One wonders who will discover Jason Isbell via Foxes In The Snow or if the fans he has are more-or-less the ones he’ll ever have. How many people will get to hear this music without all the accompanying noise? To how many “listeners” is the music the actual sideshow? There ought to be jealousy of those of us stood in small clubs on the Decoration Day tour, marveling that among all those hardened road dogs on stage it was instead a cherubic kid who wrote the title song. What right did he have?
The mystery vanished: replaced by publicity and wild speculation. Everything about him has been ground down to the essential points of recovering alcoholic, liberal Alabaman, Grammy winner, and now of course his marital and musical divorce from Amanda Shires. The latter sparked a mad rush to reappraise lyrics and find clues that – if the songs touched you personally – shouldn’t matter at all. Instead, there’s now a Shires Subreddit whose purpose is almost exclusively to bash Isbell. Fans who’ve been to concerts where Foxes tracks were previewed have since gone online to transcribe the lyrics and whisper suggestively about “the new girlfriend”. When he recently rearranged tour dates to facilitate seeing his child in a school performance, people loudly deduced that he and Shires were creating custody issues for one another.
“That kid? Him? He wrote ‘Outfit’? He looks like he could be Cooley’s grandson”.
For its part, Foxes plays the game. Issued as an early single, the title track carries a dark and sarcastic edge. It teases details about a new lover whose friends are the titular gossipy, conniving foxes. Repeated phrases such as “I love my love” preempt accusations that he’s lost his touch, while a left-field, innuendo-laden line like “I love the carrot but I really like the stick” seeks to rile up the conjecture. The opposite side of this coin is “True Believer”, which angrily addresses not just the foxes but Shires directly: “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.” The overall recording of the album – just the singer and an acoustic guitar – speaks to his ex as well. I’m starting over, alone.
But of the themes that made Isbell a Drive-By Trucker and have been carried for 20-years through his music – apart from the tedious kink they both get out of naming pharmaceuticals: Hello, Diphenhydramine! – the one that binds Foxes is not divorce but trying to define what it means to be a good man. From “Decoration Day” to “24 Frames” to “Last Of My Kind” and even “Elephant”, Isbell’s protagonists have strained to do the right things. Taking part in a marriage’s destruction will knock a person down a peg or two and this existential shame rides shotgun.
When he sings, “Everything’s green right now” on “Ride To Robert’s”, he’s dreaming not only of the summer scenery in full-bloom Nashville but probably green lights at intersections both on roads and in life. Robert’s – the honkytonk outside the Ryman Auditorium – is a refuge in the city for everyone tired of Instagram’d bachelorette parties. The reference to seeing Don Kelley perform there isn’t just an inside joke for regulars: Kelley hadn’t appeared there since the pandemic until being invited back in 2024. His and Isbell’s returns to Robert’s are attempts to revive lives interrupted, knowing full well you can never truly go back.
Some advance press for Foxes has predicted Grammy glory come 2026, though the album has weak points. “Don’t Be Tough” comes off like a rewrite of “Outfit” with its folksy, avuncular advice for the brokenhearted. Earlier, “Eileen” shows promise as a the-dream-died coda to “Come On Eileen,” but it breaks the too-much-furniture rule of Nashville by going overboard on inconsequential details.
The best parts of Foxes require you to empty your head of Isbell, to ignore the circus he has unfortunately but undoubtedly become. At this point, you can appreciate how hard he worked on the difficult intro to “Open And Close”; almost as hard as he admits – in the lyrics – to biting his lip through a botched guitar solo. The constant references to New York City reveal not refinement but a perpetual fish-out-of-water state, of being handed the marshal’s baton by accident or circumstance and then pressed into service. The agony over him trying to control the message of his personal life is washed away in the descriptions of a man ostensibly standing in the tide wearing a soaking-wet tuxedo.
“That kid? Tragedy seems to follow him around.”
