Jason Isbell didn’t make Foxes in the Snow—his first solo effort in 10 years without his trusty 400 Unit band—because he knew it would be easy. In fact, he was well aware of how hard it would be. “I don’t want to keep doing stuff that’s easy,” he says.
“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.”
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Isbell is calling from his home in Nashville, wearing a royal blue hoodie, his face clean-shaven, his short grey hair peeking out from his tan ball cap.
“When you’re being this open and this vulnerable, there’s something about doing it alone,” he says. “Even though you know that the results are going to get broadcast to everybody, there’s something about sitting with a guitar and singing a song that makes sense to me when it’s this personal.”
Foxes in the Snow is notably the first album Isbell has made since he filed for divorce from his wife and collaborator, Amanda Shires—the mother of his 9-year-old daughter, Mercy Rose—in December 2023.
While Isbell had been planning on making an acoustic solo album before he wrote the 11 tracks that comprise this album, these songs—particularly “Eileen,” “Gravel Weed,” and “True Believer”—are most likely not what he originally had in mind.
“With those three songs, especially, I’m trying to talk about a period in my life that was difficult, a lot of change,” he tells me in his North Alabama drawl. “I got a divorce. I moved out of the house. I’m trying to help raise my daughter through all of this and deal with the fallout of the relationship.”
Isbell, who has been vaguely public about his divorce, handled the complicated emotions that go along with the breakup of a family the best way he knows how: by pouring his heart into his songwriting.
“What I want to do is to be able to zoom out and sort of see things from a perspective that’s past simple bitterness or anger or resentment or anything like that,” he tells me. “And I want to look at it from the point of view of what was this period in my life? In what ways was this formative for me? And how did I treat the other people who were involved? And how can I use that information to grow as a human being into whatever’s next? And all three of those songs deal with that.”
Isbell may have learned guitar from his Pentecostal preacher grandfather and rock-band-playing uncle back in his hometown of Green Hill, Alabama, but he learned songwriting from Patterson Hood, co-founder and frontman of the Drive-By Truckers, the Southern rock band for which he played guitar for six years. Ironically, the 22-year-old Isbell was quickly recruited into the group in 2001 when the band’s guitarist, Rob Malone, failed to show up for a house concert put on by SPIN magazine.
“Before that I thought of myself more as a guitar player,” he says. “I knew that I could write songs, and I had been writing songs at that point. But I considered my primary job to be playing guitar for a rock band. And then, being around Patterson, I realized that there are a lot of different reasons to write the songs, and it’s not a lottery ticket, whereas you either make it and get rich and famous, or you have to go back into the workforce. It was more like, there are a lot of ways to do this. You just have to be smart. You’ve got to be brave about it.”
“The way I like to tell a story, especially one that carries a lot of emotional weight, is, first of all, you can abandon the idea that you have to either write things that happened to you or things that didn’t happen to you,” he tells me, looking up as he’s searching for his next words, and then back down into his iPhone camera right at me. “All this can get mixed together in any way that you want. It’s a song. It’s not a documentary, so you don’t have to stick to any rules as far as that goes.”
Like his other albums, Isbell taps into that same blend of fact and fiction for Foxes in the Snow. But this time, I have a feeling there’s a lot more of his experiences enveloped into these songs than perhaps in past records.
“The vulnerability doesn’t get easier,” he says. “And it’s not supposed to. If it does, then it’s no longer vulnerability—not the craft of it, but the art of it; trying to actually let these things come out of me and be public, certainly that gets harder over time. It’s hard to reveal those things. It sucks. And when I feel uncomfortable, then I usually think, well, I must be on to something because if I can feel uncomfortable in these songs and share them with everybody else, then maybe the audience will say, ‘You know, I’m not alone in the way that I feel.’”
With his 1940 Martin 0-17 Acoustic guitar—which he felt created a softer sound, allowing more space for his vocals—Isbell recorded the album over five days at the legendary Electric Lady Studios in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. “You could hear the subway,” he tells me. “You can probably hear it on the record if you’re listening very, very closely.”
He chose Electric Lady—the studio that Jimi Hendrix commissioned and used only 10 weeks before his death—because, he says, it was affordable and well-maintained. He wanted the process to be simple and efficient, to be able to walk into the studio with one guitar and a notebook full of songs and make a record in less than a week. The fact that artists like Hendrix, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and other music legends recorded there; well, that was all secondary.
Other songs on this album are about Isbell’s new girlfriend, artist Anna Weyant, the current darling of the art world and whose meteoric rise to fame is something that movies are made about. “Ride to Robert’s,” for instance, with lyrics like, “I’ll put an easel in the empty room, you can dream all day” is a direct reference to her; if it isn’t, it’s a hell of a coincidence.
She also created the album’s cover art.
As painful as divorce can be, he wants the listener to come away with some hope, he says.
“I’m trying to come into all of these songs, all these stories, with as much gratitude as I can have,” he says as he takes a hit from his vape. “And I’m trying to shape that, sit across the table with the version of myself that I’m not necessarily the most comfortable with and shape that into something that can bring a listener some joy.”
He tells me that in writing a song, one that tells a story with the goal of making the listener feel good, one they’ll come back to, you have to create tension and release. Tension alone doesn’t work in a narrative, nor does it work musically, he says. As much as the songs on Foxes in the Snow are meant to be, as he describes, “very heavy songs about things that could be seen as really sad; big, grown-up emotions,” he also uses melody and wit to release that tension, to try to make people want to listen to it again.
“‘True Believer,’ that would be a terribly sad song if there wasn’t any hope,” he says.” And there’s supposed to be this sort of determination. And I want the listener to walk away from that thinking, like Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ said, ‘Scarred But Smarter.’ I want you to go forward into your life with the tools that you have gained from being harmed or being hurt or harming or hurting somebody else.”
That, he says, is just part of the human experience.
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