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Tyler: We’re getting contemporary again, Peter! A release from this very year, 2025!

Peter: It’s crazy. We’re so on topic.

Tyler: Incidentally, we’re looking at today’s album having waited a few months, those months feeling especially like decades.

Peter: I wasn’t ready! I’m the problem! It’s me!

Tyler: Oh, now, there is no fault to be assigned. No need to rush. If you ain’t ready, you ain’t ready.

Peter: Did we say the name of the album? This is suspenseful.

Tyler: It’s…the new Black and Blue anniversary re-release!

Peter: Oh Lord help us!

Tyler: It’s Isbell. We’re talking Jason Isbell this evening. Foxes In The Snow, the first studio album released by the artist since 2023’s Weathervanes, and the first since 2015’s Something More Than Free to be credited to Isbell alone—more often than not, in studio and on tour, he is accompanied by his band The 400 Unit. With Foxes, the solo distinction is especially appropriate, as the music is Isbell on vintage acoustic guitar and vocals, featuring nothing else, no other instruments or musicians.

Peter: First of all, it should come as no surprise that Foxes is excellent. Isbell remains one of our greatest living singer/songwriters, and he’s been operating at or near the peak of his powers for over a decade now. Sober since 2013, his recovery has birthed a string of pretty uniformly brilliant albums dating back to 2013’s Southeastern, the album that kicked off my own fandom, and Foxes continues that streak of excellence.

That being said…

Before we start chopping it up and appreciating all the good things about this album, I’d like to address the elephant in the room. Foxes In The Snow is a divorce album, Isbell having filed for divorce from his wife Amanda Shires in December 2023, but it’s more than that. It’s two things. It’s a divorce/new love album. Jason is now dating the artist Anna Weyant.

Anna Weyant is 29-30 years old (the internet isn’t sure!). Jason Isbell is 46. Now, I don’t have a problem with any of this. Anna Weyant is an adult. Jason is too. They are allowed to do consensual stuff to each other to their hearts content.

My reason for bringing it up is I think there’s a real blind spot on this album. For a guy who traffics in self-awareness and brutal honesty, Jason seems weirdly oblivious to the huge obvious cliche he’s living out right now, namely, leaving his wife (and mother of his child), for a younger/hotter woman.

So, we’re gonna get after it. We can talk about the songs as they roll along, but I was really struck by that, and I’ll be interested to hear your take(s) as we go along.

Tyler: I don’t see quite that dynamic, principally off of the HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, filmed around the creation and release of 2020’s Isbell/400 Unit album Reunions. Isbell and Shires, his then-wife, are the main characters of the film, and it is a brutally uncomfortable watch. If what we see between them onscreen is to be believed, their union was long past its sell-by date.

Peter: Oh, I don’t doubt it. I’m not trying to parent trap them or something. But don’t you see the mid-life crisis playing out before our eyes? Even if that’s not what’s really happening here, it looks like that’s what’s happening here. He’s a bit like the buddy who drops his longtime girlfriend and immediately tries to introduce his new flame to the friend group even though you all liked, and are still friends with, his old girlfriend.

I’m just genuinely surprised Jason didn’t read the room and anticipate the sort of semi-sour aftertaste these circumstances would lend any collection that included both divorce and new love songs.

But, as I said, I like the album! It’s filled with good songs! So, I said my thing, let’s do this!

Tyler: But sometimes everyone’s relieved that the buddy and the girlfriend broke up, because they were a pair of forever sourpusses, not least a duo always dominating the room by virtue of being Americana music’s premier musical couple. You’re right, Shires and Isbell were a seductive match—she helped pull him out of alcoholism, she and he share a child, he wrote “Cover Me Up” and “If We Were Vampires,” among others, about her. We wanted them to make it work! But it had to be so tiresome to be around them. I wound up watching Running With Our Eyes Closed in two parts, so on edge the experience was leaving me. After enduring that, I wasn’t stunned to see them break up. Sad, because they were such a nifty sexy talented item. But, hell, dude wrote, recorded, and released “Miles” long before those papers were served. “Miles between us, but boy you should’ve seen us in the good old days.”

Peter: Yeah, I agree with all of that. I don’t begrudge him a failed marriage or anything like that. I’m saying, if I was him, I wouldn’t include songs about my new 29-30 year old girlfriend because, frankly, it makes him look silly. I think if he was dating a woman his own age it would look a little different. And, listen, I don’t give a shit! He can go full DiCaprio for all I care. I’m just saying, it looks like a mid-life crisis and he seems uncharacteristically oblivious to it.

