Jason Isbell Takes the Solo Spotlight on ‘Foxes in the Snow’

In October 2024, Jason Isbell walked into New York City’s historic Electric Lady Studios with one guitar—a Martin 0-17 from 1940—and a satchel of new songs.

For most of his career Isbell has worked with bands, from his stint in the early 2000s with Drive-By Truckers to many years leading the roots-rocking 400 Unit, but his plan this time was to go completely solo and acoustic. That approach suited the emotional exposure of Isbell’s latest songs, too, which reflect the upheavals from the end of his very public 11-year marriage to songwriter/violinist Amanda Shires.

The result of those solo sessions is Foxes in the Snow, a stunning close-up portrait of Isbell revealing the combination of meticulous craft and searing honesty that has made him one of today’s most revered singer-songwriters. From the traditional-sounding “Bury Me” through the playful, John Prine–esque “Don’t Be Tough” and the raw, cathartic “True Believer,” the songs stand alongside Isbell’s best, and the guitar work is gorgeous throughout. The flattop acoustic has always been central to Isbell’s music and carries many of his best-known songs—such as “Cover Me Up,” “Elephant,” and the Grammy winners “If We Were Vampires” and “Cast Iron Skillet”—but Foxes in the Snow sheds new light on his gifts as a guitarist, with band-in-a-box arrangements full of melodic riffs and instrumental breaks.

This winter I spoke with Isbell, by phone from his home in Nashville, about the creative choices behind this solo venture.

First of all, why a solo acoustic album now? What pointed you in that direction? 

Well, in some ways, just because I haven’t done it before. I’m all for giving myself creative constraints that make for a different sort of album and a different sort of challenge. I feel like after I had produced myself and my band on Weathervanes, I’d hit all the goals that I had for myself. I made a record that didn’t allow my insecurities as a producer, or my ego, to affect the nature of the songs and how they wanted to be recorded and delivered. Once that was done, it seemed appealing to me to go further into the songs themselves. 

I think it’s really easy, after you’ve been doing this kind of job for a couple decades, to start writing the imitation of yourself, you know? I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to do something that was exposed and difficult. I thought, well, if I just take one guitar and sit down and make a record full of new songs with just me, then there’s nowhere to hide. If the songs aren’t good, if they don’t do what I want them to do, it’s going to be really obvious to me before it is to anybody else.

When you wrote those songs, did you have in mind that you were going to record them that way? 

I did. For me, anyway, one of the things I’ve learned works best is to ignore most considerations when I’m writing the song. I try not to write and edit the song at the same time, but there is a default setting I go into where I’ll think, how would this sound with a full band? [With these songs] I didn’t want there to be something missing. I didn’t want it to seem like I had written a song that was supposed to be a rock song, or was supposed to be big and produced, and then I reduced it to a solo acoustic thing. So I had to flip that switch from the start and think: the melodies, the lyrics, the chord changes, that’s all I really have to work with. 

I really enjoyed the challenge of just playing one simple guitar. I had the chipboard case and I walked into the studio in the Village, sat down and started singing and playing, and five days later, a record was done. Something about that felt significant to me as a folksinger at heart.

These tracks have a similar feel to the solo demos that were released with the Southeastern tenth anniversary edition.

Right. Well, Southeastern is well produced. Dave Cobb did a good job. I think the hallmark of good production when you’re dealing with this particular type of music is when your demos don’t sound all that different from your finished product. If I were making a pop record, they should sound very different, because that’s a producer-driven medium, but the kind of music that I make is a songwriter-driven medium.

On “Bury Me,” your chord-melody flatpicking style reminds me of Norman Blake. Does the song connect with memories of learning that kind of music?

Definitely. That is still my default when I pick up an acoustic guitar, and it’s certainly because that’s how I started out. Also, as a kid, when I wasn’t with my grandfather or uncle or another member of my family, I was usually playing by myself, so there had to be some combination of entertaining and backing myself up, so to speak. There had to be a melody line and a rhythmic pattern going at the same time. 

I’m not a skilled fingerpicker, and I’m also not a skilled flatpicker. So there’s a hybrid thing that happens in between that I think is a lot more similar to Norman Blake than it would be to Tony Rice or Leo Kottke or somebody who has mastered one of those two different disciplines.

Does that mean that you literally use pick-and-fingers or hybrid style? 

Yeah. I think “Bury Me” is flatpicking, but most of the time I combine the two, so I’ll use the flatpick and then my middle and ring fingers. That style of picking gives you a lot of space, especially if you’re playing an appropriate instrument, something that’s not going to overpower the vocal. 

In many of your past songs, too, the guitar parts have a lot of melody—on “If We Were Vampires,” for instance, you pick the melody throughout. When you’re writing, do you tend to find melodies on guitar and then sing them, or does it work the other way around, where you find a vocal melody and then figure out how to play it?

