Before her marriage to alt-country star Jason Isbell officially ended in December 2023, singer-songwriter and Highwomen member Amanda Shires had already begun to imagine its unraveling. On “Fault Line,” from her 2022 album Take It Like a Man, she sang of a breaking point that felt both inevitable and unbearable. Her voice—muted and weary—floated through the song like someone already submerged in grief. “I’ll say what’s true,” she sighed, rehearsing the answers to questions she knew would come. “I don’t know.”
Now, on Nobody’s Girl, her eighth album and first since the divorce, Shires faces that pain head-on. But she resists turning heartbreak into a clean narrative. Rather than surveying the wreckage from a safe distance, she sifts through it piece by piece, her songs glinting with fragments of abandonment, betrayal, and loss. What she salvages from the ruins isn’t reconciliation—it’s herself.
The album opens with “Invocation,” a kind of ritual cleansing. Shires’ fiddle moans against her bow, her grief almost tactile. Yet the ache is softened by a warm piano that cushions each blow, creating the sense of two instruments in communion—mourning together, offering the pain up for release. Reuniting with producer Lawrence Rothman, she trades the gritty folk-rock textures of Take It Like a Man for gentler tones. Delicate strings and lush piano now surround her vocals, evoking something fragile and dissolvable—like cotton candy meeting rain.
Throughout Nobody’s Girl, Shires asks, implicitly and explicitly, How am I doing? On “A Way It Goes,” she offers a bleak metaphor: “I could show you a real shattering / A bird flown into a glass window collapsing.” Yet amid that devastation, hope flutters back in. Her poetic sensibility—honed through an MFA in poetry—peeks out when she echoes Emily Dickinson’s image of hope as “the thing with feathers.” “Even I couldn’t believe it,” she sings softly, “When I felt my heart sprouting feathers / And I caught myself dreaming again.”
Country music has long had its divorce albums, from Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E to Kacey Musgraves’ bittersweet star-crossed. But Shires goes further, shattering the genre’s restraint and exposing the private realities behind public personas. On “The Details,” the album’s rawest moment, she confronts the emotional cost of being written into someone else’s story. Her voice quivers as she references Isbell’s “Cover Me Up,” his famed ode to redemption: “‘Cover me up,’ nothing’s ever enough.” Then, in a devastating whisper, she delivers her sharpest line—“The thing is he justifies it, using me / And cashing in on our marriage.” It’s not vengeance, but liberation through truth-telling.
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Across her career, Shires has resisted categorization, weaving through Americana, alt-country, and folk-rock while her lyrics deepened in emotional intelligence and poetic insight. On Nobody’s Girl, she leans into ballads—sometimes gauzy, sometimes rooted in earth—but the repetition occasionally dulls their impact. When she breaks free on “Lose It for a While” or the nervy, driving “Strange Dreams,” her voice comes alive again, filled with restless energy. These moments reveal a glimpse of what’s possible when she allows her pain to spark experimentation rather than containment.
In the end, Nobody’s Girl is not a postscript to a marriage—it’s a living, breathing document of self-reclamation. Shires doesn’t pretend healing is linear or complete. She moves through sorrow with honesty and grace, turning heartbreak into art that feels both intimate and enduring.
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