Reviewing "Foxes In The Snow"

Jason Isbell takes on love lost and love found in his new album

First things first: Foxes In The Snow is a divorce album. The songs are strung between two poles: the end of his marriage with Amanda Shires, and the start of his relationship with artist Anna Weyant. While Isbell has written plenty of fictional songs in his career, this album explicitly lends itself to the biographical explanation.

On Foxes In The Snow, he goes full old-school, singing alone and accompanied only by his acoustic guitar. John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Gillian Welch all strike me as clear reference points here. I would also suggest that Zach Bryan had some influence on this album, but not in the way you might think.

Bryan himself is heavily indebted to Jason Isbell. He covered “Dress Blues” early in his career, and has spoken at length about Isbell’s influence on him. Unlike Isbell, known for his prickly perfectionism, Bryan has a high-volume, workmanlike approach to making and releasing music. He even fashioned this into a mission statement in early-career standout “Me and Mine,” hoarsely singing that “badly written songs next to a horse’s shit is what an Okie boy prefers.”

Bryan has shown that a singer-songwriter can become an A-Lister without a backing band or much in the way of self-editing, and Isbell follows suit here with his rawest album yet. The production is stripped-back and it sounds like it was all recorded live (and not stitched together).

The album’s opener, “Bury Me,” feels directly indebted to “Big Country Blues” or “A Song For,” both melancholy Townes Van Zandt efforts that memorialize life on the road. Isbell reminisces abstractly about tour life on the song, traveling from “Tokyo to Tennessee,” remembering the windmills that “turn up 55” and painting the picture—more or less—of a rambling man. Isbell even tells the song listener to bury me “right where I fall,” indicating that he has no home.

Increasing the sense of self-memorialization is his suggestion that his mourners “find an old live oak to carve my name,” referencing his 2013 standout “Live Oak” from Southeastern and explicitly positioning this song within his own career narrative. While some fans were disappointed by “Bury Me” when it was released as a single, it is a strong track that sets a melancholy tone for a largely melancholy album.

Right after “Bury Me” comes the feel-good “Ride to Robert’s,” which is a pretty piece of music let down by its on-the-nose lyrics:

'Cause I don't say things that I don't mean
And you're the best thing I've ever seen
You can have my money
And you spend your own
I'm still running but I'm not alone

We all get lost out here
The deepest ditches line the righteous path
And God said, "hold my beer"
And he made a man so he could watch and laugh

I’m happy—sincerely—that Isbell is happy. But the song loses itself in cliches that an in-form Isbell would undermine, or at least complicate. A much better version of this song comes later with “Foxes In The Snow,” where Isbell conjures a sort of abstract folk eroticism.

The most interesting part of “Ride To Robert’s” is a bit of lyrical continuity in the third verse, where Isbell tells his new lover that he’ll “put an easel in the empty room,” so she can “dream all day.” This reminds me of the artist-partner lines from a stronger Jason Isbell song, “24 Frames:”

And this is how you talk to her when no one else is listening
And this is how you help her when the muse goes missing
You vanish so she can go drowning in a dream again

Isbell returns to form on “Eileen,” a stunning bit of breakup mise-en-scene that tells us how the marriage ended without ever really telling us.

A diamond earring in a Bowery bed
You kicked your shoes across the floor
Do you regret the things that went unsaid
Or have you heard it all before?

Eileen, you should've seen this coming sooner
Do I mean to be alone for all my days?
Eileen, you thought the truth was just a rumor
But that's your way

Isbell doesn’t exonerate himself or “Eileen” in this song, although the tone is one of forgiveness. “You thought the truth was just a rumor” strikes me in particular as a bit of Isbellian genius that highlights the epistemic ambiguity of heartbreak. Sometimes people just fall out of love with each other, and the answers are never clear.

“Gravelweed” is a brutal follow-up to “Eileen” that takes a similar tack, although it is more self-punishing. It also takes a magnifying glass to the performative nature of breakups, as Isbell wonders at his muted reaction to the end of his marriage.

I wish that I could be angry, punch a hole in the wall
Drink a fifth of cheap whiskey and call and call and call
But that ain't me anymore, baby, never was, to tell the truth
I just saw it in a movie and thought that's what I was supposed to do

Celebrities are forced to constantly grapple with questions of “realness” and performance, and that tension surfaces throughout “Gravelweed.”

