Jason Isbell - "Foxes in the Snow"
Life is beautiful. Life is vicious.
I am a recent addition to the Jason Isbell bandwagon, to be sure — the man has been actively producing albums for almost twenty years now, and this is only the second release I’ve listened to. The last of those was 2023’s Weathervanes,1 which included Isbell’s band, The 400 Unit.
And that’s one of the most unique things about Isbell — he and his band have this degree of separation. Not every Isbell album includes the 400 Unit. To date, the 400 Unit do not have any standalone releases or releases with other artists.
If we include 2021’s Georgia-centric covers album, Georgia Blue, Foxes in the Snow is Isbell’s tenth studio album, but only his fourth without the support of the 400 Unit. The last time he released a truly solo album, in 2015, the world was still laughing at the idea of a Trump presidency, as the album released one month after that golden escalator ride.
Ten years later, Foxes in the Snow is being released into an entirely different world. This also applies to Isbell’s personal life — it’s those changes which most affect the writing and development of Foxes in the Snow.
In 2015, Isbell was still freshly married (since 2013) to his second wife, Amanda Shires, a member of the 400 Unit as well as The Highwomen and the Thrift Store Cowboys, and their first (and only) child would arrive on September 1st.
But, in December 2023, just six months after the release of Weathervanes, Isbell filed for divorce. As Rolling Stone details in their article on the revelation, Isbell and Shires had had a contentious relationship at times — both were touring musicians trying to maintain their own careers, and they faced early challenges with Isbell’s battle with alcoholism, which Shires helped him get into rehab for. Even after that, though, the pair were not always on the most loving terms. From the above-linked Rolling Stone article, penned by David Browne:
Fans of both musicians would often read between the lines to determine which songs they’d written about the other. Although the couple rarely confirmed those suspicions, few doubted that Shires’ “Fault Lines,” from her 2022 album Take It Like a Man, was about their marital issues: “You could say it’s all my fault we just couldn’t get along/And if anyone asks, I’ll say what’s true, and really, it’s ‘I don’t know.’”
The 2023 documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, an episode of HBO’s Music Box directed by Sam Jones, put their contentious relationship on full display. The film centered around the recording of 2020’s Reunions and, of course, illuminated Isbell’s personal life in the process. Given the details that were shown, it’s surprising that the marriage lasted three more years.
But when one chapter ends, a new one begins.
Somewhere in mid- to late-2024, Isbell started a new relationship. His new girlfriend, burgeoning visual artist Anna Weyant, serves as a co-lead muse for the album, opposite Shires. The relationship is less than a year old, but that makes it no less important to Isbell as he navigates the turmoil of this monumental change in his life.
As he told Spin in an interview a month-and-a-half ago, explaining why Foxes in the Snow is a solo album:
“A lot of the stories on this record, a lot of these details and a lot of these songs are very personal. I didn’t want to force anybody else to be in the room with that.”
The album runs rampant with duality, fed by the roller-coaster emotions which have dominated the last couple of years of Isbell’s personal life. It’s half-heartbreak, half-hope; the cover image, seen at the top of this page, is an Anna Weyant original, tying her relationship to Isbell to the album before you ever hear a note, and yet the opening song is titled “Bury Me”, openly mourning the closing of a chapter and the death of the man he thought he was.
The second and third tracks continue to showcase this emotional clash. The third verse of “Ride to Robert’s” reads:
Everything's green right now
Tennessee's looking after you
You get a year to come down
And I'll put an easel in the empty room
The significance of that last line cannot be overstated — he’s offering physical and emotional space to Weyant, planning and hoping for this new future with her.
And this is followed by “Eileen”, a song about the death of a relationship. It’s third verse is:
Somebody broke my heart once
And I was useless for a week
I didn't leave my apartment
I didn't eat, I didn't speak
But then I found the letter she wrote
Against the wall behind the bed
It said, "Forever is a dead man's joke"
And that's the only thing it said
If “Forever is a dead man’s joke” isn’t a heavy-ass line, nothing is.
And I have to underscore here that I’m only detailing the first three songs of eleven. The writing is superb throughout this album, with heavy layering of metaphor and meaning. It was readily apparent to me how good Isbell’s songwriting was on Weathervanes, but the poetry here really just underscores how good he really is.
On the surface, the writing often feels disconnected, but after pausing to read through the lyrics, it becomes apparent how everything fits together and ties back to Isbell’s recent experiences. I haven’t even (and won’t, for the sake of time) broken into “Gravelweed” or title track “Foxes in the Snow”.2
Foxes in the Snow won’t be for everybody — the bare-bones, folksy acoustic style sometimes feels sonically underwhelming, especially compared to the technical and layered instrumentation of Isbell’s sound when he’s nestled into his accompanying 400 Unit.3 But, really, that’s part of the point, I think; the subject matter is highly personal and emotional — at points, even painful.4
Fittingly, the album ends with a love song entitled “Wind Behind the Rain” — a song that looks to the future while acknowledging that ‘sunshine and rainbows’ are far from guaranteed.
Rating: Blue
Weathervanes earned a Blue rating from me and ranked 12th in 2023’s Top 40 list.
I will, briefly, acknowledge that I’m in love with this title. In an interview with The Tennessean, Isbell explained where the title came from:
"I've had to have a lot of really difficult conversations over the past couple of years," Isbell said, "and all of them had one thing in common: It was me being honest as soon as I got the opportunity to be.
"And a fox with a bloody mouth — that is an honest beast."
[ . . . ]
Isbell used to have chickens at his home outside of Nashville, he explained, and he'd have to shoo the foxes away from them.
"Everybody knows that the fox is a smart animal, but it just is shocking when you see something that beautiful that is on its way to kill your chickens," he said. "The fox is so graceful ... I guess that's why they're good at their job."
It was the perfect imagery for his album.
"I like something that is beautiful but also vicious, because I think that's how life is," he said. "I think that's how adulthood has to be."
I have to underscore here that the ‘underwhelming’ bit really is contingent on the comparison; there are a lot of moments here where it’s hard to believe that there isn’t a second guitar, or that Isbell isn’t tracking vocals and guitar separately.
In the same Tennessean interview linked in FN 2, Isbell lists a set of rules he made for himself for the album, and the first of these enforces this uncomfortable honesty:
Isbell crafted a very specific set of rules for this record, he explained, ones that held him accountable in both baring his heart and achieving the sound he was aiming for:
If it makes you uncomfortable, it has to go in the song.
If it sounds like it came from a songwriter, it has to go out of the song.
If you can't sing it and play it at the same time, it's out.
It all has to be solo acoustic — both on the record, and played live.