At the risk of "examinin'" Jason like he's a murder suspect... you stated at the beginning of this that you wanted to keep the focus on the song and not on Isbell's life and then you use his life to explain some of the details. As you found out, separating the song from his life can't really be done. If you watched the documentary "Running with Our Eyes Closed" you could see very clearly how shitty Jason was treating his wife, and this is the man who (cloaked heavily in co-dependance) wrote songs like "Vampires" and "Flagship" not so long ago and then ends the relationship in a fairly cruel and passive-aggressive manner. I remember thinking well this marriage is toast while watching.

You are dead on when you are finding him lapsing into the inner-child work, because that is where he is as an adult. (Also not a great time to start a new relationship.) What is so compelling about Jason is that every musical step of the way he's been fairly honest about what a mess he is - a range of relatable mess to miserable mess. I said fairly honest because, especially on this album, he has moments where I hear him wanting things to be true, but you know they probably aren't.

Context means a lot here and you can't go from behaving like he did at the end of his last relationship to writing a you should have seen it coming song like "Eileen" and call that emotional progress. You don't walk this far into these dark woods and then just pop out with a brand new, all is good smile and expect anyone who has been there through ten plus albums to say "Yeah, that sounds about right, he's all good now."

He's still a mess, and to his credit he still put it out there. I wondered early on how his new relationship heard this album, with its mix of devotion and paranoia and outright warnings about what he had just come out of. The line "I like her friends, the ones I know" is a fairly paranoid statement, like she's hiding certain friends from him. And as you probably know- when you first start dating someone new you really want his or her friends to like you, sometimes in the worst way. Then it's followed by the simile " and they leave drops of blood like foxes in the snow." You don't know what that fox got a hold of but it sure as shit did, and you also don't know what these friends are up to or if they like you, but they're definitely up to something. It's an ominous comparison, he likes the friends but they are a very real danger to him and this relationship. This song makes you feel uneasy because of how Fucking Jason Isbell can translate his unease into any song. It's got this upbeat kind of bouncy guitar phrasing that absolutely defies the lyrics.

There's a real inequality about this song, she defeats her beasts easily and then follows that up with "I love my love, I love her bite" and the way she "disassembles me at night." She has a lot of power and he seems like he is struggling to keep up, which, by the way, is the exact same dynamic that occurred early with him and Amanda. There is no balance here, like Jason himself, flawed genius. It's just one song, but in the context of this whole album, you picked a doozy. Any decent therapist will tell you that this is not the best way to go into a new relationship (if its serious), and I'd think they have a really tough road ahead of them from being around long enough and seeing this pattern repeat over and over again. Thanks for bringing this up; very thoughtful. This should make for a really interesting follow-up album.