend, his fans, himself?) in the record’s most bold line: “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.”
But unlike those timeless compositions, this new batch, in all their diaristic voice, feel destined to stay stuck in their moment.
