Jason Isbell is a multifaceted guitar player who ranges from wielding a vintage Gibson Les Paul and hollering over a howling Dumble to becoming a whispering acoustic troubadour delivering deeply personal songs in a bedroom voice. The latter scenario is perfectly in play on his 2025 solo release, Foxes in the Snow.
Isbell has developed into a highly accomplished acoustic player, which he attributes to “a bunch of guitar playing” during the height of the pandemic. His fingerpicking and strumming are fluent throughout the album, although the guitar work is never flashy. It always serves the higher purpose of framing and coloring the highly respected singer/songwriter’s meticulously crafted tunes.
The former Drive-By Trucker and moonlighting movie star — Isbell appears in Martin’s Scorsese’s 2023 western thriller, Killers of the Flower Moon — currently spends most of his time leading his band, the 400 Unit, but he goes it alone for Foxes in the Snow.
His primary partner was a single vintage Martin acoustic that he acquired recently. Isbell’s playing on the small-bodied instrument sounds very distinct compared to the plethora of cannon-fire bluegrass players and heavy-handed singer/strummers on the modern Americana landscape. Isbell’s tone is focused more in the mid to upper range, which he often accentuates by capoing up a few frets. Check out the intro on “Ride to Robert’s” to hear his precision hybrid picking and the clarity of his 0 tone.
Martin responded quickly with a pair of just-released signature models, the 0-17 Jason Isbell and the 0-10E Retro Jason Isbell, as well as a signature set of Era strings, which have red silk-wrapped ball ends to protect precious tonewood bridges such as the Brazilian rosewood on his 0-17s.
GP caught up with Isbell via Zoom from Music City, and he let us know how the pursuit of a little acoustic to kick around with in the Big Apple led him down unforeseen avenues.
How did you wind up developing a unique acoustic approach for Foxes in the Snow?
I wrote most of the songs on the same guitar that wound up on the recordings. I was spending a lot of time in New York City at my girlfriend’s apartment. It's not like my home in Nashville, where I have plenty of space for all kinds of guitars. I needed something small, and RetroFret Vintage Guitars in Brooklyn had this 1940 0-17. So I got the guitar to have around the place, and when I started playing it, these songs began appearing.
When I went in the studio at Electric Lady in Greenwich Village I didn’t intend to have that one guitar on everything. I had a bunch of different acoustics and auditioned multiple guitars. My big D-18 sounded fantastic, but it wasn’t quite right for this project. It quickly became obvious I needed something that I could sort of manipulate dynamically and cover a wide frequency range, but also something that wasn’t going to eat up the entire frequency range of the record. The 0-17 worked perfectly.
It's interesting that a player known for having a signature dreadnought would choose to use the small 0 body size on a solo acoustic album. Players often go for a smaller guitar to cut through a mix with drums and bass, but then go with larger guitars to fill more space on their own. What do you think about that?
I don’t think of an 0-17 having a smaller sound but a quieter sound, and I think it pulls the listener in a way that a big dreadnought might not. If the record was more driven by the guitar playing rather than the songs, it might make sense to play a bigger, louder, more impactful guitar. For this project, everything had to work in balance. It was more important for me to not take the listener out of the experience. Even if there's something really cool being played, I don’t want the listener to have to pause in their mind to focus on the guitar. I would like it to be a singular experience of the story.
But there's a fine line there because you have to find an instrument that will reflect everything you need to do. You can’t have a ceiling imposed by the quality of the instrument you’re playing. Getting the wide dynamic range I was looking for was not going to be possible with a guitar that wasn’t put together right.
Can you elaborate?
Guitars from that era are very different from one example to another. Necks were shaped by hand. Mine has a pretty good V as you go further down toward the headstock of the guitar. As you come back toward the body that flattens out a bit, which makes it very playable, very comfortable.
Once I found that 0-17, which was maybe a couple of years ago, everything happened very quickly. I went into the studio for a week at the end of last winter and the album came out in March. I appreciate that because a lot of records I like were made in a similar fashion, like the early Dylan stuff. He had one guitar that he took everywhere with him. He took it into a studio in the Village with a notebook, sat down and made a record. Something about that strips away all the artifice, and you’re basically left with storytelling.
“Ride to Robert’s” is a fun story with a great guitar intro. Can you walk us through it musically?
It’s in the key of F#, and I’m tuned to DADGAD, using a capo at the fourth fret. It’s kind of a Richard Thompson–eque figure that I play. The intro is the hard part. There’s a little slide up you have to execute for the position change. The main part that I sing over is a pretty simple theme based on a V to VI chord progression. Somebody could probably figure out a way to play it in standard, but I needed to be in DADGAD to maneuver on the bottom two strings.
It sounds like a fingerpicking part, but I notice you play it with a pick.
