AMANDA SHIRES – NOBODY’S GIRL: REVIEW

AMANDA SHIRES

Nobody’s Girl (Silver Knife/ATO)

THERE ARE ANY NUMBER of songwriters who at the very least quibble if not strongly resent being asked and about who the “I” or the “you” are in their songs, or when and where particular things mentioned happened, and how much is “true” – whatever that may mean – in their story songs. Must we be so literal?, they ask when being polite; piss off, I’m an artist you plonker, when less polite. Can’t you just inhabit the song or the album and breathe that air?

Those objections in most cases are quite reasonable too, given the complex nature of inspirations and source material for any song, the role of the subconscious in any creation, and the paucity of imagination in a questioner/listener who must reduce every song to a personal, and singularly personal at that, perspective. In an industry built to sustain narcissism the fact is, to borrow a phrase often thrown at narcissists, not everything is about “I”.

Then of course there is Taylor Swift.

No, this isn’t another dig at or into Ms Swift, whose very noticeable album and very public private life has been dissected and digested more than enough this past two weeks, and isn’t about to be reviewed here. Except to say this, while the world was focused on just how happy and just how horny, and just how happy to be seen as happy and horny, Swift was, an album arrived that you could describe as being at the opposite end of the relationship spectrum but unashamedly and very clearly is in the realm of “I”.

Nine of the 13 tracks have I in the first line or two (one of the other four is an instrumental) and one has I in the title; 10 address you or we, and one more uses a third-party you – us? – to hear about the man addressed elsewhere. There are no characters to blur or stand in, there is no mistake about the messages.

I hurt. I resist and resent. I cared. I was there. I am still here. I can’t be erased.

Listening to Amanda Shires’ Nobody’s Girl doesn’t require that you know that the man from whom she split was husband and former bandmate, singer/songwriter Jason Isbell, whose own catalogue has been equal parts storytelling and personal revelation and whose album earlier this year, Foxes In The Snow, semi-obliquely addressed this divorce. After all, betrayal, compromised memories, wanting to rebuild and wanting to destroy, and just plain pain, don’t require a job description first. And any survivor of a relationship with different levels of perceived status would understand the sentiment of this from Shire’s song, Lose It For A While: “Between big shadows and big shoes is no room/Don’t matter what I do”.

But this knowledge, like knowing his well-documented history with alcohol and her part in dragging him from it, most famously essayed in his song Cover Me Up – sample lyric: “But home was a dream, one I’d never seen/Til you came along” – sure does bring a potency to the standing-on-the-windswept-edge ballad, The Details.

Here Shires sings of someone who “scared me then, he still scares me now” choosing “putting your dreams over mine” when “Holding your hand, touring vans/All I got is a wedding band”. Someone who had turned to her before, when “I got him help and then he bailed/What were all those promises for?/Cover me up, nothing is ever enough/Gonna have to put the house up for sale”. The brutal line and the brutal truth from one songwriter to another (with a nod to John Lennon’s famous breakup song) is in this kicker: “You erase the details and I’m history/No matter how clear I keep the memories/You rewrite them so you can sleep.”

And yet … The thick-arm highway rock of Piece Of Mind, its guitars driving parallel lines inside which Shires’ fiddle initially dances and then asserts itself, kinda pulls back. “If you think I could ever hate you, you’re wrong,” it begins. “But that was a real fucked up way to leave”. As she talks about adjusting to a new reality (“Got a new dining room table/Repainted the walls, got rid of any evidence that you were ever here”) and new realisations (“I remember I was deadheading the roses/Thinking about how easily everything breaks trust, or dinner plates”) there is what sounds like consolation, but reads like anything but: “Oh I hope you finally find/Your missing piece of mind.”

Yeah, there are songs about the empty hurt of it all, and times when trying to move on maybe with someone else, feel even more empty, where “the silence is too noisy and the music is too loud”. And in those songs, Friend Zone and Lately, Shires lets the waver in her voice come through, past the strings, Billy Joel references and echoes of Oasis. There is understanding and sadness in the classic tears-on-your-pedal-steel country of Maybe I, vivid scenes in the too-much-to-dream-last-night imagery of Strange Dreams’ southern pop, and complexity in the piano meditations within Living and Not Feeling Anything.

There’s quite a bit going on here and it’s really good, definitely the best thing Shires done in a far more than decent career so far. But the story of this album, the note in the arrival and the score in the takeaway, is someone not covering up, not looking away, not hiding from the I of this storm.

READ MORE

Jason Isbell – Foxes In The Snow: album review

Amanda Shires – Take It Like A Man: album review 

Amanda Shires – To The Sunset: album review

LISTEN MORE

SPOTIFY: Listen to Amanda Shires – Nobody’s Girl 

APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Amanda Shires – Nobody’s Girl