Jason Isbell : Foxes in the Snow
Jason Isbell has been one of my favorites for a while, a position I staked out deliberately following Southeastern’s Chicxulub impact into the crooked bones of my life. You start to see from the outside structures that perhaps the artist, embedded deep into the flesh of the machinery of their own creations, perhaps cannot always keenly see. The turning point on The Nashville Sound’s debut single “Hope the High Road” where he disavowed simply rehashing his woes in the face of a brutalized world welcomed in two albums that draped clearly personal feeling in portraiture alternating between the broad and keenly detailed. All seemed well. I did not anticipate a sudden divorce from the woman who was a major force in getting him sober.
Foxes in the Snow then emerges as a grim counterpoint, a pained and spear-struck inversion of Southeastern. Where that record was only his second record billed as a solo artist, being driven primarily by his songcraft and his own personal story than by the interplay of band dynamics or the obfuscating heavy shades of fiction, this album too emerges, a man and his acoustic guitar and his life rendered on the page. The subject matter is tenderly interwoven; both are albums about sobriety, with this one touching more tenderly on how the pains and tribulations of a sober life pressure one to return to familiar demons, but also maps the breaking apart of a marriage that was inaugurated on its predecessor. It would be easier in a way if the divorce and thus these songs were driven by clear and cathartic drama, cheating and screaming matches. Instead, it’s the most hideous apocalypse a married and love-soaked soul could conjure, the agonizing slow breaking of a bone as a marriage simply stops working despite everything.
The lead singles misportray this record. Opener “Bury Me” strikes up a traditional country timbre that feels fit for singing by a bonfire under Texas starlight, a mood which is undercut and challenged by more complex arrangements of solo guitar and voice that come later, while the title track takes an almost jazz-blues cadence, feeling like something from New Orleans rather than Alabama. Instead, tracks like “Eileen,” a brutal slayer of the heart, and “Gravelweed”, a lonely portrait, offer something closer to the aesthetic core of the record. The former is in the style of “Elephant,” still his most calmly brutal song in his catalog, but this time detailing clearly his dawning realization of the necessity of divorce in the face of disbelief and disavowal of these deep woes from his wife. The latter is a song that in other hands would turn into an alternative rock single, its eye focused on the unique tribulations of a relationship founded on healing someone after they are finally healed. These are subtle pains, ones that deepen in force as you age and certain anxieties about the structures of your life, more subtle and less dramatic than youth led you to believe, start rimming your days.
“Open and Close” is too complex a picked tune to read as country, feeling perhaps closer to Yasmin Williams remarkable work on last year’s Acadia. “Crimson and Clay” has a jangle to it that brings to mind R.E.M. and the sharp arrangements Natalie Imbruglia once wielded. It is the final triptych of songs however that drives the stake into the heart most serenely. “Good While It Lasted” and “True Believer” do a remarkable job of capturing the difficulty in fraying love that dissolves with the same inscrutable grace as it emerges. Sobriety teaches you a funny thing about grace, a non-religious lesson, about how it emerges from quiet unexpected things. Why does this stray conversation let you put the bottle down but the devastation and weeping of your mother didn’t? These are questions too subtle to be clean and easy. So too with these ponderings of how a love so transformative to a life can simply wither in an irreconcilable way, the terror of anyone in a loving marriage.
And then the finale, “Wind Behind the Rain.” In a recent interview with Billboard, Isbell tells the story of how it was written for his brother’s wedding. In the flesh of the album, however, it reads like a pained alchemical fusion of moving on and its impossibility. Lines like “I want to see you smiling when you’re ninety” cut in a unique way as a close to a record about a divorce, as does “If you leave me, I’ll just come running back to you” sung by the man who initiated the divorce (at least legally). Further complicating things is the specter of Isbell’s new girlfriend, a relationship started after his divorce. That’s her art as the cover, after all, a quiet complication, interlacing these two women rendered nameless in these songs. That’s not a critique; love is as much about its own inferiority to us as it is about the discreet other person. There is no way to ponder love without pondering its end and vice versa, and the stains of love are not easily scrubbed clean of the human heart and its flesh. It hurts though. As someone whose own sobriety and the shape of life after was so strongly impacted by Southeastern and the admitted parasocial bond in its wake, it is painful in the way the complex emotional cobwebs of good novels are, an open portrait without clear beginning or obvious end.
Label: Southeastern
Year: 2025
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Jason Isbell : Foxes in the Snow
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