Amanda Shires Is Nobody's But Her Own

The last twenty or so months haven’t been easy for Amanda Shires. The Nashville singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist—whose last album, 2022’s Take It Like a Man, is still in rotation in my household—filed for divorce from her husband of ten years, Jason Isbell, in December 2023 and finalized it this March. During that period, she lost her grandfather and then, in May of this year, her father passed away. All of that emotional trauma became fuel for the honest, sexy, and restorative songwriting that engulfs Shires’ new record, Nobody’s Girl. Recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville with Lawrence Rothman, Fred Eltringham, Jimbo Hart, Joe Kennedy, Julian Dorio, Dominic Davis, and Zach Setchfield across crushing, laborious sessions, the album preserves Shires’ story, which had been all but buried beneath Isbell’s recent solo LP, Foxes in the Snow, in country-rock explosions and raw-hemmed, soul-bursting ballads.

In thirteen chapters, Shires’ account of her marriage’s disintegration is swept up by fits of anger, self-doubt, defiance, and, eventually, rebirth. The material is sensitive but naked and unwavering, pulled from some thirty songs written during the last two years. On “The Details,” she recounts not just her life as a wife and a bandmate, but her regret for putting Isbell’s dreams over hers; “A Piece of Mind” takes the collapse of her love life in a fuck-you stride full of mega-specific detail and gut-punching couplets, like this one: “Broke everything we built and left me there to just deal with it”; the rapturous “A Way It Goes” is a journey through delicacy, dreaming, and desire. Shires sings about her history in the 400 Unit, the anxiety of pursuing new love, and what goodness she deserves. Nobody’s Girl is not only her’ greatest effort to date, but it’s one of the year’s most emotional releases. Before a show at the Anzie Blue in Nashville last month, I rang Shires at her home to talk about the record and how she wrote herself back into her own story. This interview has been edited for clarity.

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Paste Magazine: When did the title Nobody’s Girl come to you for the first time?

Amanda Shires: Probably a little over a year ago and, now, I guess it’s in the collective.

What do you mean by that?

Because there’s a book that I just read called that, too. I feel like it’s representative of the whole process of change, from going to having been a couple for so very long and that identity, in those roles, to being nobody’s but my own. And that’s a funny thing to reckon with, when that wasn’t the plan in your mind. But everybody gets to be happy, and I’m finding a lot of things here that I can reclaim: my time, my dreams, my autonomy, and all that—at least in my yard. I’m nobody’s but my own, and I have myself to depend on.

Gardens have played a recurring role in your music, whether it’s “The Garden Song” twelve years ago or “Strange Dreams” on this new album. And it’s not lost on me that gardens are pretty apt imagery for the soul’s journey. What’s been your relationship with that, to nature’s presence in the continuance of your life, especially recently?

As a kid, my dad—he passed away in May—had greenhouses. He worked wholesale, but we grew peaches and pecans and peddled those and all that. I’ve been in the dirt since I was a kid, and my mom likes to garden, too. It’s a nice, relaxing hobby—more than just a hobby, it’s working with nature. I guess you could even say it’s grounding. You can witness entireties of life. Whether or not you believe plants are sentient or not—I do—the way they weather the storms or the seasons. There’s a lot of growth and wilting. It’s the closest thing to a mirror I can find when I’m trying to describe matters of the heart or my experience or the human condition.

There’s nothing cooler than seeing something succeed. Sometimes I’ll go down to one of the hardware stores, or some kind of box company, and see some discarded plants and I’m like, ‘I can revive that rose.’ And, a lot of times, I can. There’s something beautiful about that to me, too. Or, harvesting the seeds for next year.

One of the things that stuck out to me was the climate writing that you do, especially in “Can’t Hold Your Breath.” When did that start peeking through for you? There’s a lot of heavy, personal ideas on this album, but then there are these images of our relationship to nature. I thought that was a beautiful contrast, and I was curious if that was always there for you while you were writing Nobody’s Girl.

That song struck me before the fires, maybe a year before. A couple of my friends live in LA, like my producer Lawrence [Rothman]. And [people] were talking about the floods [from Hurricane Helene] and having to deal with that, cars floating by and all of this stuff. And then I thought, “Holy crap, it’s gonna grow and then it’s all gonna be on fire.” I have a daughter, and I have friends, and I want the world to continue and exist the way that I’ve known it. I know that things change, and I know that we, as humans, could do a lot better to maintain some kind of relationship with the grounds we occupy. I don’t know how to make people care, but sometimes I hope that, maybe, a song will reach somebody or open some eyes.

It’s a bigger problem than the things I’ve been experiencing in life that everybody goes through. Most of the people go through some kind of loss or grief. While I wanted to be writing and singing a record about other things—I would love to dedicate a bigger record to something like climate change—I did my best. And it seems like all the world’s a mess. I don’t know. There’s healing out in nature and I don’t wanna see it become a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Someone once said that your music gets a kick out of telling the ugly truth. Do you think they’re right?

If they think that, that’s fine. I try to take the things and eliminate abstractions and do my best over here with it. If it does that, then I think that’s a compliment.

What was it about Maggie Smith’s You Can Make This Place Beautiful that became so impactful for you?

That was the encouragement I needed. When I picked that book up, it was like, holy shit. She’s describing the fog over everything, from where you look around the house and there’s evidence of a life that existed before that that doesn’t exist anymore. And then, the approach in how she told her story and the way she handled herself and carried herself: I really admired that and it stuck with me.

I could sit here and talk about almost every song on Nobody’s Girl with you, but one that did stick out to me was “The Details.” I was interested in what led you into a song like that. It’s the nakedest song on the album, and I’ve been thinking about it since the first time I heard it.

