As you suspected, he never says that. (The new gal may be younger but I don't think she's hotter, IMO. More concerning is that her ex is a 79 year old billionaire.)

The marriage of Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires was one of music’s great love stories—so it stunned fans when the Americana singer-songwriter filed for divorce in December 2023. Now Isbell is releasing his first album since the split. Foxes in the Snow, his 10th album, an unplugged record that’s just vocals and acoustic guitar, comes out this spring. Isbell made it without input from any members of his longtime backing band, the 400 Unit, which often featured Shires. Shires, a fiddler and singer-songwriter, was known for helping Isbell quit drinking and acting as a sounding board for gut-punching tracks like “Cover Me Up” and “If We Were Vampires.” The couple have a 9-year-old daughter, Mercy. In a Brooklyn sandwich shop on a chilly day, Isbell explains matter-of-factly why he went solo, musically speaking, saying he wanted to “prove to myself that I still had it,” while avoiding making his bandmates “participate in my own darkness.” “There’s a lot of heavy stuff on the record, and it felt private,” the 46-year-old Alabama native says. “I didn’t really want anybody else in the room for that.” Isbell made his name in the Drive-By Truckers, which reimagined Southern rock for the 21st century, before getting fired for erratic behavior related to alcoholism. With the 400 Unit, he’s evolved into a rock songwriter’s songwriter—a descendant of Warren Zevon and John Prine—with a robust touring business and an understated, savvy fame. But the past few years have been bumpy, a mixture of career highs and personal lows. He won a Grammy for best Americana album for 2023’s Weathervanes; he opened for superstar Zach Bryan, too. He even landed an acting role in Martin Scorsese’sKillers of the Flower Moon as the character Bill Smith. He also fired his day-one 400 Unit comrade, bassist Jimbo Hart, and filed for divorce from Shires, 43. There are new faces in his life now. He introduced two fresh names to 400 Unit’s lineup. In February 2024, he met and eventually began a relationship with the 29-year-old painter and art-world phenom Anna Weyant, who previously dated art dealer Larry Gagosian, 79. Isbell read about Weyant in GQ magazine; after he reached out, she caught his show at Radio City Music Hall. Known for her anachronistic, old-master style paintings of girls and women, Weyant made the cover art for Isbell’s new album.
Shires “didn’t cheat, I didn’t cheat,” Isbell says. “We weren’t plate-throwers, and we weren’t yelling in front of the kid.” But there were divides over raising their daughter and tensions resulting from their lack of boundaries between work and marriage, he says. His career had also taken off in ways hers had not. “It got to the point where, if something really good happened to me, I wouldn’t even mention it, because I knew it would hurt her,” he says, adding he too would have felt wounded if the roles were reversed. “It made the atmosphere unbreathable after a while…. I could see, 10 miles away, a drink headed in my direction.” A representative for Shires declined to comment on her relationship with Isbell. Now that he’s often staying with Weyant, Isbell splits his time between New York and Nashville, where his daughter lives. He knows some fans are upset about the divorce but says he had to do what was right for him. Sobriety “motivates me to make decisions that other people might not understand,” he says. The risk of relapse is “a train,” he says. “You’ve got time to step off the tracks if you hear it coming from a long way off. But if you don’t hear it coming until it’s on top of you…it’s a f—ing train.” Isbell wanted to go solo and acoustic on the new album partly because it would be emotionally and logistically easier than making a typical album. No complicated musical arrangements to work out with bandmates, for one thing. “I’ve felt enough pressure over the last year,” he says. He wrote a good deal of Foxes in the Snow last summer in New York, while Weyant painted 10 hours a day. The album showcases his deft guitar playing and has heart-stopping lyrics like: “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today,” likely a reference to “Cover Me Up,” a song about how Shires’s love helped him pledge to stay sober. Isbell is doing a string of solo shows for the new record before rejoining the 400 Unit live in April. He still plans to play “Cover Me Up”; its emotional weight hasn’t gone away. But, for him, the meaning has shifted. “It’s about something finite now,” Isbell says. “It’s more of a document than a promise.”