Inside Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires’s Dueling Breakup Albums

After their wedding in 2013, Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires became an alternative-country power couple, a Johnny and June for the social media age. So when they announced a separation back in February 2024, their fans were left in shock. Their relationship troubles were the backdrop of Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed, a 2023 documentary—but the couple seemed like they were on the road to figuring things out. But in December 2023, Isbell filed for divorce, and in later interviews he said that he was the one who initiated the split, citing problems with work-life balance.

Now, nearly two years later, the divorce papers are finalized—and the pair have spent the better part of 2025 litigating their difficult dissolution in song. In March 2025, Isbell released Foxes in the Snow, a spare and morose solo record. On September 26, Shires responded with Nobody’s Girl, which is more strident and haunting. Below, a full breakdown of the he-sang, she-sang battle dividing the country mediasphere.

Born in Alabama, Isbell is a heartfelt country rocker and former member of the Drive-By Truckers who hit it big after going solo. His backing band is called The 400 Unit. Shires, a native of Lubbock, got an early start as a fiddle player in legendary western swing band The Texas Playboys before branching out into a solo career in 2005, then joining Isbell’s band. They started dating in 2011, and a year later, Shires helped Isbell’s manager stage an intervention for Isbell’s alcoholism. They married in 2013, and had a daughter, Mercy, together in 2015.

During the course of their marriage, both experienced major career growth, often through work they made together. Though Shires still does solo work, in 2018, she joined the Highwomen, a country supergroup also featuring Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, and songwriter Natalie Hemby. Isbell, meanwhile, had a stratospheric rise, becoming well-known as a progressive voice in Nashville as he won six Grammy awards from 2016 to 2024. He also launched an acting career, and in 2020, he played an unctuous and bumbling henchman in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

After the split, Isbell started dating Anna Weyant, a painter known for her affiliation with celebrity gallerist Larry Gagosian; they met after he read an article about her in GQ and reached out, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Both singer-songwriters have long written autobiographical material, and with new albums out, they’ve been addressing the problems in their relationship during their promotional cycles. Isbell got a head start when he talked to a slew of journalists back in March, including NPR’s Terry Gross.

To Gross, Isbell was conciliatory about Shires. He said that his album ruminates on dark topics because of his traumatic upbringing. “The record’s about growing and changing as me, myself, and not about accusing Amanda or any other individual person of any wrongdoing,” he said. “I don’t think there’s really any criticism at all. … I think perspective, empathy for the other person starts to sink in as time passes.”

But he had more negative things to say about the relationship’s end in the Wall Street Journal though denying infidelity on the part of either party. He said that he ended the relationship out of concern for his hard-won sobriety, comparing the risk of relapse to a “train” rumbling in the distance. “We weren’t plate-throwers, and we weren’t yelling in front of the kid… 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 said. “It made the atmosphere unbreathable after a while.”

Six months later, in a new interview with Texas Monthly, Shires objected to Isbell’s comments in the WSJ. “There’s a lot of mean things I could say about that, besides that it’s silly and a bald-faced lie,” she said. “How could I be jealous of something I helped make?”

Shires added that she felt like Isbell was stifling her creativity, saying that while they still lived together, she would go inside a closet to write songs. “There was a lot going on, and it was better if I stayed in this area where nobody could hear me,” she said. “The first song that I’ve ever written in my living room got wrote, and that was amazing and felt good. It’s like replacing old ways, old ghosts, old everything with new and different vibes.”

Isbell’s album seems inspired less by the divorce and more by his new relationship. He wrote it in New York City while living with Weyant, and its lyrics drop a few references to his new girlfriend’s Bowery apartment, her upbringing in Calgary, and her career as a painter. In one song, “Eileen,” he mentions that the title character, “should’ve seen this coming sooner,” wondering if he’ll “be alone for all my days.” In a song called “Gravelweed,” Isbell also references his previous love songs and how his attitude about them has changed:

I was a gravelweed and I needed you to raise meAnd you couldn’t reach me once I felt like I was raisedAnd now that I live to see my melodies betray meI’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today

For Nobody’s Girl, Shires teamed up with Lawrence Rothman, a producer known for his work with ghostly indie rocker Angel Olson, and his influence is felt in the album’s atmospheric production. But when it comes to lyrics, Shires is direct. Isbell was more vague and elegiac about their split on his album; on hers, Shires gets very, very specific about the breakup.

On “Piece of Mind,” she implies that Isbell initiated their split—“If you think I could ever hate you, you’re wrong / But that was a real fucked up way to leave.” She also mentions that she “‘Bout buckled when I heard and saw—You on the Ring cam whistling,” implying that she felt he took the breakup too easily. On “I Decide,” she references “Cover Me Up,” Isbell’s popular song about their union, and accuses him of “using me / And cashing in on our marriage.”

On “Not Feeling Anything,” Shires overtly references Isbell’s 2020 album Reunions, which featured Shires on the fiddle and background vocals. She indicates that she had gotten sick of cleaning up after him around the house: “Got ovеr over-working, bottomless pile of towels / Washing and drying, not getting much for all the putting out.”

Nearly every song on the album is about the aftermath of a crushing breakup, though other references to Isbell are less specific. In “Maybe I,” Shires mentions seeing “icy blue” eyes—the same color as Isbell’s—whenever she closes her own. On “A Way It Goes” and “Living,” she talks about the discomfort of staying in the house they used to share.

These two certainly aren’t the first prominent country musicians to use their albums as public therapy. Isbell and Shires are just the tip of a tumultuous relationship iceberg: Morris and her ex-husband Ryan Hurd have been cryptic about the details of their 2023 split, but it’s there in the lyrics. Kacey Musgraves and her ex-husband Ruston Kelly got pretty explicit in the divorce albums they released in 2021 and 2023, respectively. In 2022, we got songs from both sides of the Kelsea Ballerini and Morgan Evans divorce. There was also Carly Pearce and Michael Ray, to say nothing of the long-running Country Internet conspiracy that Morgan Wallen and Megan Moroney have been trading breakup songs on their recent albums. (Moroney finally confirmed that she had dated Wallen in a July interview with Call Her Daddy, though she hastened to add, “Never exclusively.”)

The modern trend was likely kicked off by Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton, whose messy 2015 breakup inspired her 2016 opus The Weight of These Wings—but it’s a tradition that reaches back at least as far as Tammy Wynette and George Jones. Country music is known for its collaborative spirit and for writing rooms that spark emotional relationships. Thankfully, the tape is always rolling when those relationships come to an end.