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Country Star Jason Isbell and Wife Amanda Shires to Divorce After Nearly 11 Years of Marriage
Country music star Jason Isbell is divorcing his wife and bandmate Amanda Shires, filing paperwork two months shy of their 11th wedding anniversary in court documents viewed by Life & Style.
Jason, 45, filed for divorce on December 15, 2023, citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split. He listed his separation date from Amanda, 41, as December 3, 2023. The former couple share one child, daughter Mercy, 8.
The former couple had been one of Nashville’s most beloved duos. They met in 2004 while Amanda was playing with her band, Thrift Store Cowboys, at a show in Athens, Georgia, and Jason gained fame with his group, Drive-By Truckers.
“I’d never heard of the Drive-By Truckers, and I had two friends at that show, and one of my friends said, ‘That’s Jason Isbell of the Drive-By Truckers band. He’s famous.’ I was like, ‘Cool,'” Amanda recalled to Rolling Stone in 2018
Jason added, “So I introduced myself and she said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be famous?’ I didn’t know she’d just talked to a person who said, ‘He’s famous,’ which, I was not that famous.”
The fiddle player had the singer autograph a Polaroid picture, which after becoming a couple they hung in their bathroom. Jason pulled up a chair and watched Amanda play front and center for Billy Joe Shaver, realizing the fan was actually a talented fellow musician.
“Now in hindsight, that seems really creepy. I would never do that,” Jason explained. “I was like, ‘That’s that girl that played with Billy Joe Shaver, it’s gotta be.’ Because she had the same boots on. We met and just talked briefly after that.”
Amanda collaborated on Jason and his band 400 Unit’s 2011 album Here We Rest, and the pair began dating the same year. She also helped him get sober, as he checked into rehab.
“He said nice and sweet things, like, ‘Wait to see the progress,’ and all this kind of stuff. Drew pictures. And I was swayed to see the progress,” Amanda told WNYC in 2014 about their communication during his rehab stay.
The Alabama native proposed in 2012 and the couple married on February 23, 2013.
“We didn’t know each other very well, and I was a philanderer in a past life, so it was hard for her to trust me, you know,” Jason explained in the 2014 interview. “I wasn’t an easy person to trust, because I hadn’t been sober very long, and I felt like I hadn’t been a grown-up at that point.”
The couple welcomed their only child, daughter Mercy Rose, in September 2015.
Their romance hit several rough patches over the years, with Amanda moving into a hotel for 10 days in 2020.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a quasi-famous person like Jason or me, everybody’s relationships are the same; there’s up and downs and there’s good and bad and you just try to deal with it,” she told People in 2022. “Life’s not easy, marriage isn’t easy, but aren’t we lucky to be able to live?”
Jason and Amanda’s marriage woes were also chronicled in the 2023 documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed.