That one is a place for me to hold my experiences and to validate my experiences for myself. I wanted to have a place where I had my truth. And I didn’t want it to be written out of it. These things happen, and these things happen to lots of folks. It’s about knowing your story and not wanting to disappear in a mess.

People will hear you singing some of these songs, and they’ll hear you singing about Reunions, or they’ll hear you making a reference to “Cover Me Up,” and they’ll think that you’re talking about Jason [Isbell’s] albums. But you played on Reunions and you played on Southeastern. How important was it for you to reclaim parts of those albums as your own, as if to say, “Hey, I was there. That music does exist, in some part, because I helped make it. It’s a part of me, too”?

I was there. Jimbo [Hart] was there. We were all there. We made these records and these songs and we, as a band, made decisions. Of course, there was the power of veto, and that’s always a good thing, because that’s the way it works when you’re paying the studio bill. There were some really beautiful moments, but it stings. It hurts, for a little while. Why not get those feelings out and not let them poison you? I don’t like the idea of being written out of my own story. There are times when I’m sitting around, thinking to myself, process. I’m like, “Was that all just a wild dream? What was all that? How does this kind of thing happen?” And it just does, a little bit by a little bit.

When you’re writing songs after such a life-altering thing like divorce, how do you go about deciding who’s going to be in that room with you when you record that music? Do you have to search for objectivity, even if the people who may be best for your music are the ones that are closest to this story and this experience that you’re trying to convey to the world?

I wanted to make sure that nobody felt caught in the middle, so some of [the album] I did in LA. And then I just remembered that a lot of musicians don’t listen to words at all. I tried to remind myself of that, that they’re listening to the chord changes and thinking of how not to screw up too bad and the best way to stay out of humiliation. But, I work with grown-ups and everybody has, at this point, gone through some kind of heartbreak or loss. I try to trust that, that my folks around me can either be neutral and still be supportive. I usually pick people that I have a relationship with, friendship-wise. I don’t want anything to get too uncomfortable. But nobody said anything, so the most uncomfortable person is always me, I think.

But we did it, and I picked the right people. I picked the people that I’ve played with before on my other records, or in live settings, and they seem to have the same beliefs as me. And some of them are still unfamiliar with the words but think they did a great job on the record. And I would agree.

There was a conversation that you had with Shooter Jennings about whether or not you should share this part of your story—the emotional, private stuff. Tell me about that.

I’ve been friends with Shooter since, well, since Shooter used to live in Nashville. When I moved up there, we’d hangout. One night after the studio, Shooter and [his wife] Misty came by to visit me at the hotel, and I just got to talking about how I’d recorded all these songs and I wanted to stick to the ones that were not anything to do with what had been going on with my personal life.

And Shooter about spit his drink out and said, “You’re gonna do what?” And I said, “I’m not putting any of those songs on there.” He said, “You can’t do that. The way I got through my divorce was other people’s divorce records.” And I said, “But I don’t want to be wallowing in it, or people thinking I’m a victim, or something.” And he said, “Just skipping that whole thing is disjointed. It doesn’t make any sense. Do you have any feelings?” I was like, “Yes I do, a lot of them.” I sent him the songs and he said it would just be wrong to not share them when there’s so many people either breaking up, or having a divorce, or grieving anything. And, because I respect his opinion and the way he put it, I said fine. He said, “Make a note on your record that I’m the ‘Divorce Song Consultant.’ And I regret that I forgot to put that in the liner notes.

The inevitable is here. I think people are going to listen to this album and they’re going to connect it to your divorce from Jason, just as they already likely connected his recent album to the divorce. We can’t always have the Richard and Linda Thompson thing, where two people are communicating the dismantling of their love on the same songs together. How do you deal with knowing that the first records the two of you have made on your own are, in some way, circling each other?

When I look back into musical histories, it seems to be one of things you know full well going into—that either part of you or part of your character or part of your stories is gonna end up in some kind of song. We both knew that entering into some kind of relationship usually means that something’s going to enter a song. Now, [it’s] the part where things bust up, but [with] different perspectives and different lenses. We should bring back “nothing lasts forever in the cold November rain,” just start covering it. I think life is life, and it is what it is.

Not many stories get to have both sides told.

I like to think of it like our daughter gets to see people go through tough things and try to make something beautiful out of it. I want to make sure that she knows that she can speak up and have her feelings and talk about them, should she want to, just like anybody else can.

None of the things that preceded this record are easy, but what are you most proud of? Because you went through hell.

Even though my stubborn ass had to get shown the path, I’m proud that, in the end, the song choices were the right ones—because I did, in the end, have to cull the babies. I’m proud of the way we worked with fiddle. We did some fun things that are out of the box. We made a sample out of the fiddle, in fifths like a violinist. I’m proud of mine and Lawrence’s friendship, because Lawrence has my best interest at heart. I wasn’t easy, when it came to getting after those songs in the studio. Sometimes, it would get uncomfortable and I’d just walk away. Sometimes I would take my issues out on Lawrence. And, while that’s not fair, Lawrence understands and has since done things like that to me. It’s true friendship.

And I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t quit—that I didn’t just say, “Damn, life and music has been hard on me. I give up.” I didn’t do that. I’m proud of myself for finally putting down the Double Stuf Golden Oreos, because that was getting out of hand.

Nobody’s Girl is out September 26 via Silver Knife/ATO

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Amanda Shires Is Nobody’s But Her Own

Q&A: The Nashville singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist spoke with Paste about making Nobody’s Girl and writing herself back into her own story.

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