Album Review: Jason Isbell, ‘Foxes in the Snow’
Over the span of five days in October 2024, Jason Isbell holed up in Electric Lady Studios and laid down eleven spare, haunting tracks for his new solo acoustic album Foxes in the Snow.
“Bury Me,” the album’s first track, opens with Isbell’s keening a cappella vocals that lead into a cantering Western rhythm that travels along a story about being a prisoner of fame and a prisoner of the road. The song’s also a meditation on the nature of the human soul and its efforts always to get free of the confines of the bars we use to enclose it. Isbell’s crystalline fingerpicking introduces and flows below the bright, up tempo country folk of “Ride to Roberts,” an ode to Nashville’s Robert’s Western World and its presence as a stage for undiscovered artists. Cascading notes fall like rain at the opening of “Eileen” a tenderly rendered song of loss and love, and perhaps regret. It’s also a song that’s a tribute to the ravages of love, even live lived in hope that it endures. “Don’t Be Tough” offers a plainspoken litany of life lessons Isbell passes along to anyone who will listen: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you”; “Don’t just pray and wait around/Life will kill you if you let it”; “Don’t be tough until you have to/Let love knock you on your ass.” The lilting waltz “Open and Close” dances around the ways that we play with one another’s emotions; the Beatles-esque rhythm evokes a ride on the carousel of love. The walking blues of the title track displays Isbell’s exquisite fingerpicking, and the layers of sound he creates provide a bed on which he can lay down his ode to the need to get lost physically in the love of one’s partner. The swirling rhythms of “True Believer” capture both the emotional breakdown that issues from love and the emotional resilience that such a breakdown fosters.
Isbell has always had a knack for writing incandescent lyrics that reveal the workings of his heart and soul, but when he sits down—as he does here—and invites us to listen as he sings over his own strumming and fingerpicking on his 1940 Martin 0-17, the echoes of loss, love, and hope resonate even more loudly. Foxes in the Snow showcases Isbell’s lyrical and musical genius.
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More information about Foxes in the Snow is available HERE
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