It started out more with the former. When I first started writing songs, I’d already been playing the guitar for quite a few years. The guitar players I liked when I was a kid were all classic rock, blues-influenced players, and also I spent a lot of time going back and finding their influences. So I was listening to Albert King, B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, and Jimmy Page, and I fell in love with David Lindley’s lap steel playing when I was a teenager. And they all played these singable melodies. You know, everybody can sing the outro solo to “Stairway to Heaven,” and also [the solos] on “Hotel California” and “Running on Empty.” 

So when I started writing songs and lyrics, to figure out how to get to a vocal melody that stuck in my head, I would play until I came up with something melodic on the guitar that felt composed to me, and then I would start singing words over it. [The process] went that way for quite a few years. Now I’ve done it so many times that it’s more of a thing that happens in my head, with words connected to it at the same time. Then I’ll find the accompaniment for that on the guitar. 

If you start with something you hear and then figure it out on the guitar, do you try different capo or chord positions to see what gives you the best access to the melody? 

Yeah, I do. Finding open strings, different partials, different fingerings, different ways to approach pickup notes and dotted notes, and how to get the most concise but still musical version of that melody out is really important. When you’re singing a melody, especially if it’s a chorus, it needs to be pared down to pretty basic elements for it to stick. This is just my own personal unwritten rule. But when you translate that to the guitar, you have a little room to play with it. 

Your new song “Ride to Robert’s” sounds like double-dropped-D tuning. Is that right? Do you use alternate tunings much? 

I don’t a whole lot, but yeah, that one is in DADGAD actually, and then I capoed it. That one’s definitely in the Richard Thompson tradition. Part of the challenge on that was making it sound like I wasn’t covering “’52 Vincent.” 

Jason Isbell in the studio, Photo: Will WelchSince you have a lot of blues in your background, do you get into common open tunings like open D and open G?

Oh, definitely, and I still enjoy that. I’ll sit around and play in those tunings for fun. Sometimes I’ll write in sort of a modified Keith Richards tuning where I’ll drop the A string down to G and the [low] E to D, so I’ve got D G D G B E. And I like that tuning a whole lot, because you can do some really bluesy stuff, and then on the top four strings, you can solo like you would in standard. 

If I’m playing slide, it’s real hard for me to play solo, unaccompanied slide guitar without playing the blues. As influenced as I am by the blues, I don’t feel qualified to make that type of music, so I kept the slide on the stand for this record. 

Do you look at acoustic and electric guitar as completely separate instruments? 

I think so. My favorite acoustic guitar players, without a doubt, approach it as a different beast. When I hear Dave Rawlings play, I think, this man is not playing the guitar, he’s playing the acoustic guitar. I know he would say—because I’ve talked to him about this—that he’s just playing notes. He’s not even really considering what instrument he’s playing. But he’s approaching the instrument in a way that sounds to me like it’s specifically for the acoustic guitar.

If I went and tried what I do on a Les Paul on a dreadnought Martin, it just would not work. When you get into playing rhythm, those lines blur a whole lot, but if you’re doing anything single-note or lead guitar style, you’re going to have to approach them differently. There are players who are very talented at making an acoustic guitar sound like an electric guitar, but I don’t know why they do that. That doesn’t seem like fun to me. I think if you want to play the electric guitar, just get an electric guitar and turn it up real loud. 

The acoustic takes a different type of touch, too.

Yeah, it does. It takes some muscle to play the acoustic guitar. I mean, Jerry Garcia played the electric guitar a lot like he would play an acoustic, without a whole lot of vibrato, and rambling in sort of a Dixieland bluegrass kind of way. That defined his style of playing. But [electric guitar] is something that has to be approached differently for most of us mortals.

You’ve described your songs as a mix of autobiography and character-based stories. From a writing point of view, do you look at those modes differently?

I try really hard not to. It is tempting to reveal less in an autobiographical song than you would in a character-driven song. It’s terrifying to reveal much of anything in an autobiographical song, especially if you’re going through some significant changes in your life, like I have been over the past year. But I hold my feet to the fire, because that’s the job. 

The last song on this record, “Wind Behind the Rain,” has nothing to do with me, as far as the story goes. My little brother was getting married, and his fiancée asked me if I would write a song for their first dance for their wedding. So that song was completely written about the two of them. On a psychological or artistic level, it’s so much easier to write a song like that than to write something that’s super personal, because you don’t have that nag in the back of your mind saying, “Oh, you’re giving away too much.” You have to fight that. I think you have to lean into the side of you that’s afraid, because that’s how you get the best art.

All the songs on the album feel personal on some level, but “True Believer” hits particularly hard.

Yeah, that’s a tough one. That’s a tough song to write, tough song to sing, but it’s real. I think I did a good job of expressing and recording how I feel, while at the same time working through those feelings in a way that eliminates bitterness or the need to be maudlin or self-referential. I don’t know that anybody would agree with me on this, but I feel like the rules for writing a good song translate really well to just living a good life. 

