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The Catalyst interview: Amanda Shires
With seven acclaimed albums in her discography, singer/songwriter and fiddle player Amanda Shires is a towering figure in alt-country music.
Shires is on the marquee for Saturday’s Pig Jig Festival at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park in Tampa, alongside mainstream country artists Brad Paisley and Riley Green, and the Americana groups Shovels and Rope and The Head and the Heart. Shires is the first act, due onstage at 1:30 p.m.
The native Texan was 15 when she joined a latter-day version of Bob Wills’ legendary Texas Playboys as an instrumentalist; a later move to Nashville, as she explains in this interview, brought about a lyrical shift in the songs she wrote, and the dawn of what’s become an unflinching desire to communicate honestly. She co-founded the Highwomen, with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Maren Morris, in 2019.
Shires was featured in the recent HMO Max documentary Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed, filmed in 2019 and 2020. She and Isbell, the prodigiously talented Alabama singer, songwriter and guitarist, have been married since 2013, and the film presented a warts-and-all peek at their loving (and sometimes rocky) relationship. (Their daughter Mercy, Shires proudly reports, is now 8 years old and seriously into Pokemon.) It’s also a behind-the-scenes look at recording sessions with Isbell, Shires and his longtime band, the 400 Unit.
The interview began with a conversation about Loving You, Shires’ recently-released collaboration with pianist Bobbie Nelson (Willie’s older sister and longtime member of his Family band, who died in 2022).
With Bobbie Nelson. PhotoL Joshua Black Wilkes.
St. Pete Catalyst: Tell me about the project with Bobbie Nelson.
Amanda Shires: For me, she was one of the first women playing in a band that I ever saw. She made it easier for folks like me to find their own place in music too. I met her a long time ago and we became fast friends. Then I was considering putting “Always on My Mind” on an album I released a little over a year ago, called Take it Like a Man. In my mind the only way to do it right was to get Bobbie on it. She said yes, and so I went to Austin and began recording that with her.
Then we decided we were gonna make a record together because we just had such fun, a such a strong musical connection. We would make a record, make a group and go on tour, and go shopping on the weekends. She didn’t live to see that part, the touring and all that – it sucks and it’s sad, but we did get to accomplish what we set out to do, which was to make music and have fun together.
You have a Masters in Creative Writing. In high school, were you a poet, one of those sensitive teens sitting under the tree?
I think most teens are sensitive, and have their big feelings and emotions. A lot of teens, I think, experiment with poetry and music … I did a little of that, but I was mostly involved with orchestra, and fiddle and violin – anything related to that, really. I liked words but didn’t fall in love with words until I was in my 20s.
Since I started with the Playboys, a career in bands was what I wanted to do, but I also appreciate classical music. The techniques I got from that, I use still, some. But I was always going to be in bands, and I would likely be a sideman. That was how I saw myself when I was younger. And as my frontal lobe developed, and I started working with Billy Joe Shaver, he was the one that told me I had songs; I should be a songwriter. And I started thinking about it.
And call it inception, but a year later I moved to Nashville to pursue my dreams of being a waitress.
Photo: Michael Schmelling.
What happened then?
That’s not really true! I had to start over; where I had a secure job as a sideman in Texas, I had to start over as a writer … in order to do that I had to hold myself accountable and not just take the easy way out with finding myself in more scenarios where I’d be a sideman. And I stuck to it. I changed the way I made my money by waiting tables, and started writing songs and recording records. You know, you do what you gotta do. That’s what it is.
But 99 percent of people fail at it. There must have been times, in the beginning, when you thought “This isn’t going to happen for me. I should just back up and be a session player.”
I don’t think about it like that. I think about it more as defining what success is, instead of thinking about “I’m gonna fail at this.” Because you can’t even really say that you’ve failed anything until you’ve tried. But as cheesy at it sounds, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to change what your idea of success is. Maybe you need to re-define it, start smaller and build up to it.
Watching the documentary, I wondered: What is it that you want out of your solo career? Let’s take Jason and the 400 Unit out of it for a minute. What are you looking for?
I’ve already got what I want. I want to make music, and I want to say what’s on my mind. And I want to explain the way I feel to myself and to others that feel the same as I do. If I can’t effect change, I want to be a light for others that might be able to. That’s what I want to do! I want to raise a girl into a world that’s freer than the one I grew up in.
The film is pretty candid in places. Was there a point, while you were making it, that you thought “Maybe we don’t want the world to hear some of this”?
It wasn’t ever set up to be a documentary about us. I didn’t sign up for that, but that’s what it turned into. I think that, the two of us, we don’t know how to be anything other than ourselves, so it was going to be what it was going to be. We’re the type of people that show up, and we say what we’re gonna do … there’s other folks that might can something like that, or say “This is too much” or whatever, which you could do at any time, but there’s a certain amount of pride that we take in doing the things that we say we’re gonna do. My granddad instilled that in me at a young age: You tell somebody you’re gonna be there, you better show up!
So there never came a time when the camera shut off, that you said “That was too personal – let’s leave that part out”?
A lot of times, unfortunately, we had to be the cameramen, and we didn’t even get paid for that shit! (laughing) Those are the things I resent! It was Covid. I helped make it, I ran the camera, and I didn’t see my name on the camera-running credits!
Are you a fulltime member of the 400 Unit?
I’m not a fulltime member. I go to shows and play when I’m not already working. And I go to shows and play when it makes sense, you know? I’m striving to be better with my balance as far as the groups that I’m playing in and the records that I make … before Covid, I was gone from my home, probably close to 280 days a year. And in the times we had to sit alone with ourselves, I got a chance to really look at what was the best use of my time, and which ways do I feel like I’m operating at my highest potential and my highest frequency? What is it serving, who is it serving, and am I satisfied?
I kind of take a lot of things into account now that I didn’t take into account before, because I felt a little pressure in the world to keep my place, because I’m a woman and because the minute you stop working they might forget you. These are just all things that I’ve made up in my mind, which aren’t true.
As a writing and recording artist, do you feel sometimes that you’re in Jason’s shadow? Would you like to have more of an identity as an artist – not as a person, but as an artist?
As an artist, I think it’s set up against me because I’m a woman, more than being Jason’s wife. I’m a 41-year-old woman. The way we value women in the world, and working women too, their values are generally based on how old they are or what they look like. All these kinds of things.
We haven’t really learned how to support and encourage women’s growth in most businesses. It’s an interesting thing too, ‘cause going back to your idea about high school and poetry and all that, I remember girls doing it in high school. Girls do cooking at home. Girls write. But once you go past college, your chefs are mostly men; your poets are mostly men. These are some things I’ve noticed here. And we’ve got to ask ourselves questions – why is that, how is that? And it’s because we hire men for their potential, and women based on experience. Yet we don’t hire women to get more experience.
I’ll cut to the chase then: Do you wish you sold more records?
(laughing) I think everybody wishes they sold more records, but everybody gets ‘em for free! But I don’t really wish for more – I feel like I have more than most people do. And I’m happy with that. Some folk – entertainers, I call ‘em – are out there for fame and – you know, fame and fame and fame. I’m happy just to be able to make the work that I make and I can say what I want to say, and if people don’t like it they don’t have to go. I’ve never been one of those that was in it for the fame and the money and all that. I’ve been in it to actually just try to help with my own connection to the place that I’m in, and my own connection to the world, and somehow be connected to other people. Because it’s all about connection, and feeling tethered somehow to the world when you’re going through some shit. Everybody’s good at different things; my goal is just to help folks find connection. And that’s what I do.
