Jason Isbell - Foxes in the Snow (Mar. 7, 2025) Album • Page 4

True Believer is unreal

 

Yeah Jimbo never came back to go on tour. Unfortunately at that point I guess Jason is technically “firing” him even if there’s no other interpersonal stuff there. Life is hard and people are messy.

 

it’s definitely an uncomfortable listen. listening to songs speaking directly to Amanda juxtaposed with songs featuring super specific biographical details about his new girlfriend is a weird experience for a longtime fan. not judging him or anything, it’s just impossible to ignore the context and just hear the songs.

handful of really great songs though, true believer is devastating. think i agree with the Hyden piece that this album suffers a bit from how raw it is and there are some really clunky lyrics in spots which is rare for Isbell.

 

i like true believer a ton but the chorus is kinda petulant and lame

 

Album is fantastic. The last 3 in particular are amazing.

 

First impressions- I love the first 4 and last 3 songs, the middle 4 were fine

 

It’s absolutely petulant but I’m not going to pretend I’m mature enough to not still enjoy it. Not saying you’re pretending obviously just talking about me lol

 

I really really like this record, a lot more than I expected to. Willing to admit I’m a stan though—and this probably rates middle of the catalog for me when the new wears off

 

yeah this is really good but its just not for me right now lol

love ride to robert's though

 

I almost skipped this altogether but I'm glad I didn't

it's solid

 

I like @DaydreamNation am a stan, so I just adore this. Definitely not on the level of Reunions or Weathervanes, both of which I think are masterpieces, but it's a good ol' fashioned "leave it all on the table" divorce record, the likes of which I feel like I haven't heard in a little while.

 

it reminds me of the god said hold my beer line earlier on the album. just seems like stuff that if he took some more time, or at least if he did this album the way he has the recent stretch of albums, would have been finessed into a better line

 

it also feels like half a divorce record and half a new relationship record. hearing some of the songs sandwiched between each other feels a little weird. almost wonder if it would have worked better as two separate EPs

 

My cynical side says part of this is a divorce record in the sense that the recording was fast (cheaper), with no musicians to pay, and the tour is solo (again nobody else to pay and much cheaper to put on) in part because divorces are expensive haha

Not an indictment of the record or anything tho.

 

i doubt that has much of anything to do with it

 

Yeah he made it pretty clear in the WSJ piece that he felt this was something he had to do on his own, which makes sense. I dont exactly expect another JI400 album next year but i certainly hope he returns to the band sooner rather than later.

 

anyone feel like copy/pasting?

also that headline is a real gut punch.

 

The marriage of Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires was one of music’s great love stories—so it stunned fans when the Americana singer-songwriter filed for divorce in December 2023.

Now Isbell is releasing his first album since the split.

Foxes in the Snow, his 10th album, an unplugged record that’s just vocals and acoustic guitar, comes out this spring. Isbell made it without input from any members of his longtime backing band, the 400 Unit, which often featured Shires. Shires, a fiddler and singer-songwriter, was known for helping Isbell quit drinking and acting as a sounding board for gut-punching tracks like “Cover Me Up” and “If We Were Vampires.” The couple have a 9-year-old daughter, Mercy.

Isbell made his new album without his band, the 400 Unit. ‘There’s a lot of heavy stuff on the record, and it felt private,’ he says.

In a Brooklyn sandwich shop on a chilly day, Isbell explains matter-of-factly why he went solo, musically speaking, saying he wanted to “prove to myself that I still had it,” while avoiding making his bandmates “participate in my own darkness.”

“There’s a lot of heavy stuff on the record, and it felt private,” the 46-year-old Alabama native says. “I didn’t really want anybody else in the room for that.”

Isbell made his name in the Drive-By Truckers, which reimagined Southern rock for the 21st century, before getting fired for erratic behavior related to alcoholism. With the 400 Unit, he’s evolved into a rock songwriter’s songwriter—a descendant of Warren Zevon and John Prine—with a robust touring business and an understated, savvy fame.


Isbell’s ex-wife Amanda Shires was known for helping him quit drinking and acting as a sounding board for some of this most gut-punching tracks. Isbell filed for divorce in December 2023.

But the past few years have been bumpy, a mixture of career highs and personal lows. He won a Grammy for best Americana album for 2023’s Weathervanes; he opened for superstar Zach Bryan, too. He even landed an acting role in Martin Scorsese’sKillers of the Flower Moon as the character Bill Smith. He also fired his day-one 400 Unit comrade, bassist Jimbo Hart, and filed for divorce from Shires, 43.


There are new faces in his life now. He introduced two fresh names to 400 Unit’s lineup. In February 2024, he met and eventually began a relationship with the 29-year-old painter and art-world phenom Anna Weyant, who previously dated art dealer Larry Gagosian, 79. Isbell read about Weyant in GQ magazine; after he reached out, she caught his show at Radio City Music Hall. Known for her anachronistic, old-master style paintings of girls and women, Weyant made the cover art for Isbell’s new album.

For Isbell, the past few years have been bumpy, a mixture of career highs and personal lows.

Shires “didn’t cheat, I didn’t cheat,” Isbell says. “We weren’t plate-throwers, and we weren’t yelling in front of the kid.” But there were divides over raising their daughter and tensions resulting from their lack of boundaries between work and marriage, he says. His career had also taken off in ways hers had not.

“It got to the point where, if something really good happened to me, I wouldn’t even mention it, because I knew it would hurt her,” he says, adding he too would have felt wounded if the roles were reversed. “It made the atmosphere unbreathable after a while….

I could see, 10 miles away, a drink headed in my direction.”

A representative for Shires declined to comment on her relationship with Isbell.

Now that he’s often staying with Weyant, Isbell splits his time between New York and Nashville, where his daughter lives.

He knows some fans are upset about the divorce but says he had to do what was right for him. Sobriety “motivates me to make decisions that other people might not understand,” he says. The risk of relapse is “a train,” he says. “You’ve got time to step off the tracks if you hear it coming from a long way off. But if you don’t hear it coming until it’s on top of you…it’s a f—ing train.”

Isbell has a new girlfriend, artist Anna Weyant, and splits his time between New York and Nashville.

Isbell wanted to go solo and acoustic on the new album partly because it would be emotionally and logistically easier than making a typical album. No complicated musical arrangements to work out with bandmates, for one thing. “I’ve felt enough pressure over the last year,” he says.

He wrote a good deal of Foxes in the Snow last summer in New York, while Weyant painted 10 hours a day. The album showcases his deft guitar playing and has heart-stopping lyrics like: “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today,” likely a reference to “Cover Me Up,” a song about how Shires’s love helped him pledge to stay sober.

Isbell is doing a string of solo shows for the new record before rejoining the 400 Unit live in April. He still plans to play “Cover Me Up”; its emotional weight hasn’t gone away. But, for him, the meaning has shifted.

“It’s about something finite now,” Isbell says. “It’s more of a document than a promise.”

 

I hope I never need this album. Am I supposed to say thank you or go to hell for how “Good While It Lasted” makes me feel?

 

its a good mix of both

 

He's never made a headphones album before. Even Southeastern needed to be played out loud in an empty room.

 

disagree

reunions is a headphone album

 

it's intimately communal for me. my wife, sister-in-law, and I played that vinyl nonstop while we were in quarantine.

 

Yeah, Reunions has gotta be one of my most played vinyl records. I had one of the independent record shops in town order me a copy of the indie exclusive version he did, and then they dropped it off at my house. I then played it every day for awhile.

What a weird fucking year that was. Jesus.

 

This is a special record. Greatest songwriter alive.