AMERICANA
AMANDA SHIRES
Nobody’s Girl ATO
Confessional ballads drive country queen’s deeply emotional latest
Album of the month
7/10
IN March this year, Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell finalised their divorce after a decade-long marriage. Isbell’s Foxes In The Snow, released the same month, was partly informed by the split, as well as a new relationship. Now it’s Shires’ turn, only with a different focus. Nobody’s Girl, she points out, “isn’t a break-up record. It’s a survival record.”
Shires initially wrote 30-odd songs for the album, but shelved a number of them because they were judged to be too bitter and pointed. It’s intriguing to know exactly where she decided to draw the line, given that a couple of pieces here are almost uncomfortably candid. Set against a deep, mournful fiddle, “The Details” speaks of discarded wedding rings, failed promises and being used to cash in on a marriage. “He erases the details in our history”, Shires declares at one point. “No matter how clear I keep the memories/ He rewrites them so he can sleep”. On “Piece Of Mind”, shaken into life by a chafing guitar and jagged violin, Shires seethes: “Everything we built/You left me there/ Just to deal with it”.