“At one point, I said, ‘It’d be easier if somebody had cheated,'” he told The New York Times that year. “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.'”
Isbell and Shires—who share daughter Mercy, 8—appeared to once more be united last February, when they celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary and shared tributes to one another on Instagram. “Every day I wake up and fall in love with you again,” he wrote to his wife, who said in her own post, “Cheers to all of the laughing, talking, laughing, traveling, dancing, laughing, growing, laughing, learning, laughing, loving and making music, a family and a life together. I love you very much.”
But the following April, just months before the divorce filing, the former couple opened up about their marriage problems in Isbell’s 2023 HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed. In one scene, he alludes to a particularly heated moment between the two.
