Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires. Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Jason Isbell is making it clear he did not cheat on estranged wife Amanda Shires.
“I can’t believe I need to say this, but – my manager, business manager, tour manager, tour assistant and both publicists are all women,” Isbell, 45, wrote via an Instagram statement on Wednesday, April 3. “I’m very grateful for each of them. None of us have ever had any kind of romantic relationship in any way.”
The Americana singer asked his followers to not “make up misogynistic nonsense stories” about his coworkers and share them online like it’s a fact.
“It’s hard enough already for anybody who isn’t a straight white man in our business,” he continued. “And now there are folks contacting them and accusing them of ‘breaking up a family.’ Stop it.”
Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires were one of country music’s biggest power couples before they ended their decade-long marriage in February 2024. Isbell saw Shires play for the first time in 2003 and met her at one of her gigs the following year. The two shared a meet-cute as Isbell sat front-row to watch her […]
The Los Angeles Times reported that Isbell filed for divorce from Shires, who is a singer-songwriter and violinist, in December 2023 after a decade of marriage. The exes wed in 2013 and share daughter Mercy, 8. The duo also occasionally collaborated on several music projects.
Before their split, Isbell and Shires, 42, got candid about how the ups and downs in their marriage inspired their songwriting process for their 2020 album Reunions.
“At one point, I said, ‘It’d be easier if somebody had cheated,’” Isbell told the New York Times in May 2020. “Then we could say, ‘You did this,’ or ‘I did this,’ and ‘Somebody needs to be real sorry.’ But it was more like, ‘We don’t know each other right now. We’re not able to speak the same language.’”
Shires noted that Isbell “was impossible” to work with during the recording process, adding, “It was like he wanted help but didn’t want help.”
Two months after filing for divorce, Isbell opened up about how he was faring following the breakup.
“I think I can still manage to tell people who I am and what the truth is from my perspective. It’s one of those things where not everything that ends was a failure, you know?” he said during a February appearance on the “Broken Records” podcast. “I think we did a lot of really beautiful things together and I have really fond memories of all of that, and I don’t regret any of it, even the hard stuff.”
Some of country music’s greatest songs are about heartbreak — and the relationships that inspired them can be just as dramatic. Shania Twain learned that firsthand when her husband of 14 years, Robert “Mutt” Lange, had an affair with her former personal assistant, Marie-Anne Thiébaud, in May 2008. The pair called it quits following the […]
Isbell explained that coming to terms with the split was similar to his experience with his sobriety, which he achieved following an intervention in 2012.
“It’s like when I got into recovery, I wound up after a few years looking back and thinking ‘I don’t regret even the worst parts of that’ because it all goes into making me who I am,” he confessed. “And the time will come when the wounds aren’t still fresh, the time will come when I’m able to take all this and put it into my work in a way that is honest and true, but makes sense for me.”