I remember in the Tom T. Hall book about how to write songs [The Songwriter’s Handbook], he talks about how to be angry without being bitter. I mean, I’ve gotten a lot out of anger—it has served me well—but bitterness has never really helped anybody. I feel like you can hear that in a song, just like you can see that in a person. So sometimes, when I’m writing my way through my emotional life, like I did with “True Believer,” in the process of eliminating things that don’t help you write a better song, you also eliminate things that don’t help you live a better life. Hence the therapeutic abilities of art.

Your songs often have a central image—on this album, for instance, there’s “Gravelweed,” and another that comes to mind is “Cast Iron Skillet.” When you’re writing, do you look for a physical detail that’ll ground the song?

I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that in that way before, so that’s a good question. “Skillet” started, I think, with that image. I don’t usually start that way, but sometimes I’ll get there naturally just by trying to put the listener in the room. 

There are definitely times when I get halfway through a song and think, I need some images. I need some pictures that people can see and latch onto, sort of anchors for where I’m trying to take folks. And then I’ll go looking for a good one. 

Do you picture a song unfolding in a particular location?

Maybe one, maybe multiple, but I’m always somewhere. I think it’s important to be somewhere very specific.

With “Open and Close” [which begins, “The fireplace isn’t real/ It’s some sort of LED light and mirror”], I remember sitting in a dressing room, looking at the fireplace, and thinking, oh, that’s not real. That’s how I started writing that song. By the end of the song, I’ve moved not only through space but through time, because I’m in a completely different place many days later. 

Really, what I’m trying to do is move somebody, in a literal sense: put them in the room that I want them to be in. That’s the thing that I love about my favorite records. Go back and listen to Exile on Main Street, and you feel like you’re in a different place, in a different time, and even in a different physical condition. I think songs can do that without being very songwriterly, without being clever, sometimes without even really being melodic per se. You can relocate somebody in a lot of different ways.

Do you look at the songs on this album as related to each other, or moving your songwriting in a particular direction?

I certainly see them as conceptually linked. I’m trying to document a point of change in my life, and naturally the songs are all going to be interconnected in that way. 

That being said, as far as the direction of my songwriting goes, I don’t think much about that. I’m just refining the process over time, trying to get to a point where the rules are so second nature to me that I can ignore them. It’s kind of like Jackson Pollock before he started splattering paint everywhere. He could do a photographic picture; he could paint and draw something that looked very real. I feel like he got to the point where he could just ignore those rules completely. 

So I’m trying to do that. I’m trying to follow the rules that I’ve made for myself: avoiding clichés and going for something other than the most obvious choices for rhymes, trying to make lyrics sound more natural, while the whole time trying to reveal more of myself than I’m comfortable with. 

I want to refine the process to the point to where I can let go of the process itself and sort of eliminate the song—which is an impossible goal. I don’t want somebody to realize that they’re listening to a song when they’re hearing one of my songs; I would like for them to just be experiencing whatever story I was experiencing when I wrote it.

Jason Isbell, Photo: Josh WeichmanWhat he playsJason Isbell recorded Foxes in the Snow with a 1940 Martin 0-17. His stage acoustics are vintage-inspired contemporary Martins: two OM-28 Modern Deluxes and a Custom Shop 000-18 1937. These guitars have Fishman pickups run through the Fishman Aura system, with digital images created from the guitars’ acoustic sound. Isbell uses Martin Marquis phosphor bronze light strings (.012–.054), Dunlop Tortex 1.14mm picks, and McKinney-Elliott capos. —JPR 

Capturing ‘Foxes in the Snow’For recording his first-ever solo acoustic album, Jason Isbell enlisted his trusted studio collaborator Gena Johnson, a Nashville-based engineer and producer who’s worked on all of his albums since The Nashville Sound (2017). On Foxes in the Snow, Johnson not only engineered and mixed but served as co-producer—helping guide the choices of songs and takes and even arrangement details such as keys and tunings. 

“Working with him so much, I’ve really gotten to know him and his heart, so you just get good at reading things in the studio,” says Johnson. “I think that comes across in the recordings, the comfortability and openness.”

Jason Isbell with engineer and co-producer Gena Johnson, Photo: Will WelchIn the album sessions at Electric Lady Studios, she says, “I really wanted it to feel like you’re in the room with him. To be able to do that, I wanted to use the actual room.” 

For that up-close-and-personal sound, Johnson wound up using seven microphones: two vocal mics (Telefunken ELA M 251 and Neumann M 249); three guitar mics (Neumann U67 on the body, Sony C-37a and Neumann KM86 on the neck); and two room mics (Cascade Fat Head ribbon mics about 12–15 feet away). “The blend between those mics felt perfect to me,” she says.

Isbell recorded all full takes of the songs—no overdubs. Even with guitar and vocal together and no click track, they were able to do some judicious comping. “He’s so consistent a player and singer that it was not difficult to use little parts and pieces if needed—fitting in those special little moments from different takes and making sure it feels like one take, of course,” she says.

Making the album was “a very beautiful, collaborative, trusting process,” she adds. “I just was having grace and respect for him the whole time of like, how can I support him in doing this? Because, man, it’s vulnerable and intimate—the two biggest things about this record.”  —JPR

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.