“Now that I’ve lived to see my melodies betray me, I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today,” Jason Isbell sings on last year’s Foxes in the Snow, his first solo album since 2015’s Something More Than Free. Those two albums serve as bookends to the songwriter’s marriage, with his latest lingering unmoored and searching for anchors in the wake of divorce. Yet Isbell remains one the most gifted songwriters working today, slicing into vulnerable emotional depths with simple but sharp poetic lines that have only continued to mature through love and loss. – Doug Freeman
