Amanda Shires was honestly trying not to go nameless. She’s only worked with country legends since she was 15, so most of the characters that populate her anecdotes need no introduction.
My onyx ring reminded her of a ring John Prine once gave her – which she promptly dropped through a sewer grate. A few years ago, when Shires got a long manicure just before she had to play the violin on a show, Dolly Parton gave her wise advice she’s never forgotten: “You can’t just show up, you have to excercise with the nails.” The first person to believe in her as a songwriter when she was just a teenager was outlaw country icon Billy Joe Shaver, with whom she starred in the long-running Western Swing group the Texas Playboys. Shires met Maren Morris, her friend and bandmate in the supergroup the Highwomen, when Morris was a precocious child of just “10 or 12” singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” around a campfire when they happened to be two at the same local festival.
Shires added, in her signature bone-dry, smeared pan, “She hasn’t gotten any bigger.”
On a damp Friday earlier this month, the singer-songwriter had a Diet Coke in a cozy corner of the Bowery Hotel lobby in Manhattan. Shires, who is 40 and has been married to musician Jason Isbell for nine years, wore a white tank top that showed her many tattoos (including a red “Mercy” on her biceps, the name of the couple’s 6-year-old daughter). , black jeans and – despite her dark brown hair still a little wet from the shower – a completely smoky eye. She discussed her exciting new album “Take It Like a Man,” which, if there’s any justice in the world or maybe just in Nashville, this vastly underrated country music should make Zelig a household name.
Shires, a violinist since childhood, started her career as a sidewoman. But after taking Shaver’s advice and moving from Texas to Nashville in 2004, she found her way as a solo artist, releasing six increasingly sophisticated solo albums and one with the Highwomen, featuring Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby. (She is also a member of Isbell’s band, the 400 Unit.)
However, Shires didn’t always feel like himself in the recording studio. When they first met, Isbell said in a phone interview, “She was a great songwriter and singer, but she was terrified” after some bad experiences. “Not everyone treated her with respect,” he added, “and a lot of people made her feel like she was small.”
Even after the release of her excellent 2018 record ‘To the Sunset’, the thought of recording another solo album caused such fear that Shires was certain she would never make one again. She would come to experience the studio as “sitting under 2,000 magnifying glasses, hearing everything you’ve ever done wrong very loudly.”
To rekindle her confidence in recording, she had to build trust and work with the right people. She found one of them in an unlikely collaborator, the gender-fluid, Los Angeles-based musician Lawrence Rothman, known for crafting bold, ghostly indie folk. Rothman, a huge fan of Highwomen’s album, had contacted Shires out of the blue and asked her to sing a backup of a new song and was shocked when Shires said yes.
“I reached out, not expecting it to go down,” Rothman said in a telephone interview. “Then we got on the phone and had such a great conversation, almost as if we were long lost relatives.” That chemistry carried over into the recording process, and eventually Shires decided she could make another record as long as Rothman was producing.
“There’s a lot of dancing going on in the studio right now,” Shires said. “A lot of joy, now and then tears. It has become a beautiful thing again.”
Isbell said the difference is palpable: “You really hear her true self on this record.”
Rothman recalled the incredible scene that unfolded when Shires wrote the title track of the new album in early January 2021 in a sort of creative trance. A friend had come to the barn in Nashville that Shires and Isbell had converted into an all-purpose studio – littered with instruments and the abstract canvases Shires had begun painting in acrylic during the lockdown – to give Shires her first haircut in 10 months. .
“I was just messing around on the piano,” Rothman said, “and she said, ‘Wait, what’s that?'” Shires jumped out of her chair — one side of her hair cropped shorter than the other — and told Rothman : “Don’t stop playing!” For the next hour she sat on the floor in deep concentration, scribbling lines and flipping through notebooks and the index cards on which she wrote down her best ideas. Suddenly she popped up and told Rothman to record a voice memo, sang the entirety of what would become “Take It Like a Man”, and sat down again to get her hair cut.
“And then she’s like, ‘Okay, guess what?'” Rothman recalled with an awesome chuckle. “And I’m like, ‘Uh, I have to digest. This is like one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.”
“Take It Like a Man” is a haunting torch song that showcases both Shires’ voice – a little Parton, a little punk – and one of her strengths as a writer, the way her lines can be abstract and concrete at the same time. “The poetic and literal, trying to wed the two together — I think that’s a great songwriter,” Rothman said. “And she does.”
In Nashville, Shires is an agitator and problem solver. “If something is wrong, it can’t stay wrong,” Isbell said of his wife’s vision. “She refuses to ignore things she thinks are wrong, and that’s a hard way to spend your day.”
Shires’ idea to form the Highwomen was a direct result of realizing, while listening to countless hours of country radio on tour, how few female artists got airplay. (There’s a wonderful video online where she calls a station manager to ask why he doesn’t play more women.)
