Interview: Amanda Shires
Two friends of mine on separate occasions asked me to tell Amanda Shires hello for them when I interviewed her ahead of her Tuesday, Sept. 6, show at The Grey Eagle. Keep in mind that I’ve never met the Nashville-based singer/songwriter before, and neither have they. It’s just that Shires has distinguished her songwriting, and her public persona, by letting you in on her personal doubts, joys, disappointments, and desires in a way that makes you feel like maybe you have.
Shires can recite from memory the last time she had her own show: March 12, 2020. Outside of one performance with the The Highwomen, the supergroup she founded with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and Maren Morris, and a few dates holding down the fiddle parts and harmonies in husband Jason Isbell’s band The 400 Unit, the Grey Eagle date launching the Take It Like a Man tour will be the first time Shires has stepped back into the spotlight.
Amanda Shires: “I haven't been back to the stage with as much energy and excitement as I have going into this one. I think it’s going to be great, and I have to tell you I'm so excited to work. And my mom is so excited that she's making the trip to Asheville, too! I can’t wait.”
What makes Shires’ seventh solo album, Take It Like a Man, stand out is its scope and size. And its depth, both topically and instrumentally. The album is big and roomy, and Shires’ songs are draped in string arrangements, horns, pianos, cavernous guitar, and the deep warmth of one of Nashville’s most famous spaces: RCA Studio B, known as the birthplace of the “Nashville Sound.” These days, the studio is there for tourists to visit and listen for potential country music ghosts, but during the pandemic it was closed to the public. So when it came time to create these songs, Shires was able to book it.
“Elvis [Presley] recorded there. Roy Orbison. Dolly [Parton]. Everybody's been to ‘B.’ And after some tests and masks, we were allowed to go into the building and set up and record there, which was incredible because I've been to a lot of studios and there's not any that sound like that room. It's a ‘live’ room and you have to stand in one room and figure out how to make music, the spirit that is music, together without bleeding into each other's microphones.”
During lockdown, a new album wasn’t on Shires’ mind — at least not at first. A prolific and persistent writer, she was sorting out the kinds of emotions and experiences that came up in her own life and relationships, especially the zig-zag turbulence of the pandemic’s strange days. Days that put new pressures on families, relationships, and psyches.
“I guess I just started by trying to make sense of my own feelings for myself. That's kind of been the way I, you know, do some self-therapy. And I think that in finding my collaborator [and the album’s producer] Lawrence Rothman, I was encouraged and pushed to do more and say more and learn self-acceptance and kind of hold nothing back.
When we first started to work together it was only one day because, you know, I didn't have a working relationship with Lawrence until that day that we met in person. ‘Let's start with a trial date, see how that goes, and if it's a good fit or not, then we'll know at the end of the day and not a lot of time or energy is lost and no feelings hurt.’ And at the end of that first day, it went so well that I immediately booked more studio time.
And all this [happened while] not thinking about making a record, just thinking about making things that felt complete.”
What came out is a confessional of uncertainties, anxieties, and the kind of self-examination that some songwriters would squeeze into three verses of been-there-done-that advice. What Shires managed is more personal, and she doesn’t offer answers. Some of the songs sound like she’s walking through the ashes of something already lost.
“There's nothing left to fix, you could say I lost my grip,” she sings on “Fault Lines.” On “Empty Cups,” she attempts to catch the last drops of something evaporating in front of her: “You’re leaving now through the hole of an argument. I guess for a while you've been looking for the exit,” she sings.
Other times, she sounds defiant, as on “Hawk for the Dove,” singing “Come on, put pressure on me. I won't break,” or on the title track, where she issues challenges with her feet planted and her chin out, accepting the consequences of what she’s asking for. Do not mistake Shires’ brand of vulnerability for being a pushover, or the lilt in her voice for a quiver.
“I think there is strength in vulnerability. I think there's more strength in being vulnerable than being stoic and shoving your feelings down inside.
I think that's the takeaway, and the other takeaway is freeing yourself of the burden of carrying all your own problems around and not having a place to put them. I think that when we talk to each other and take care of ourselves, we operate as better, maybe more happy humans. We gotta take up space and be vulnerable and care about each other when we're talking to each other.”
In 2020, Shires released the single “The Problem,” an imagined exchange between two people considering the prospect of an abortion. She cut the song as a duet with Isbell, then updated the track in 2021 as “Our Problem” with a mind-blowing roster of female musicians, including Linda Perry, Cindy Lauper, Valerie June, Peaches, and others. And all that was before the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Why did Shires make a standalone single about abortion during the rise of the new decade? Because she felt like she had to.
“I decided I had to put [‘The Problem’] out around when [Supreme Court Justice] Amy Coney Barrett was being sworn in. I could sort of imagine a world where we'd be losing our rights to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedoms. It makes me sad and I feel like it's cruel and barbaric and, you know, it is. But in trying to do something or to help somehow, I put out that song for the money to go to Yellowhammer Fund [an Alabama-based abortion fund and reproductive justice organization].
We have [midterm elections in] November and I think we have more than hope. I think we have a lot of folks ready to take action. I can tell you that the conversation around it has changed a lot. In the past 10 years, even talking about our abortions with one another, or any of our reproductive health, was taboo. You had to talk carefully if you were going to talk at all, and now the conversation at least is changing in that folks are telling their stories, not because they want to but because they want to affect change.
We're having these conversations and it's getting easier to talk about it. I think that's at least allowing for our voices with one another to kind of get a little stronger, get a little bit more used to the conversation, and it sort of keeps folks from feeling like the lone person out there drifting in the big open sea with no one to talk to.”
It’s that person, the lone one drifting out in the big open sea, that Shires seems to have her eye on. And when that person finds Shires’ music, it’s not hard for them to feel like they’ve met her before.
IF YOU GO
Who: Amanda Shires with Honey Harper
When: Tuesday, Sept. 6, 8 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $22, VIP package $149
(Photo by Michael Schmelling)
