For a Jason Isbell fan, it can be a challenge to pick his signature song. Stalwarts might go with something from the Drive-By Truckers era (“Decoration Day” or “Outfit,” perhaps), or one of his defining tunes about southern identity, like “Alabama Pines” or “Speed Trap Town.” Judging by audience responses at his live shows, “Cover Me Up” or “Elephant” also seem like logical picks.
But in terms of streaming numbers, there is but one choice: “If We Were Vampires,” the ballad where Isbell pines for a fantasy about love lasting forever — even in undead, blood-sucking form — is easily his most popular track, with nearly 138 million plays on Spotify. (“Cover Me Up,” his second most popular, trails by around 60 million streams.) Originating on the 2017 album The Nashville Sound, “If We Were Vampires” has garnered a reputation for being the ultimate tearjerker from a songwriter who has penned more than his share of devastating emotional haymakers. But whereas the majority of Isbell’s most famous numbers address matters of life, death, addiction, and other everyday calamities, “If We Were Vampires” is romantic, sentimental even, about the tenuous but soul-sustaining bonds of marriage and the sad knowledge that these unions eventually must end, as all things do.
On countless nights, Isbell performed the song with his wife and bandmate, Amanda Shires, and it naturally was interpreted as a public expression of their till-death-do-us-part commitment to one another. “It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever,” goes one especially potent cry-line. “Likely one of us will have to spend some time alone.”
Of course, a lot of marriages also end due to the other big D-word. So it goes for Jason Isbell, who announced in late 2023 that he was filing for divorce from Shires after 11 years of matrimony. In a subsequent interview, he hinted that a legal agreement restricted him from being too open about the particulars of the split. But anyone who heard his two most recent albums, 2020’s Reunions and 2023’s Weathervanes — or watched the uncomfortable HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, about the making of the former record — could sense the obvious portents of marital discord scattered throughout those works.
And now comes Foxes In The Snow, an album that, in typical Isbell fashion, doesn’t shy from the unavoidable elephant in the room that is his private life. Anyone looking for lyrical allusions to his broken marriage won’t have to look hard. In “Eileen,” a wistful breakup song, Isbell casts a sideways glance to “If We Were Vampires” in the form of a letter left by a departed lover: “It said ‘forever is a dead man’s joke,’” Isbell sings, “and that’s the only thing it said.” In case that’s too subtle, there’s also the stickiest verses from “Gravelweed,” which appears to address both Shires and his own most judgmental fans simultaneously. “I was a gravelweed / and I needed you to raise me / I’m sorry the day came when 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.”
Crucially, Isbell made Foxes In The Snow without his usual backing band, The 400 Unit, opting instead to accompany himself only on acoustic guitar, a gesture that immediately links the album to iconic “breakup” records like Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. (Isbell’s previous two records sounded more like Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love, which continues to be a north star in terms of the lyrics and themes.) But as the pointed reference in “Gravelweed” to “the love songs [that] all mean different things today” suggests, Foxes In The Snow ultimately plays like a meta exercise. Isbell’s own past songs are the most important reference points.
So much of Isbell’s public-facing artistic persona for the past decade-plus has been informed by his relationship with Shires. The pivotal album of his career, 2013’s Southeastern, is anchored by songs like “Cover Me Up” and “Traveling Alone” that mythologize their love affair as Isbell’s personal redemption. Subsequent numbers such as “If We Were Vampires” and “Flagship” — where Isbell contrasts his relationship with the loveless couple at the bar who no longer speak to each other — fortified their unique connection.
But, alas, Isbell and Shires were not really lovestruck vampires, after all, and this was eventually borne out on the records, too. Isbell’s “Running With Our Eyes Closed” and “King Of Oklahoma” chipped away at that old, idealized façade, as did Shires’ own “Fault Lines,” a startling ballad from 2022’s Take It Like A Man that not-so-delicately mocked the “wife guy” image forwarded in “Flagship.” But Foxes In The Snow represents the most overt accounting of how, it seems, the reality of life in the Isbell-Shires household didn’t always square with the art.
(I’m going to pause here to state, for the record, that I don’t know any of these people personally, and that songs don’t exactly present a thorough, journalistic representation of facts and figures. I recognize this. And I don’t pretend to know more about what I don’t know and have no right to know. However, Isbell has been open about plumbing his personal life for material, which therefore makes discussing his art without at least nodding gingerly to difficult personal matters all but impossible. My promise is to proceed with sensitivity and tact.)
In the best and worst ways, Foxes In The Snow feels like the project of a man who is still processing a seismic change in his life. Melancholy, naturally, is the predominant mood. But there are also palpable undercurrents of anger and confusion. Normally a studious craftsman, Isbell is blunter and more impulsive here. On “True Believer,” he blusters into “Idiot Wind” territory, lashing out about how “all your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart / and I don’t like it.” On the title track, he flips the script, presenting himself as a passive victim of how love can bruise even while it soothes: “I love her well and I love her sick /I love the carrot but I really like the stick.”
While the f-words are more plentiful on Foxes In The Snow than normal, so are some unfortunate clichés. (I cringed a little when I heard Isbell sing, “God said, ‘Hold my beer’” in the otherwise strong “Ride To Robert’s.”) The music is also less memorable, a byproduct of him banishing The 400 Unit from the proceedings. An excellent guitar player, Isbell mostly sticks to a workmanlike strum to underpin his emotionally fraught words.
But what these songs lack in polish they make up for in urgency. For the first time, Isbell seems to be taking cues from one of his most famous disciples, Zach Bryan, who typically prioritizes naked emotional authenticity and stripped-back instrumentation over careful songwriting and full-bodied musical arrangements. At the heart of this album are sad but resigned songs in which Isbell takes fresh stock of the “forever” he wrote about “If We Were Vampires.” He’s no longer fantasizing about living out an eternal Nosferatu-like existence with his beloved; he’s now trying to appreciate fleeting moments of happiness, even from a newly pained, bittersweet point of view observed in hindsight.
“All that I needed was all that I had,” he sings in one of the album’s best songs, “and it was good while it lasted.” In the cold, hard light of day, vampires simply can’t survive. But at least they had the night.