Country music power couple Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires are set to divorce.
In court documents obtained by People, Isbell filed for divorce from Shires on 15 December after being separated on 3 December. The pair cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason behind the divorce. The divorce papers were filed two months before the couple’s 11th wedding anniversary.
Isbell and Shires married in February 2013. The two had worked together on and off or a decade before then, getting married two days after they finished work on Isbell’s solo album Southeastern. Shires plays fiddle and provides backing vocals in Isbell’s band The 400 Unit, plays guitar in the country supergroup The Highwomen and released her seventh solo album, Take It Like A Man, in 2022.
While Isbell commemorated their tenth anniversary with a sweet Instagram post in February 2023, the pair have been open about marital issues that have surfaced since the release (and work on) Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit’s 2020 album Reunions.
A moment was captured in Isbell’s 2023 documentary, Running With Our Eyes Closed, where Shires read an email she sent her husband about marriage counselling. Shires briefly lived in a hotel in 2020 before the couple reconciled. Shires and Isbell share an eight-year-old daughter, Mercy.
In 2022, Shires told People, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a quasi-famous person like Jason or me, everybody’s relationships are the same; there’s ups and downs, and there’s good and bad, and you just try to deal with it.”
In 2020, Isbell discussed increasing pressures in his life and admitted that he pushed his wife away. “At one point, I said, ‘It’d be easier if somebody had cheated.’ Then we could say, ‘You did this,’ or ‘I did this,' and ‘Somebody needs to be real sorry,’” he said in a New York Times interview. “But it was more like, ‘We don’t know each other right now. We’re not able to speak the same language.’”
Neither Shires nor Isbell have commented about the divorce proceedings at this stage, but representatives for both artists confirmed the news.
Last June, Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit released their latest album, Weathervanes, with the accompanying HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed landing in April.
“There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell said. “As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.”
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