I wish that I could be angry, I wish I didn't understand
I said your skin was like water and let you flow right through my hands
Is there a love that's not crazy? Is there a life that's not a lie?
All I know is that I had to go, you know why, why, why

This sense of grappling with the gap between performance and reality is only rendered more poignant by the very-public nature of Isbell and Shires’ relationship. “Cover Me Up,” perhaps his biggest song—and almost always the big showstopper on tour—is about Shires helping him sober up. That’s what comes to mind when I listen to the chorus of “Gravelweed.”

I was a gravelweed, and I need you to raise me
You couldn't reach me once I felt like I was raised
And now that I live to see my melodies betray me
I'm sorry the love songs all mean different things today

In “Cover Me Up,” his career-defining love song, Isbell sings about the night that “I tore off your dress, in Richmond on high.” Isbell and Shires have made it clear that these specific lyrics do not reference a positive memory. Richmond was where Isbell hit rock bottom, and while the specifics of the referenced event are not clear, they appear to have been traumatic for Shires. As time passes, “Cover Me Up” will remain a rousing call to sobriety and testament to the power of tough love. But I won’t blame Isbell if he never performs it again; breakups can sharpen difficult memories to an unbearable definition.

“Don’t Be Tough” is when you really feel the John Prine influence; this could easily be a Prine outtake, comparable to “That’s The Way That The World Goes ‘Round.” While I’m sure some Isbell fans will get jazzed up by this song’s spiritual connection to his classic “Outfit,” it is sorely missing the narrative/ancestral throughline that carries into that song’s anthemic chorus.

“Open and Close,” on the other hand, is a gorgeous tribute to the start of his new relationship. It starts with him in a bad mood:

The fireplace isn't real
It's some sort of LED light and a mirror
But I like that better tonight
Sitting here with a woman I don't know at all
She's so small

And I'm mad at the sidewalk
I'm mad at the rain
I'm mad at the band that played Kid Charlemagne in a bar in the village
And the solo was fucked all to hell
And you could tell

I'm dressed up and waiting for something to change
The overhead lighting makes faces so strange
But there's something about her that's breaking my heart and my fast
How long could it last?

There’s another Isbell Easter Egg here, this time calling back to “Codeine,” where he complains about a cover band “trying to fake their way through Castles Made Of Sand.”

More importantly, this song is a narratively impressive gem that takes us from the ignominious beginning of his relationship, all the way to his glorious present. At first he didn’t know her, he hated the band, and the overhead lighting sucked. But there’s “something about her,” something powerful enough to break not only his heart but his (romantic/sexual) fast. When he says “How long could it last?” he is talking about that fast—about the post-breakup abstinence.

And day after day after day after day passes
Day after day after day after day passes
Day after day after day after day passes by

Here Isbell enters a sort of musical reverie that his listeners won’t be used to; it strikes me as a distinctly late-’60s moment, something you’d hear in a Donovan song.

And there's tea on the table
A dog in my lap
And I might be capable of taking a nap in this New York apartment
Peace in the eye of the storm
It's so warm

Well, I'm open and close now to minding the flame
She speaks in a whisper and calls me by name
And she says I remind her of Calgary, where she was raised
It's time to be brave
It's time to be brave
It's time to be brave

These lyrics are as straightforwardly sweet as anything else on the album. But they are saved by the arc, by the lyrical progression form darkness to light. There is some CSNY here, too—think of “Our House,” which David Crosby wrote about Joni Mitchell.

“Crimson and Clay,” which appears to be an early favorite of Isbell’s online fandom, hasn’t quite grabbed me yet. It’s a nice-sounding track, but its topic—his complicated, powerful ties to Alabama—feels a little tired. The elements that tackle Isbell-as-hick are better understood in “Alabama Pines.” And when Isbell tackles racism, singing briefly about “brown eyes crying in the hall,” and “rebel flags on the highway,” it just reminds me of the racially-aware micro-fiction of “Cast Iron Skillet.”

