Before the end of her marriage to alt-country darling Jason Isbell became a reality in December 2023, singer-songwriter and The Highwomen member Amanda Shires imagined its possibility on “Fault Line,” from her 2022 album Take It Like a Man. Despondently etching out a rough patch the modern-day Johnny and June had endured, Shires sang as though underwater. As she envisioned how to answer the inevitable questions she’d get about their split, her voice slumped with exhaustion: “I’ll say what’s true/I don’t know.”
As Shires faces the fact of divorce on Nobody’s Girl, her eighth album and first since Isbell filed nearly two years ago, she remains mostly uninterested in tidy stories about what happened. The album sounds as though she’s still down among the debris of her marriage, rather than circling overhead surveying the damage. Shires picks through the wreckage by hand: there’s the serrated edge of abandonment, the brittle filament of betrayal, and the suffocating fog of loss. What’s left to salvage, it turns out, is herself.
Opener “Invocation” is a saging ritual. Shires’ fiddle is the mouthpiece here, her bow dragging against the strings so they groan. But she’s not alone in that pain—a piano balms the burn and together, they offer it all up for release. Partnering again with producer Lawrence Rothman, they strip away the bluesy folk-rock used to ground her fluttering vibrato on Take It Like a Man. This time, they reach for softer styles to cradle her grief. Musing piano and gooey strings take up more space in the mix, their interplay reminiscent of the spun fragility of cotton candy—the slightest drop of rain and it all dissolves.
So how is Shires doing? “I could show you a real shattering/A bird flown into a glass window collapsing,” she sings on the undulating “A Way It Goes,” the drums lumbering behind her. At the chorus, Shires’ voice rises from the ashes of each verse—delicate plumes that write the space between who she was and who she might become, though the calligraphy evaporates before either story is complete. Time’s passage returns some sense of self. Nodding to Emily Dickinson’s “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers”—Shires’ MFA in poetry peeking from behind the curtain—she lands somewhere burbling with possibility: “Even I couldn’t believe it/When I felt my heart sprouting feathers/And I caught myself dreaming again.”
Country music is rife with D-I-V-O-R-C-E albums, but recent additions tend to avoid the tell-all approach, even if they can’t help firing off a little snark—think Kacey Musgraves’ sass-colored sigh “breadwinner” from star-crossed. Shires shatters that tradition, dispensing with the approximations that once veiled her meaning and airing her long-suffocating truth on “The Details.” Wrestling with the stark divide between public perception and private reality, her voice carries the burden of living with the larger phantom of someone else’s version too long. She rails against Isbell for rewriting their reality to suit his songs, briefly referring to his hit “Cover Me Up,” from Southeastern, about a fraught night they shared before he got sober. “‘Cover me up,’ nothing’s ever enough,” she sings, her voice like a loaded pistol with one in the chamber as the piano turns accusatory. But it’s the part she delivers with a hush, somewhere between weariness and angst, that lands loudest: “The thing is he justifies it, using me/and cashing in on our marriage.”
Shires spent her previous seven albums traversing different Americana ground, her lyrics growing denser and more dazzling as she resisted the urge to anchor in any one approach. (“Maybe bein’ human is an orphan condition/And what’s missin’ isn’t meant to be found,” she offered as an aphorism on To the Sunset’s “Charms.”) Nobody’s Girl deals mainly in ballads—sometimes gauzy, sometimes earthy, often mournful—but that form grows stale even while it suits the personal upheaval she writes her way through. When she breaks the pattern on the surprisingly psychedelic “Lose It for a While” and the driving “Strange Dreams,” where her voice skitters with nervous energy, there’s a flash of what her emotional candor paired with more compelling arrangements could achieve. Ballads may be a gentle vessel to hold her challenging feelings, but the result is disjointed: emotionally profound and lyrically rich, but musically narrow.
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