Tyler: It’s his Driving Rain! You said it yourself!

Peter: I hadn’t thought of that comparison!

Anyway, we’ll be back next week with part two of our introduction to Foxes In The Snow!

Let’s talk about the opener, “Bury Me.”

Tyler: Lays down the rules. Just Isbell and that acoustic. I like “Bury Me” a whole lot and have a hunch it will be my top track on 2025’s Spotify Wrapped. I could probably use a break from it, and at this point, am principally dying to re-hear the bluegrass rave-up version performed at shows with the 400 Unit. But the studio cut is great! Defiant, southern-fried.

Peter: Interesting! I like “Bury Me,” but I have other favorites here.

It was the lead single!

But, yeah, it’s great. He’s playing a 1940 Martin 0-17 guitar on all these tracks. That’s one for the guitar-heads. I assume that’s a thing.

Tyler: The Venn diagram sweet spot of Loom readers and guitar-heads!

Peter: It’s a coveted demographic.

Tyler: “Ride To Robert’s” is next. This is very much a doe-eyed paean to new love.

Peter: Right. It is. The second track! It’s a good tune. I like it.

Tyler: I like it, too. “Hold my beer” isn’t my favorite ancient online meme, but I pretty much hate them all.

Isbell songs aren’t typically very chipper, but “Ride To Robert’s” is a big head-over-heels grin.

Peter: He played this on Fallon. I think it was Fallon… I’m surprised this wasn’t the lead single.

Genius dot com told me that, “Robert’s Western World is a historic honky tonk bar on Lower Broadway in Nashville.” We visited Nashville last spring but we did not visit Robert’s. We did go to the Ryman which is like a block away but that whole area is just sick with tourists. Jason mentions, “Bachelorettes that don’t know where they are,” and we saw lots of those! Also, we were there and we were tourists so, yes, I see the irony of me making fun of them.

“And I’ll put an easel in the empty room,” is obviously about Anna.

I mean, he’s not trying to hide it.

And the next one is obviously about Amanda. “Eileen.” Eileen is Amanda. I sleuthed it out by listening to the lyrics.

Tyler: We should perhaps aside that, as of this conversation, Amanda Shires has just released her own first album since the divorce, the wryly-titled Nobody’s Girl.

They’re trading barbs! I actually don’t know what kind of lyrics are found on Nobody’s Girl. Shires is a badass fiddler and a tremendous harmonist, but I don’t love her voice on its own.

Peter: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if she throws any shade.

I like “Eileen.” It’s one of four or five from this album that I’ll be adding to my Jason Isbell mega-mix playlist.

Tyler: The fourth track is the first that truly knocked me on my ass. “Gravelweed.”

Peter: Great tune! Love it.

Tyler: That’s relative, of course. Isbell songs are by and large very good.

Peter: Well, this one is also going on my Jason Isbell mega-mix playlist!

Tyler: We’re getting pretty inside-baseball about their relationship here, but the line “You couldn’t reach me once I felt like I was raised” has a visible echo in a scene from the documentary, wherein Isbell brushes off Shires in full view of the band as she offers songwriting suggestions.

Peter: Ouch.

Tyler: It’s so fucking awkward!

Peter: “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today,” is a very good line.

Tyler: Agreed. Nods as much to his audience as to his ex-wife.

Peter: Yes. A lot of those songs are going to hit a little differently now.

Tyler: Next up: “Don’t Be Tough,” a song that doesn’t quite fit in, as it is pretty rough.

Peter: This one isn’t making the mega-mix.

It’s fine! The whole album is good.

This one isn’t about Amanda or Anna! It’s just a song?

Tyler: I’m guessing it’s about Mercy, he and Amanda’s daughter.

Peter: That sounds right.

Tyler: “Outfit” pulled off the whole parental “Don’t—” angle to exquisite extent, and “Letting You Go” was a nice permissible father-daughter ode. Both needs satisfied. “Don’t Be Tough”: extraneous.

Peter: See, this is where he could have put in a “Gee I Know How This Looks But You Don’t Understand And It’s Actually Okay Because I’m Writing A Song About It” kind of number. Something wry and self-deprecating.

Tyler: “I put down her fiddle/I picked up a brush/I know it seems silly/Maybe just a bit much.”

Peter: Wow, did you just come up with that? That’s pretty good!

Tyler: I can do it! I can write songs!

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