Amanda Shires, to be honest, wasn’t trying to namedrop. Most of the characters in her anecdotes don’t need to be introduced, as she’s only worked with country music legends since she was 15 years old.
My onyx ring reminded me of what John Prine once gave her — she immediately dropped the grate of the sewer. A few years ago, Dolly Parton gave her the advice of an unforgettable sage when Shire got her long-tipped manicure just before she had to play a fiddle on the show. training With nails. When she was still a teenager, her first belief in her as a songwriter was the outlaw country icon Billie Joe Shaver. She played with her longtime Western swing group, the Texas Playboys. Shire met Maren Morris, a friend of the supergroup Highwoman and bandmate. Morris was a “10 or 12” precocious kid singing “Kentucky Blue Moon” around the campfire, two of whom happened to be playing with the same locals. festival.
“She isn’t taller anymore,” Shiaz added in her characteristic dry deadpan.
On a humid Friday earlier this month, a singer-songwriter nursed a diet cork in a cozy corner of the Bowery Hotel lobby in Manhattan. Shire, who has been married to musician Jason Isbel for nine years at the age of 40, wears a white tank and has many of her tattoos (red “mercy” on her biceps, the couple’s six-year-old daughter. (Including name) was shown. ), Black jeans shorts, and — even though her dark reddish-brown hair is still a little wet from the shower — full smoky eyes. She was discussing her inspiring new album “Take It Like a Man”. This should make this highly underrated country music jelly a generic name if there is justice in the world, or only in Nashville.
Shire, a violinist since childhood, started her career as a sidewoman. However, after moving from Texas to Nashville in 2004 with Shaver’s advice, she established herself as a solo artist with six increasingly sophisticated solo albums, Brandi Carlile and Natalie Henby. We have released a featured High Woman album. (She is also a member of Isbell’s band, 400 Unit.)
But Shire doesn’t always feel like himself in the recording studio. When they first met, Isbel said in her telephone interview, “She was a great songwriter and singer, but she was afraid after some bad experiences.” “Not everyone treated her with respect, and many made her feel small,” he added.
Even after the release of the amazing 2018 album “To the Sunset,” thinking about recording another solo album caused anxiety, and Shires was convinced that he would never make an album again. She began to experience the studio as “with less than 2,000 magnifying glass, she’s listening loudly to all the wrong things she’s ever done.”
To rekindle her confidence in the recording, she needed to build trust and work with the right people. She found one of them in an unlikely collaborator, a Los Angeles-based musician in genderfluid. Lawrence RothmanKnown for making bold and haunted indie folk. Rothman, a big fan of Highwoman’s album, suddenly contacted Shire and asked him to sing a backup of his new song, and was shocked when Shire said so.
“I didn’t expect it to go down, so I contacted him calmly,” Rothman said in a telephone interview. “Then we answered the phone and had a very nice conversation, as if we were long-lost relatives.” Its chemistry was taken over by the recording process and finally. Shire decided that as long as Rothman produced it, he could make another record.
“There are a lot of dances in the studio right now,” Shiaz said. “A lot of joy, occasional tears. It’s beautiful again.”
Isbel said the difference was obvious: “You really hear her true self on this record.”
Rothman recalled the amazing scene that Shire unfolded in early January 2021 when he wrote the title track for his new album on a sort of creative trance. A friend came to a barn in Nashville and Shire and Isbel converted it into a multipurpose studio studded with instruments. And the abstract canvas that Shire began to paint with acrylic paint during the lockdown — to give Shire the first haircut in 10 months.
“I was just playing the piano,” Rothman said, “and she said,’Wait, what’s that?” Don’t stop playing! “For the next hour, she sat down on the floor. I scribbled lines, flipped through my notebooks and index cards, and copied my best ideas. Suddenly she appeared and told Rothman to start recording voice memos, she sang the whole thing that would be “Take It Like a Man”, sat down and cut her hair.
“And she said,’Okay, what do you think?’ And I said,’Um, it’s like I have to digest. This is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. It is one. “
“Take It Like a Man” is an unforgettable torch song that can express Shire’s voice (a little parton, a little punk) and one of her strengths as a writer, her lines abstractly and concretely at once. is. “Poetic and literally trying to get them married. I think that would be a great songwriter,” Rothman said. “And she’s doing that.”
In Nashville, Shires is an agitator and problem solver. “If something is wrong, it cannot be left wrong,” Isbel said of his wife’s outlook. “She refuses to ignore what she thinks is wrong, and that’s a difficult way to spend your day.”
