Jason Isbell, “Foxes in the Snow.”

The lyrics of Jason Isbell — intimate, confessional, vulnerable — haven’t always been as one with the music that enveloped them. While that has rarely, if ever, dulled those words’ impact, Isbell’s new solo album, Foxes In The Snow, presents the artist in an even more personal way, placing Isbell’s ruminations in quieter, more rustic surroundings.

Foxes In The Snow is a true solo effort; he wrote all 11 songs, with the only instrumental accompaniment being the “all-mahogany 1940 Martin 0-17” acoustic guitar he plays on every one.

This more intimate setting is populated by songs almost entirely given over to affairs of the heart and of common everyday scenes. It’s a bit of a shift from much of the subject matter Isbell addressed with the 400 Unit on 2023 album Weathervanes. Instead of issues like abortion, mass shootings and growing up as a foster child, Foxes gives us vignettes like “Ride to Robert’s,” and its description of the beautiful green Tennessee hills in June through which he passes on his way to a local bar, and on the people he finds there.

“And God said ‘Hold my beer,’ and he made a man so he could watch and laugh,” he sings.

“Crimson and Clay” is an account of a return to his Alabama roots, putting down loneliness and alcohol and walking away back from the city to a place where there are “rebel flags on the highway and wooden crosses on the wall.”

And there are stories of love, sometimes won, in many cases lost, but generally finding some measure of redemption either way. On the title song, Isbell praises his woman with words both profound (“And I love my love, and her velvet bed, where she’s heard me sing the words that can’t be said”) and superficially silly (“I love my love, I love her mouth, I love the way she turns the lights off in her house”).

Far more dire is “Eileen,” Isbell’s account of a breakup long in its development. Saying his own behavior “was a shock to me,” the author also blames his about-to-be-former love for the seemingly insurmountable rift: “Eileen, you should have seen this coming sooner.”

Could it be autobiographical?

Isbell also offers some words of wisdom, notably on “Don’t Be Tough,” in which he advises embracing life’s ups and downs – “feel your pain and feel it pass” – and living by the Golden Rule.

While Isbell is a singer-songwriter in the strict sense of the term, he’s more than that. He’s also a superb guitarist, be it with his band or in this stripped-down unplugged context. His playing here, both his chords and his excellent fingerpicking, is crisp and clean and mixed high, a worthy complement to the words floating above and around it. And that all these songs were recorded over a five-day span gives Foxes In The Snow an even more in-the-moment air than it would have already had.

Isbell has transcended labels like alt-country and Americana, and should be considered one of the most accomplished singer-songwriters in America today. And he walks the walk on Foxes In The Snow. As he says in “Don’t Be Tough,” “Tell a story like you’ve seen it/ Tell yourself that you belong.”