When Rothman, who uses she/she pronouns, came to Nashville to produce the record, they saw Shires switch to a similar mode, correcting people who misgendered them and drawing attention to gender-segregated facilities. “Over two or three months, the bathrooms in restaurants and the recording studios suddenly turned gender neutral,” Rothman said. “She really went around town and taught everyone, which was pretty awesome. She really made it feel welcome and didn’t mind. ”
LIKE A songwriter Shires’ musical influences are remarkably varied. On Twitter, she identifies as a “Disciple of Leonard Cohen” (she also does a great “I’m Your Man” cover) and posts about her admiration for Kendrick Lamar. Mixed metaphors make her skin crawl; in fact, anyone who appreciates the infinite power of a well-chosen word is fine with her, she said.
In 2011, she enrolled in a graduate program at Sewanee: The University of the South to earn an MFA in Poetry. “I just needed more tools in the toolbox,” said Shires. But she believes the degree, which she completed in 2017 after taking some time off to have Mercy, has helped her become a more precise writer, better able to “vague” about emotions and the human experience so accurately. possible,’ as she put it.
That certainly includes the hard stuff. While there are a few upbeat tracks on “Take It Like a Man,” due out on July 29, there’s a misty melancholy that hangs over most of the record.
‘Empty Cups’, with tight harmonies by Morris, is a painful chronicle of an old couple drifting apart. “Can You Just Stop These Little Wars? / Can You Hold On And Hope?” Shires asks on the beautiful, soulful ballad “Lonely at Night,” written with her friend Peter Levin. But arguably the most devastating track is “Fault Lines,” one of the first she wrote for the album, at a time when she and Isbell were navigating what she called “a disconnection.”
When Isbell heard a demo of ‘Fault Lines’, he said, ‘The first thing I noticed was that it’s a really good song. Rule No. 1 with us is that if the song is good, it will be on the record. Everything else, we’ll work it out.” (He shared his version of this challenging period in their marriage on his own 2020 album, “Reunions.”)
Being part of a Nashville power couple didn’t make Shires want to paint an overly rosy portrait of her relationship—quite the contrary. “Because we’re a couple in love, I didn’t want people to think that if they were married and it doesn’t look like that, there’s something wrong with their marriage,” she said. “Not like I want to expose my own marriage or anything. All I’m trying to do is tell the truth that it’s hard, and people get disconnected and the idea of finding your way back is sometimes like, Why? But it is possible.”
Isbell plays guitar on nearly every song on the album (recorded live to tape at Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio B) – the most brutal of marital snags and the heartfelt “Stupid Love,” which begins with one of Shires’ sweetest lyrics: ” You laughed so much that you kissed me with your teeth.”
In September 2020, Shires and Isbell released a duet called “The Problem”, a compelling story about a young couple contemplating an abortion; all proceeds from the song went to Alabama’s Yellowhammer Fund.
Last August, while touring Texas with the 400 Unit, Shires started having a stomachache that she initially ignored because the pandemic had derailed live music for so long: “I thought, ‘I’m going to play music now! I don’t feel anything. I feel great!’” she recalled with a tired laugh.
One morning she fell to the floor in pain and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors told her she had had an ectopic pregnancy that had progressed to the point where one of her fallopian tubes had burst. (“I have a high pain tolerance,” she said, again on the air.) The experience led her to write a piece for Rolling Stone denouncing the Texas abortion ban that would have affected her treatment if it had been just a few weeks earlier. had been adopted.
She pushed more by name for more country artists to take a stand on the then imminent overthrow of Roe v. Wade. “Where are our Nashville people?” Shires wrote. “Do they just hang out and drink beer? I want Garth Brooks to tell people that women’s health is a priority. That is what I want. Why not? What has he got to lose?”
In 2022, when success in country music is still tied to institutions like radio that don’t reward rocking the boat, it’s a big risk to be as outspoken as Shires. But she wouldn’t want it any other way. “She’s a seeker, and that’s probably the thing she appreciates most about herself and other people,” Isbell said.
That individualistic streak makes Shires seem like a modern day outlaw of the country, applying the rugged and righteously combative spirit of elders like Shaver and Prine to the version of Nashville she lives in — and challenging to change. That’s also the inspiring spirit, she said, behind the provocative album title ‘Take It Like a Man’.
“To be successful as a woman working in an industry, we learned not to get emotional,” Shires said. ‘Don’t cry, don’t have your feelings. Be strong, show your strength, be stoic.” The song was born out of her realization that true strength actually comes from “being vulnerable, saying your feelings, and also having the courage to just to be– which Shires certainly has in spades.
“So,” she added with a fiery laugh, pointing a finger at an imaginary enemy, That like a man?”