After three studio albums and one charity album featuring covers of songs by Georgia artists following President Joe Biden’s 2020 election, Jason Isbell is back to playing on his own. Out today via his own independent label Southeastern, Foxes in the Snow is Isbell’s first solo album without his supremely talented band the 400 Unit in a decade.
The 11-track set is return to a more acoustic sound that places an acoustic guitar and Isbell’s soulful voice at the foreground as he grapples with death, love and everything Tennessee. The album is his first since filing for divorce from his longtime wife, 400 Unit member and solo musician Amanda Shires at the end of 2023. And, in true Jason Isbell fashion, Foxes in the Snow does not stray away from addressing difficult issues.
With more than 20 years as a professional musician – first as a member of the Drive-By Truckers and then as a solo artist and with the 400 Unit – Isbell has used his music to publicly grapple with everything from his poor behavior to getting sober and being a dad. For this latest album, he tackles the end of a relationship, his continued belief in commitment and how it all impacts those his old love songs.
How did you decide it was time for a solo album instead of one with the 400 Unit?
It had more to do with challenging myself to do something different than anything else. I’m 46 [year-old] and I’ve been making records since I was 22 and I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Making another full band, fully produced sort of rock album didn’t feel like the right thing to me right now either. We did such a good job on [our last album] Weathervanes and I didn’t want to keep trying to do a different version of the same thing.
Foxes In the Snow is very much not a full band album. It’s bare bones in comparison.
Especially with [2013 album] Southeastern, Dave Cobb and I were trying really hard to demonstrate song first and make the song the center of everything. I still try to do that when I am in the studio, but I feel like it’s not as impactful sometimes as it is when you just strip everything away. I like reminding people of the old work.
Lyrically, I was trying to push myself on this record. When I am pushing, I am attempting to grow. More often than not that will come out as something else that I need to ignore. Originally, it was “ignore the size of the audience,” because I was playing to rooms that were really small and sometimes they weren’t full. Then it was “ignore the critics,” because they weren’t always getting what I was doing. Rolling Stone, Pitchfork – they didn’t like Southeastern. Then it was “ignore the record sales,” because the number of records that people sell is so significantly big.
What were you trying to ignore with this album?
Now, in a lot of ways, what I was trying to ignore were the expectations of songwriting craft. I’m not here to impress anybody. I don’t have anything to prove. If you want a witty songwriter and a bunch of metaphors and stuff like that, fine. We can do that, but that’s not serving the point. The point for me is that I needed to express the way I felt in these songs. And sometimes I don’t feel metaphors. Sometimes, I feel straight up emotions just like everybody else.
Did you feel the need to put boundaries on anything you wrote for this album?
I normally do the opposite of that. If something’s uncomfortable, I force myself to keep it in the song. The trick to that is going in without bitterness and going in without any kind of maudlin demonstrations of emotion. There’s a big difference between feeling a certain way and demonstrating a certain feeling. The former is always allowed. Everybody in the world is allowed to feel however they need to feel at all times. But when that turns into action, then it becomes manipulative. When you’re using those emotions to fuel the way you act in order to make other people feel a certain way, then you’re weakening your position as a narrator.
This wouldn’t be a Jason Isbell album without some emotional intensity, and it certainly gets heavy in the middle with tracks like “Gravelweed” and “Eileen.” But it ends on a lighter note with the lovely “Wind Behind the Rain.”
I wrote [that song] for my little brother and his wife when they got married. She came to me and asked if I would write them a first dance song. Nobody’s ever asked me that before and I thought, that’s so bold. But since you asked, I’m going to do it.
I was really nervous. It’s crazy. I was more that day than I would be at Red Rocks [Amphitheatre] or something, because of how much it meant to them. Then it wound up making the record. I felt like it ended on a very hopeful note. I want people to understand that I believe there’s still always a reason to commit to something. Whether it’s a person or a belief or a way of life. The process of committing yourself I so much more valuable than how it turns out.
That was incredibly brave of your brother and now sister-in-law. You’ve very good at writing sad songs.
I know. She could have gotten herself in a bind with that if I’d written a traditional song of my own. It would have been bad.
Did they hear the song before you sang it on their wedding day?
No. Nobody did. I just got up and sang it while they were dancing their first dance. I wasn’t gonna get halfway through the song and be like, “and then she died of cancer.” [Laughs.] But if anybody ever asks me to do that again though, it’s fair game. I played along the first time. This time, I’m pulling some s–t.
You’ve created a lot of beautiful love songs throughout your career that fans have glommed onto. Then on track “Gravelweed” you sing, “And now that I live to see my melodies betray me/ I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” Are you apologizing to yourself? Fans?
That’s a good question. Why not both? It doesn’t say that the songs don’t mean anything. It’s just they mean different things. Once you finish a song, you turn it loose out in the world. It’s not really yours anymore. It belongs to the people that connect with it. It’s still yours in that you carry it with you and you get to revisit it and perform it every night if you want. You get to see it grow and change over the course of performing it. But if you’re too precious about the meaning, you’re going to limit yourself and your audience in the long run.
My life changes. And out of the changes that I’ve made in the last year and a half – ending a long-term relationship – the only thing to me that was confusing about that is what’s going to happen with these songs. After I went out and performed them again, I saw exactly what was going to happen. They were going to continue to mean the same thing for some people and they were going to take on different meanings for other people. Some of them were going to collect a little bit of irony, a little bit of bittersweetness. But the songs were still going to have an impact on me and on the people who heard them.
Looking back to your older work – Southeastern was certified gold by the RIAA earlier this week, which is a first gold certification for you.
How exciting is that! On our own little independent record label. It’s pretty crazy. I never thought that would happen. I remember when that Civil Wars record went gold and it was on their own independent label. I remember thinking, that was amazing. I’ve never heard of such a thing. To me, it reflects, if you’re lucky and you work pretty hard, the idea that there are different avenues, different ways to be successful in the music business now. Also, I’m so grateful to the audience for listening to the record and consuming the record like that.
Right now, you’re playing a string of solo shows, singing mostly new tracks about your divorce and other intimate things. How do these shows compare to your full-band gigs?
I’ve been really grateful for the type of audience that I have. At first, it was a little bit scary emotionally but also mechanically. But the audience has been great. When it works and everybody’s paying attention and nobody’s got their phone out, they’re all listening to what you’re doing – you feel like you can control every single corner, every space in the room.
If you’re playing solo like that, you’re steering a motorcycle rather than a cruise ship. When you’ve got a full band up there, you don’t get to interact with time. You can interact with the volume. There are times in the solo set when I can speed songs up and slow them down intentionally, just to control an extra level of the dynamics. I can do that in a split second, whereas with the band, it takes a few beats. If I am up there by myself, I can move with a lot of precision. You just have to turn off the part of your brain that’s yelling, “Don’t screw this up.”
You recently rescheduled a few of those shows because you didn’t want to miss your daughter’s performances.
Yeah, it’s Frozen Junior. She’s Anna in Frozen Junior. She’s killing it. She’s doing really well. It’s great because she was shy to sing in front of people until this and now she’s walking around singing in front of everybody.
[The school] doesn’t tell you the dates of the performances. We book our shows a year in advance and I didn’t know the dates. As soon as they gave me the dates, I thought, I’m going to have to reschedule the shows. I hated to do it after people had already made plans, but some things are more important.