Yeah, I play it in a hybrid picking style. I always use a Tortex 1.14mm.
In other videos when you drop the pick and play fingerstyle, it’s interesting how you maintain the digit pattern of a hybrid picker with your index finger out of the mix.
Yeah, I’ll use the index finger when I play slide, but for fingerstyle I leave the index finger out and use the middle one and the thumb. I don’t know why. Maybe I just dropped so many picks early on that I thought, “Well, we’re not using this finger. This one will just be on hold in case we have a pick.” Laughs
What’s the guitar playing story on “Crimson and Clay”?
It’s in the key of F# minor, and I’m tuned standard with a capo at the second fret. I’m mostly playing out of C-to-Em7 chord shapes while leaving my ring finger on the second string pretty much the whole song to add suspensions. I don’t think it ever really leaves there. I do that a ton where that ring finger stays put there [three frets above the nut or capo position] while I go through basic open chord shapes.
How about “Eileen?”
That’s in the key of G and I’m just playing in standard. The trick is that I’m playing a B minor shape while leaving the G string open. I keep that shape as I raise the bass note to C, and then drop it down to G. That chord is a bit of a finger twister. You can lift the ring finger off the F# on the fourth string for the second measure of that G chord to get a little relief without the suspension.
Do you perform material from Foxes in the Snow on tour with the 400 Unit?
I’ll play between four and six of these songs in a live set. We’ve worked up some pretty interesting full band arrangements, which is nice because I didn’t have that in mind from the beginning. We also do a couple with just me and my other guitar player, Sadler Vaden, on two acoustics, and I might even get up and do one by myself at some point.
I suppose you play one of the new Martin signature models based on your 1940 0-17?
Yes. I needed the 0-17 version to be as accurate to the original guitar as possible, which is a limited release [just 50 examples]. That has to cost more because of the materials and being so labor intensive. I think replicating the neck was probably the biggest challenge from a craftsman perspective. The body is made of sinker mahogany and Martin was able to use Brazilian rosewood for the bridge and fingerboard, which is like a dream for them to do for me. I didn’t even have to ask. They simply went ahead making it the best way possible and the most accurate to the original.
I had a Fishman Matrix piezo pickup installed under the bridge, and I run that signal through a Fishman Aura Spectrum DI pedal onstage. So, that guitar suits all my needs for sure, but I also wanted to have a second option that was more available to the public and less expensive, rather than split the difference between the two for a single signature model.
I believe that the Mexican produced guitars from major manufacturers are very underrated, which has more to do with player bias than the ability of the craftsmen in those factories. Once you get over that preconceived notion, you begin to understand that they’re doing the same kind of work down there.
The 0-10E Retro has the same vibe. It is also made of all mahogany and it looks very similar, but the finish is different and the neck is intentionally slimmer, so it’s going to be a bit more comfortable for players in their early stages or that might play a different style. I’ve spent lots of years making barre chords on big, fat guitar necks, so that doesn’t bother me at this point, but the 0-10E does play a little bit faster, which comes down to preference.
I didn’t want something that felt like trying to replicate a more expensive guitar with cheaper materials. I wanted them to be different choices, and I believe we accomplished that. The 0-10E has built-in electronics. I could take it out on stage, and I don’t think I would miss anything. I don’t think the audience would either.
I notice that the 10-year anniversary remaster of Something More Than Free just popped up on Spotify, and your playing seems to have evolved significantly. What’s your take?
I’m a much better guitar player now than I was 10 years ago. I spent a lot of time during the lockdown phase of the pandemic sitting on the floor playing guitar — everything from electric to acoustic… just a bunch of guitar playing. I had also written and recorded an album right before the lockdown started, and we went ahead and put it out, even though we couldn’t tour behind it or anything.
I sort of emptied the well at that point, so I didn’t really focus too much on writing new songs. I just played the guitar to keep myself from going crazy. Since then, I feel like I’ve shortened the distance between what's in my head and what happens in my hands. And the older I get, the more I want to play guitar. It might not be the coolest thing in the world to be a guitar player these days, but at this age, I just don’t care, you know? It’s what I want to do.
Where do you see the frontier right now?
I’d like to develop stronger fingerstyle techniques and keep working on my slide playing. That might be the thing I’m best at on guitar, but it’s not like riding a bike. If you don’t do it for a while, it takes a minute to get back into the swing of things. Slide playing is so rewarding because it has such a human vocal characteristic. My favorite types of guitar playing require the least number of notes to move you.
I remember hearing Warren Haynes talk about how when he first got a ’Burst [Les Paul Standard], he played fewer notes because he simply liked the way they sounded so much. He was listening to the guitar. So if the instrument is right and everything's working like it should, I wind up playing less and less notes as time goes on.