Shire’s idea of forming a highwoman was a direct result of listening to countless country radios on the tour and noticing the small number of female artists. (There is wonderful video Online she calls the station manager and asks why she doesn’t play more women. )
When Rothman, who uses them / their pronouns, came to Nashville to make a record, they switched to a similar mode for Shire, corrected those who misunderstood them, and noted the segregated facilities. I observed pulling. “In a couple of months, the bathrooms in restaurants and recording studios suddenly became gender-independent,” says Rothman. “She really went around town and sent everyone to school. It was a little awesome. She really welcomed it and made her feel like it wasn’t a big deal.”
As a songwriter Shire’s musical influences are extremely diverse. On her Twitter, she identifies her as a “disciple of Leonard Cohen” (she is also in hell “I’m your man” cover) And Kendrick Lamar’s post about her admiration. The mixed metaphor crawls on her skin. Basically, she said she’s okay with anyone who appreciates the infinite power of carefully selected words.
In 2011, she enrolled in the graduate program at Sewanee: The University of the South to obtain an MFA for poetry. “We needed more tools in our toolbox,” says Shires. However, after a short break to welcome Mercy, the degree she completed in 2017 made her a more accurate writer, “capturing the vague things about emotions and human experience as accurately as possible. I can now do it. ” As she said. “
It certainly involves difficult things. “Take It Like a Man,” which will be released on July 29, has some bright numbers, but most of the records are foggy and melancholy.
“Empty Cup” A painful chronicle of a long-standing couple drifting away, characterized by Morris’s intimate harmony. “Can these little wars stop? / Can you wait a little longer?” Shire asks about the gorgeous and soulful ballad “Lonely at Night,” which he wrote with his friend Peter Levin. Perhaps the most devastating song is “Fault Lines,” one of the first things she wrote for the album when she and Isbel were navigating what she called “disconnect.” ..
When Isbell heard the “Fault Lines” demo, he said. “The first thing I noticed was that it was a very good song. Our rule 1 is that if the song is good it will stay on the record. Everything else we understand. (He spoke on his own 2020 album “Reunions” his version of this challenging period in their marriage.)
Being part of a Nashville power couple, Shire didn’t want to paint an overly rosy portrait of her relationship. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. “We’re a married couple, so if we’re married and don’t look like that, we didn’t want people to think something was wrong,” she said. “It’s not like I’m trying to expose my marriage or something. What I’m trying to do is that it’s difficult, and people experience disconnections, and sometimes find your way home. The idea is to tell the truth what looks like this: why? But it is possible. “
Isbell plays the guitar on almost every song on the album, recorded live on tape at the famous RCA Studio B in Nashville. This is the most brutal song about marital difficulties and a heartfelt “Stupid Love” that begins with one of Shires’ sweetest lyrics. “You smiled so much and kissed me with your teeth.”
In September 2020, Shire and Isbel “problem,” A moving story song about a young couple thinking about abortion. All proceeds from the song were donated to the Yellowhammer Foundation in Alabama.
While touring Texas with 400 units last August, Shire began to experience abdominal pain that he initially chose to ignore as the pandemic had been crazy about live music for so long. now! I don’t feel anything! I feel good! “She remembered with a disgusted laugh.
Then one morning she fell to the ground in pain and was taken to the hospital. There her doctor told her she was suffering from her ectopic pregnancy, which had progressed enough for one of her fallopian tubes to rupture. (“I’m tolerant of high pain,” she said again in deadpan.) Her experience of her urged her to write. piece Rolling Stone’s condemnation of Texas’s abortion ban could have influenced her treatment.
By name, she urged more country artists to confront the imminent overthrow of the Roe v. Wade case at the time. “Where are our Nashville people?” Shire wrote. “Are they just going to sit down and drink beer? I want Garth Brooks to tell people that women’s health is a priority. That’s what I want. Why not? He What do I need to lose? “
Being as candid as Shire is a big risk when 2022, when success in country music is still tied to institutions like radio that aren’t rewarded for rocking boats. But she had no other choice. “She is a searcher, which is probably what she values most of herself and others,” Isbel said.
Its individualistic sources make Shire look like an outlaw in a modern country, applying the rugged and legitimate fighting spirit of elders like shavers and preen to the version of Nashville where she feels inhabited. , Challenge change. She said it was also the spirit of animation behind the provocative album title “Take It Likea Man”.
“To be successful as a woman working in the industry, we are taught that you are not supposed to be emotional,” Shiaz said. “Don’t cry, you don’t feel. Be strong, show your strength, be stoic.” In this song, the true strength is actually “vulnerable, express your feelings, and just It was born from her recognition that “it comes from having courage.” Get used to— Shire certainly has a spade.
“That’s why,” she added with a fierce laugh, pointing her finger at a fictitious enemy. that Like a man? “
