Amanda Shires still remembers the first time she recorded in a Nashville studio, but it’s not the best memory. She was following the vocals as the man behind the recording console offered some non-constructive criticism.
“Less goat,” he told her, referring to the natural trill in her voice. “More note.”
“Okay, that’s nice,” Shires recalls, thinking sarcastically to himself. She ended up going to a singing teacher who told her bluntly, “There’s no changing that.”
Of course that was ages ago. Today it’s hard to imagine anyone telling Shires she’s doing it wrong.
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The 40-year-old is best known as an award-winning singer-songwriter, violinist and co-founder of country supergroup The Highwomen. She is also an integral part of The 400 Unit – the band around her husband Jason Isbell.
But even after a milestone decade, those negative, critical voices still found their way into her head. As the pandemic loomed, Shires says she “really believed in my heart that I was done with music” — and she blamed herself.
“Originally, I thought: ‘It won’t work because of me or my musicality’, so… When, in hindsight, I really did work with some people I shouldn’t have been with that much because it made me feel small.'”
Luckily for us all, Shires came to this realization while tentatively putting together a new album – one that she and many others consider her finest work yet.
The just-released Take It Like A Man is a breakthrough on several fronts: the sharply focused production of a new friend and musical champion, Lawrence Rothman; the lyrics that vividly portray an uncertain period of her life; and bold performances Rely on her uniquely soulful voice. The sound that “couldn’t be helped” now earns Shires comparisons to Dolly Parton.
“In the octaves of consequence,” she sings on the title track as cinematic violins soar her minor-key drama.
“I know the cost of the flight is landing / And I know I can take it like a man.”
Adding to the self-doubt, Shires was dealing with “a breakup in my marriage” when Rothman first contacted her and asked her to sing harmony in one of her songs. She recalled how the late John Prine discovered her music by “listening to everything that came on his desk. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll try.'”
The Shires were impressed with the song’s arrangement, production and lyrics. She soon sent several of her own songs to Rothman, who flew to Nashville in December 2020 after Shires agreed to a single “rehearsal day” at the recording studio.
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One of the first songs she shared with Rothman became the album’s centerpiece: “Fault Lines.” Over ponderous, dark piano chords, she calmly lays out a plan for her separation from her partner: “You can keep the car and the house.
“You could say it’s all my fault/ We just couldn’t get along/ And if anyone asks me
I’ll say what’s true: I don’t know.”
“Me and Jason probably had a silly argument about the purpose of our lives and COVID or whatever. I don’t know, some nonsense,” Shires recalled.
“And I did what I do when I try to explain my feelings to myself. I sit somewhere with my little ukulele and write a song. And I was like, ‘Man, maybe I’m like that can come over to Jason’ because I was having trouble getting in there. I sent Jason the song and he didn’t listen to it (laughs). And I was like, ‘That’s a ******’.”
Isbell eventually stopped by and played guitar on several tracks on the album. On the day he was released, he praised his “brilliant wife” – “Proud to have helped and grateful to be a part of her creative life,” he wrote on social media.
Friends join in too: Maren Morris adds classical harmonies to the torch song “Empty Cups,” while Brittney Spencer’s alibbetic performance on “Bad Behavior” was “the purest expression of joy I’ve ever seen in anyone in my life.” says Shires.
She had a similar moment of her own in the studio. Album opener “Hawk For The Dove” ends with a frenzied fiddle solo – one Shires didn’t know she was going to play until she impulsively grabbed it while her full band was recording. The room wasn’t officially set up to capture the sound, but her staff urged her to seize the moment. (“You should fuck that up,” Shires recalls the words of drummer Fred Eltringham.)
Inspiration also surrounded her throughout the songwriting process. Shires writes in a diary every morning before getting up. When a journal is full, she copies the bits she likes onto index cards and shreds the rest. The cards are taped all over the barn at her home, where she paints and plays music.
“You start to see themes,” she explains. “When you see them all together, they present themselves as sort of a big bowl of spaghetti that you have to unravel.”
On Thursday, Shires took the stage at Third Man Records’ Blue Room to perform the song “Take It Like a Man.” The performance came less than a week after The Highwomen – the group she formed with Brandi Carlile, Morris and Natalie Hemby – performed at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, opening for Chris Stapleton.
“It was something I could never have imagined in my entire life,” she says. “Not as a kid, not when I was reborn as a bloody rat.”
Beginning in September, she will be on the road for nearly three months, including a return to Ryman Auditorium, where she will open one of Isbell and 400 Unit’s annual shows at the venue. Less than two years after she thought she’d hang it up, she can’t wait to hit the road.
“Having that back is a big deal,” she says. “I will not take it for granted and I will take care of it.”
