Some scars come from the deepest heartaches — the kind that stay with you long after the pain fades away. Then there are scars that come from, well, a deer. Amanda Shires is familiar with both.
I’m talking with the singer-songwriter about her new album, Nobody’s Girl, while she’s recovering from a recent accident. Driving home outside Nashville, Shires swerved to avoid hitting a deer — “I should not have swerved, I still hit it” — sending her truck plowing through a fence and into a tree. She walked away with a broken nose and a wound on her face.
“It’s kind of like the equivalent of a face tattoo,” Shires tells Yahoo with a wry laugh. “But you could still get a job at Home Depot.”
It’s that blend of humor and raw honesty that permeates Shires’s album, which ventures deep into the territory of heartbreak, survival and personal reinvention. She began writing it in 2023, the same year her marriage to singer-songwriter Jason Isbell ended, and the emotional aftermath of that split is woven throughout.
When I ask how she’s doing, revisiting a painful chapter through the lens of her new music, she pauses before answering.
“I’m feeling pretty good [right now],” Shires says. “It’s a process going through something. I think the songs helped me do that, because I speak more clearly and figure things out easier with music than I do in real life.”
Not a divorce album
While the dissolution of her 10-year marriage looms large in the background of Nobody’s Girl, this isn’t a divorce record. Instead of cataloging grief or betrayal, Shires says the album focuses on what comes after — a reckoning with life when you realize no one is coming to save you, but you.
Shires began sketching out songs for Nobody’s Girl not long after the release of her 2022 album Take It Like a Man. But as her marriage unraveled, the project shifted. Her longtime producing partner, Lawrence Rothman, encouraged her to keep digging. Shires says Rothman told her she still had some work to do: on herself and on the record, for herself and for her art.
That push led to “A Way It Goes,” the album’s first single, which opens with the lines: “I could show you how he left me / Paint a picture, growing flowers for nobody / But I’d rather you see me thriving / Vining my way back up.”
“I wrote that in two hours,” Shires says. “It was kind of a response to not only Lawrence, but also a reaction to folks asking me what happened or wanting more details than I felt I wanted to share. I don’t ever want it to sound like I was some kind of victim to something that’s so universal — people dealing with loss or grief or letting go of things. I want them to see me when I’m fully healed, kind of like the song says.”
Shires rewrote certain songs on the album. (Brett Warren)
The details
For fans seeking answers about her ex-husband, many have focused on the track “The Details,” which draws listeners into the raw center of Shires’ story. The song underwent multiple rewrites before it became what she calls her most honest version of events.
“I got him help, and then he bailed / What were all those promises for? / Cover me up, nothing’s ever enough / Gonna have to put the house up for sale,” Shires sings. “He scared me then and he still scares me now / Never will hear me out / The thing is he justifies it, using me / And cashing in on our marriage / He erases the details / And I’m history.”
“That started off being a different song,” Shires explains. “It was still about not wanting to be erased or my story not [to] be erased — about saying this was my experience. This is my truth. But I was being too vague, or I was trying to mix too many characters up in the song. So I scrapped it all and rewrote it.”
That willingness to start over is part of what makes Nobody’s Girl feel so unflinching. When asked if those lyrics are a reflection of her own experience or a broader, universal truth, Shires doesn’t hesitate: “It’s both.”
“It’s a lot to do with the fear of not being heard or having your truth dismissed or twisted,” she says. “It’s about the kind of harm that being shut down can cause and emotional fear. And it was one for me — or it is one for me — that’s difficult, I guess, only because I’ve only just now become comfortable in reclaiming the silence, if that makes any sense.”
The 13-track album is hardly wall-to-wall sadness. Shires makes room for levity, most playfully on “Friend Zone.” She leaned into melodrama with sweeping strings to mirror the absurdity of yearning for someone who doesn’t feel the same way. She sings about getting too high with someone, watching Tombstone and snacking, not flirting.
“That one is just like when you’ve been [told], ‘You remind me of my cousin’ one too many times,” she laughs. “It feels absurd — you keep on trying, or pretending you’re not trying and you’re just hanging out eating jelly beans.”
The song serves as a reminder of how humor has helped her cope with the heartache. “You can’t cry the whole record,” Shires says. “It’s all the laughter and the tears, sometimes between delusion and self-respect.”
A happy ending
At its heart, Shires’ new album isn’t about loss, but about what follows and the messy, unsteady process of reinvention. It’s a declaration that even in heartbreak, there is strength.
“You don’t have to be OK to be powerful,” she says. “Even in your worst moments, there’s somebody that’ll listen to you. And if you’ve ever had to hold your own hand or come to your own rescue, maybe this music can make a good partner to sit with.”
The most important partner in Shires’s life right now is her daughter.
As we talk, traces of Mercy, her 10-year-old with Isbell, are everywhere — in the paintings that hang in Shires’ home studio, in the glue gun art projects that clutter the house. On the album, Mercy’s presence can be felt in the way Shires talks about resilience. Being a mother, she explains, has shaped how she approaches music and life.
“When I think about my daughter, I want to try and make the world a better place,” Shires says. “And I want her to see that you can survive something painful without becoming bitter. You can lose love and still be full of love. And making art is always an option.”
Shires knows her ex will likely hear the record — he has also released music since their split. Asked what she hopes he might take from hers, she only shrugs.
“We all process our experiences in different ways,” she says. “And this one’s mine.”
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