Jason Isbell, ‘Foxes in the Snow’: Album Review

Jason Isbell is alone. Alone on this record and alone, it seems, in his life. Foxes in the Snow was recorded without his usual backing band, the 400 Unit, and outside of a marriage that turned into a muse. There’s introspection about what it all means, even what his own old songs now mean, but he’s also become angrier and more lyrically impulsive. Isbell has been stripped bare, and you hear it everywhere on this new album. He’s never had more main-character energy.

But Foxes in the Snow, like its mostly heartbroken protagonist, struggles to find purpose in the wreckage. In “Eileen,” Isbell makes a melancholy return to a former lover’s note: “It said ‘forever is a dead man’s joke’ – and that’s the only thing it said.” In “Gravelweed,” he’s bluntly honest: “Now that I live to see my melodies betray me, I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.”

There are moments when the clouds part around Isbell. “Bury Me,” the lead single, unfolded like a dusty Old West adventure. “Ride to Robert’s” pokes good fun at Nashville’s tourist-trap present. But “Open and Close,” despite the appearance of a comfortably snoozing doorman, is really all about things that come and go. The title track hints at new love but then “True Believer” dives into deep well of resentment over the past, as a strikingly raw Isbell grumbles about how “all your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it.”

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Set during an insomniac’s endless night, “Good While It Lasted” attempts to put things in perspective – but only in its own broken way. “You’re like sleep, take what I can get, but I’ve got to make some sense of this so here the fuck I sit,” Isbell sings, again with just a 1940 Martin acoustic to answer back. He confronts the difficulty of facing heartbreak without a return to the bottle (“last time I tried this sober, I was 17“), before finding some solace in aphorism: “All that I needed was all that I had – and it was good while it lasted.”

It was all undoubtedly cathartic for Isbell, but sometimes there’s not much more. So Foxes in the Snow never answers its own central question. His 2013 breakthrough album Southeastern was anchored by “Cover Me Up” and “Traveling Alone,” both inspired by a love now lost. Isbell’s best-known solo song remains 2020’s “If We Were Vampires,” about a (literally) timeless romance. Even his most recent release, 2023’s Weathervanes, often found emotional purchase in discussions about his faltering relationship. What’s to become of Isbell’s career without that spark? We’ll have to wait until he refocuses on other characters to find out.