“My hand broke, ‘coz I was trying to keep my head from hitting the metal,” says Amanda Shires, wildcat of alt-country-rock. She splays her claws and runs a finger up the damage zone.
“Feel any different playing instruments after?” I ask. After all, she’s been a pro-fiddler since joining the Texas Playboys at 15.
“Yeah, at first, but I had ice buckets,” says Amanda. “And I didn’t ask any permissions from doctors — I just did what I wanted.”
A past life as a first responder taught me that, whatever you might imagine you could do to prevent it, in any serious frontal hit your head will smack forward. As Amanda’s did this past July, splitting her face open.
“No airbag?” I ask.
She laughs at the stupid question, pointing out it was her granddad’s ’84 GMC Sierra. Too early for bags — and a pickup she was so attached to that she wasn’t about to just collect the deer that jumped in front.
“I love my truck, so I swerved, which is not what you’re supposed to do. I hit the deer and then I hit a fence board, which came through the windshield, and then a tree.” The Texan-born-and-raised singer-songwriter, leans forward to show where up over her eye got sewn back together.
“Oh my God this sounds crazy — I saw what I think was my dad as a light, but it wasn’t his form. More like an orb.” Amanda laughs. “I was concussed, but I do think it was him, and I managed to elbow my way through the side glass and get out. It was in a ravine and I crawled out and got onto the road and started walking.”
A certain Gothic quality of Ms. Shires brings to mind Van Diemen’s Land, a bleak Tasmanian cannibal-convict flick based on a true story, so I quote a line: “If you have no scars, the crow will eat your eyes.”
“Whoah, whoah,” says Amanda, 43, reaching for a pen. She’s a big Post-it noter and spontaneous scriber of thoughts. “I’m writing that down.”
A certain burning presence I’ve seen Ms. Shires unfoil live at Nashville’s EXIT/IN club brings to mind prime-’90s PJ Harvey, so I say so.
“I’m not a very big person,” she replies. “Like five-three. Some of it is the physicality of trying to find air — to hold air. Some of it is just body expression and moments when you’re in the meditative spirit, or channeling — and that’s cool, I’m into it.” Amanda pauses to further ponder moments when she is clearly on fire.
“You make little choices along the way,” she says. “And if you’re paying attention to yourself, you know who you are. I knew that Top 40 Country isn’t my jam — it’s not a place I’ve ever sought to live in.”
I bring up her ex-Drive By Trucker ex-husband, Jason Isbell, with whom she fiddled and sang as a member of his 400 Unit band (winning a Best Americana Album Grammy together in 2018 for The Nashville Sound) and from whom she was divorced in 2025. I recently watched an interview with him, I mention, during which Jason says he’s learned not to write bitter songs.
I then describe listening to a Drive By Truckers’ song with an invigoratingly bitter post-divorce quip about “Paying for a house that that bitch lives in now,” and how it prompted me to contemplate the vitality of bitterness. Like Ben Folds (“Give me my money back / You bitch … And don’t forget to give me back my black t-shirt”), or most of Lou Reed’s best stuff. But, puzzled by how it fits with Jason’s I’m-bigger-than-bitter spiel, I look up the Drive-By song, “Used To Be a Cop”, and it turns out to postdate Jason’s time in the band.
There’s a strength in bitterness, right? I say.
“I’m not going to handicap myself in the way of feelings,” says Amanda, whose 9th and latest solo album, Nobody’s Girl, followed her divorce. “All emotions that are the human experience are up for grabs. I’m not going to turn any of them away.”
She thinks for a moment. “Certain people write different types of songs and have hard, fast lines about what they do and don’t write about. But I don’t feel like closing the door on anything — they’re all too hard to open.”
Not that bitterness needs lyrics anyway, I propose. Such straining, crushing, quickening movements of the heart can be rendered without verses, story, or any words at all — erupted instead through the “absolute music” of the likes of that supreme rock star, Ludwig van Beethoven. Or, I now think, given Amanda follows the Way of the Violin, the wrenchingly emotional instrumental music of the Dirty Three.
“They’re so good. Warren Ellis,” says Amanda, taking a moment to let thoughts of the Dirty Three wash over her. “Instead of writing Post-it notes [on the tour bus] tomorrow, we’re going to listen to some Dirty Three.”
“The light in the dark. And there is a way to exorcise bitterness and resentment,” she continues. “These are all feelings that we have: anger and frustration. But if you remove one or other then you wouldn’t have the opposite.”
It’s now Nietzsche-time, so I quote her a quip from Fred on how he wishes for his nearest and dearest only suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, torturous self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished. “I have no pity for them,” writes Fred. “Because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”
“I completely agree,” says Amanda. “I want to hear about your dark and how you survived it.”
Why is country music so sexless, I ask her, who herself lives in the Nashville area but can and does turn on the heat. Why is it so devoid of carnality and erotic power?
“You’re not allowed to have that,” she says, and brings up the city and industry’s central positioning in the Bible Belt. “They’re got this Madonna-whore complex. We’re not allowed to be multidimensional. It doesn’t fit into a role that’s palatable for maintaining patriarchal control.”
That’s life in Nashville?
“I live in the country. It’s very beautiful and boring.”
“Do you shoot?”
“I shoot armadillos out of my yard with my .22. They keep killing my air conditioning and they don’t have an apex predator.”
Such simple pleasures will have to wait, though, as Amanda’s in Pittsburgh tonight with a line of gigs still ahead. When I ask if she trashes hotel rooms she says she’s usually too tired after a show, so she weeds and reads, and maybe bathes. “But I’m not one of those people afraid to be dirty. Sometimes I feel like a cat that shouldn’t be in the water.”
Might have something to do with her dad, who was Alaska by way of ex-army. “Crew mentality,” she says. “I’m at home in a van or bus with people you’re doing something with and the grunge is part of the enjoyment — getting grungy together, you know?”