“Good While It Lasted,” ironically, isn’t just about the end of Isbell’s second marriage. There is at least one stanza that clearly references his new girlfriend Anna Weyant, who is a painter:

Baby, let me learn from you
How'd you get that shade of blue?
What's it like from where you stand?
Let me hold your steady hand

This is a little confusing, because the song’s titular refrain seems to center his marriage to Shires:

And all that I wanted was all that I had
And it was good while it lasted
Now I feel like a boy who got caught being bad
And it was good while it lasted

Regardless of the song’s subject, the writing is too generic to stand out, its emotional thrust weakened by the broadness of the word choice throughout. This is also true of the album’s closer, “Wind Behind The Rain.” The album’s odd sequencing is underlined by the fact that this unremarkable pair of songs sandwiches “True Believer,” one of the most raw and unguarded songs that Jason Isbell has ever recorded.

“True Believer,” starts out with a few lines that take direct aim at his fans, who flooded the internet with speculation about infidelity and his (supposed lack of) sobriety when Isbell and Shires announced their split.

Take your hand off my knee, take your foot off my neck
Why are y'all examining me like I'm a murder suspect?
If I got a little loose, I just forgot to be afraid
But I started out a true believer, babe

Isbell is almost certainly aware of his online fandom; in recent months, his new girlfriend Anna Weyant personally reached out to moderators of the grotesquely evil r/jasonisbellsnark subreddit in a plea for social media mercy. That subreddit was eventually shut down, thankfully, although some other corners of Reddit are still plagued with near-constant invective about the age gap between Isbell and Weyant, as well as Isbell’s imagined marital sins.

Once the haters have been addressed, however—and a relapse hinted at with “If I got a little loose—” Isbell turns his attention squarely on his ex-wife Amanda Shires.

A lot of dangerous memories, a lot of bars in this town
But oh, to have loved and lost and then still stuck around
But I heard God in the Ryman, I crawled out of the grave
And I guess I'm still a true believer, babe

All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don't like it
There's a letter on the nightstand I don't think I'll ever read
Well, I finally found a match, and you kept daring me to strike it
And now I have to let it burn to let it be

Here Isbell flashes his capacity to both utilize and subvert cliches at the same time. “To have loved and lost,” he sings, never closing the loop with “is better to have never loved at all.” Instead he is moving onto new topics: sticking around, hearing God at the Ryman, crawling out of the grave. In this stanza he cycles through half-cliche and metaphor and image and emotional truth at high speed.

The way Isbell modulates his voice upwards alongside the melody at the start of the second, angrier stanza is a sign that he will eventually fashion it into a live Southern rockstar banger, ala “When We Were Close.” Isbell doesn’t quite defend himself in this song, which is interesting. He doesn’t like hearing that he broke his ex-wife’s heart; but he also doesn’t deny it.

I can't remember my dreams, I guess it could be the meds
But the sound of you screaming won't get out of my head
I still remember the fever 'fore it started to fade
I really was a true believer, babe

Here the song goes ominously dark with reference to “the sound of you screaming.” It makes me think of Weathervanes standout “Death Wish,” which positioned the song’s unnamed female subject—I won’t go further than that—as someone suffering from severe mental illness, manic episodes and suicidal ideation.

Isbell refers here to a “fever” that started to fade; this strikes me as a terribly cynical, depressing way to look at young love. It is softened by his refrain of being a true believer, but the past tense— “I really was a true believer, babe” —adds a touch of ambiguity. It suggests that he believed in the relationship for a long time—but he just can’t do it anymore.

Like the stain on your teeth, I'm as stubborn as wine
Just when you think that I'm beaten, I get up every time
So when we pass on the highway, I'll smile and I'll wave
And I'll always be a true believer, babe
I'll always be a true believer, babe
I'll always be a true believer, babe

Isbell clearly targets Shires with this line; his ex-wife has shared many a wine-drinking Instagram story over the years. But he deflates the cruelty by comparing himself to the wine on her teeth, a metaphor that minimizes his significance in her life. He knows that she has moved on, is moving on, will continue to move on. He situates himself as a stranger on the highway, waving as he passes her going in the direction. In his final refrain—I’ll always be a true believer, babe—he reaffirms his belief in the worthiness of his ex-wife, the worthiness of the love they shared, the worthiness of love and life writ large. It provides a durable closure to a painful, powerful album.