Amanda Shires has been the subject of a lot of “What is she feeling?” talk and speculation over the last year and a half, and she’s mostly laid low during that time, keeping all those emotions to herself — or keeping them to the recording studio, anyway. Now, the artistic fruits of a fraught period in her life will be heard in a new album, “Nobody’s Girl,” her first since 2021, coming out Sept. 26. A taste of that record, “A Way It Goes,” is out today as a single and music video, offering a very representative sample of just how confessional Shires will be getting with the full album. As always, the “way it goes” with Shires is in the direction of candor.
The opening lines of the just-released single set up a tension that will come to the fore in the full record: “I can show you how he left me / Paint a picture, growing flowers for nobody / But I’d rather you see me thriving / Vining my way back up.” Fans will immediately understand that Shires is talking about her divorce from fellow singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, and the public’s curiosity about that… especially since they starred together in a popular HBO documentary, “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed,” released just about six months before the split, that appeared to show them patching things up after a bad spell. Isbell wrote some songs referring to the divorce on his “Foxes in the Snow” album earlier this year, and now listeners will get to hear Shires’ perspective — although, as she says in those opening lines, she wants to emphasize recovery over rehash.
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“It’s a record that’s an exercise in life and getting through hard stuff, and then the rewards that you don’t feel will ever come from that, but they do,” Shires tells Variety. “And they’re usually in understanding yourself better. It’s hard to get too crazy about it, because everybody goes through it, and I’d struggle with thinking this is a story that a lot of people go through it, true. So why does mine matter more than any others? It doesn’t. But what it does do is create songs that might help people better communicate their feelings, I guess, or want to feel better with me. You know, it’s the whole purpose of music — connection.”
She adds, “People break up and love hurts and all that, but, for me, you heal by going through the work of naming the feelings. At the same time, it’s about rejecting the idea of being stuck in victimhood, and focusing on thriving, choosing strength over sorrow and not wallowing too hard. And love can vanish; love can go away in all kinds of ways. It hurts, but there’s clarity, I think, in accepting the different flights of having grief and resisting the urge to dwell there. And it’s a record that starts out in one place and winds up in another place, which is, I think, the natural movement of dealing with big changes in love and loss.”
The new album was produced by and largely co-written with Lawrence Rothman, who handled the same duties on 2021’s “Take It Like a Man.” The ATO release can be pre-ordered in physical and digital formats here.
Shires has performed “A Way It Goes” a handful of times, including a live premiere of the tune on the Grand Ole Opry in May. But for 99%-plus of her audience, this week will mark their first chance to hear her reveal what’s been on her mind. How does she feel letting tht out into the world?
“Honestly and selfishly, I’m excited, because that was a hard time — October ‘23 (when the marriage exploded) up till March (of this year, when the divorce became final) really was hard, you know? So I’m excited because the work that it took to get to a mental and physical head space of being nice to myself, to take care of yourself, took a lot of work and a lot of doing and a lot of dragging myself up when I didn’t want to. I’m proud of the work that it took to write that song, and for it to be a true song. Like, yeah, I could give you the sensationalist, parasocial details of what happened and all the shitty things. But none of that’s helping anything.
“The truth is, I’m not gonna go too far into the realm of the side of things that are ugly, because there’s too much beauty left in the world that we don’t showcase enough,” Shires says. “We see so many ugly and gross things happening to the world all day anyway… There’s the transformation from the impossibility of it while you’re going through it, feeling like you’ll never be hopeful or happy again — that is just completely not true, and completely what your brain tells you when you go through it… I’m happy, and everything works out in the end. So I want to focus on the part that’s beautiful about going through hard things.”
Of the music video for “A Way It Goes,” Shires says, “It was the first video concept idea that I’ve come up with my own, and I wasn’t sure how that would work out because I’m not super hip to visual language. But I think that it turned out like I’d hoped. We shot it in a day at my house and in my neighbor’s yard (in Tennessee), and at the creek it started out raining, but we worked with the rain and in the end got a beautiful sunset in the field next to mine. I kind of wrote this out with the ideas of how it would look, and then Taylor G. Kelly, the girl that directed it, was amazing at staying true to the original ideas and bringing her own creativity in. She was easy and amazing and full of life, as the youth tend to be.”
Watching the video all the way through, we couldn’t help but notice that, visually, when it gets to scenes of community, it suggests that maybe one way of moving on is by having a pretty ripped guy or two around.
“Well, they’re not love interests,” Shires clarifies. “They had to be paid to be there!” But, she adds, “I mean, if there’s ever a chance to get a ripped guy in your video, do it… If it does anything, it should encourage people to see the Thunder From Down Under show.”
But no one who listens to the forthcoming album will be under the impression that it’s about rebounding with a fresh relationship; she makes that clear with the record’s title.
“I’m not anybody’s property. I’m not anybody’s wife. And the reclamation of self makes me more my own than I’ve ever been. Part of the work of reclaiming yourself is looking back and seeing the ways that you’ve made mistakes and trying to own those and be a better version of yourself in the end, and to not allow yourself to ever do that again. But I am nobody’s girl. I’m always gonna be my own. This is how it’s gonna be — knock it or lump it, take it down the street and dump it.”
That’s an Archie Bunker reference, but all classic aphorisms aside, Shires expounds on the album title with unapologetic confidence: “At first, it sounds lonely. Then it sounds free. That’s the trick of it. It’s about sitting in the wreckage and realizing that no one’s coming to save you. And yes, it’s tough. But it might be the most liberating truth of all…
“It’s about autonomy. It’s about the quiet steady pride of knowing you rebuilt yourself piece by piece without a map, a witness, or even someone to say, ‘You’re doing great.’ It’s about becoming whole again in a new way, without needing to be anyone’s half. … After years of giving away pieces of myself (rightly or wrongly) out of love, out of fear, to keep the peace, or maybe just out of habit, I’ve come back to the center of who I am. Not someone’s girl. Not what’s left. Not what’s easy to love. Just mine. Entirely.”
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