By Matt Hanson

One thing, among others, that sets Jason Isbell apart from his country scene contemporaries is that he isn’t afraid to break the all-American code of manly stoicism.

It’s always struck me as irritatingly stupid that country music is stereotyped as a bunch of yokels yowling yodels over dead dogs and pickup trucks. Like most caricatures, musical or otherwise, this assumption says more about the person applying the label rather than the thing being discussed. The more you listen to country music, especially the greats, the more the plaintiveness, emotional desperation, and utter humanity shines through. And that is particularly impressive because it is music made for and by working class southerners — not a group of people known to be emotionally forthcoming. One thing, among others, that sets Jason Isbell apart from his country scene contemporaries is that he isn’t afraid to break the all-American code of manly stoicism. He lets his angst and vulnerabilities show.

Isbell’s ruminative new record, Foxes in the Snow, wastes no time in getting right to the heart of the matter. The first few moments of the first song, “Bury Me”, just feature his bare voice until a plaintive acoustic guitar undergirds his weathered Alabama tang. “Well I can’t no cowboy/ but I can ride/ And I ain’t no outlaw/ but I’ve been inside” the lyric declares. His delivery reflects the poise and confidence that comes from being a major songwriter who came up with the venerable outfit Drive By Truckers before establishing himself as a major voice. This is a voice that was confident enough to entitle an album The Nashville Sound, made in 2017 with his crack backing band The 400 Unit. The album brilliantly honors that city’s rich musical heritage while simultaneously pushing its themes and subject matter forward.

It’s been years now since Isbell has sobered up and gotten married and divorced. That process has been artistically fruitful. His keen songwriting became deeper, a maturity that contained literary resonances, like some of the unflinching short stories from Raymond Carver or Breece DJ Pancake. You can hear it in his fine previous record Weathervanes, particularly in the subtly observed working-class struggles of “The King of Oklahoma” or the survivor’s guilt over the death of Justin Townes Earle in “When We Were Close” and, looking a little farther back, the spooky death ballad “Live Oak.”

Isbell himself would probably admit that this sophistication is due to the influence of his now former wife Amanda Shires, who has an MFA in fiction and who can be seen critiquing his lyrics — the moon and sun is etched on either side of her dark sunglasses — in the intimate HBO 2023 biographical documentary. The film is partially about Isbell’s career, but it inadvertently became a portrait of a tenuous relationship. When, matter of factly, he settles into sleeping on the studio couch, you can tell things aren’t going well.

The new songs take a rueful perspective on the older songs. “I wish I could be angry/ punch a hole in the wall/ drink a fifth of cheap whiskey/ and call and call and call.” But the fact is,  that’s not him anymore, if it ever was: “but that ain’t me anymore, baby/ never was, to tell the truth/ I just saw it in a movie and thought/ that’s what I’m supposed to do.” Here is an example of rigorous honesty; he calls himself out on his own bluster and how he’s allowed himself to be shaped by a toxic gender stereotype. Isbell has recently parted from someone he admirably credits with helping him to grow from a “gravelweed” He sees everything he used to be from an alternative perspective: “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.”

The title track is a simple but sensitive and painstaking accounting, possibly inspired by the rigorous self-analysis of sobriety, of all the things that make him love his beloved: “I love my love/ I love her mouth/ I love the way she turns the lights off in her house.” I’m curious what Isbell means when he admits “I like the carrot but I really like the stick.” Isbell has talked about how those pesky wild foxes, who came out at night to snap at his farm’s chicken coop, provided a stark metaphor for a breakup’s emotional fallout: “they leave drops of blood like foxes in the snow.”

There are some sweet moments remembered, like kisses in a limousine cruising down Broadway. Their are memories of heading to the raucous Robert’s Western World (the toast of Nashville’s downtown) and chuckling over clueless party girls “who don’t know where they are.” There’s also some palpable bitterness when Isbell nearly shouts the line “and all your friends say that I broke your fucking heart and I don’t like it.” At least he has the class to wistfully claim, even in that very song, that if he sees her again on the road he’ll wave. He settles into a kind of emotional equilibrium: “I’ll always be a true believer, babe.”

Music is more intimate than any other art; you literally have a musician’s voice, human or instrumental, pressed up against your ear. It feels like they’re singing directly to you. Their poetry easily entwines itself into the texture of your life. In some cases, listeners know damn well who’s saying what to whom. Of course, you can enjoy the way Fleetwood Mac sings “Silver Springs” (or all of Rumors for that matter) and not know that it’s exactly what Stevie Nicks wants to say to Lindsey Buckingham, even as they sing it together years after the breakup.

The point is that the listener doesn’t have a right to all the dirty details. I admit that, as I listened to Foxes in the Snow, I wanted more clarification, more detail, more drama. More fool me. I’m sure the story is more complicated than Isbell’s version of the breakup, and that’s fine, as far as it goes. Even though these songs moved me, that does not mean Isbell or Shires or anyone else owes us any further explanation. We should be satisfied with following the tracks laid out by those foxes running away in the snow.

Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at the Arts Fuse whose work has also appeared in the American Interest, the Baffler, the Guardian, the Millions, the New Yorker, the Smart Set, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Boston, he now lives in New Orleans.