Amanda Shires Is Done Crying In Her Pantry

Amanda Shires is already covered in paint. The singer-songwriter enters the lobby of Nashville’s newest wellness concept, TheraPaint Studio, where clients can blow off steam by getting their Jackson Pollock on, in a breezy white sundress dappled with colorful splatters from her own artistic endeavors. She’d heard things might get messy here, and she isn’t wrong. Moments later, Shires is armed with brushes, winding up like an MLB pitcher and hurling maroon, orange, and white paint at a canvas adhered to the wall in one of the facility’s “treatment rooms.” It’s a cathartic moment for the once-avid painter who hasn’t picked up a brush since a series of traumas turned her world upside down.

Just a few weeks earlier, Shires, 43, was driving to her home an hour outside of Nashville when she swerved to avoid a deer in the road. Her truck spun out and plowed into a fence, sending a post through the windshield that barely missed her head. It’s covered by makeup now, but up close, you can make out a lengthy scar running from her forehead through her eyebrow to the bridge of her nose.

That’s not the only thing Shires has been healing from lately. On her new album, Nobody’s Girl, out Friday, she details her very recent divorce from fellow musician Jason Isbell, whom she married in 2013 and with whom she shares 10-year-old daughter Mercy. The two were close collaborators: She often played fiddle and sang on his albums, and as a member of his backing band The 400 Unit, she shares in the Grammy win for Best Americana Album for 2017’s The Nashville Sound.

“I don’t belong to anybody or anybody else’s story anymore.”

Together, they represented a kind of Americana golden couple whose apparent support for one another’s careers seemed like something spouses everywhere could learn from. Onstage, their connection was so intense that watching him watch her play the fiddle felt like getting a glimpse into someone else’s foreplay. Offstage, they stood by one another as they tackled important causes. Shires wrote two op-eds in support of reproductive rights, once after suffering an ectopic pregnancy in 2021. Isbell was also outspoken about politics and inclusion and was one of the most prominent male feminists in their country-adjacent world. All of which made their surprising divorce, which Isbell filed for in 2023 and was finalized in March of this year, the subject of intense speculation from their fans.

Isbell, who met his now-girlfriend, artist Anna Weyant, in February of 2024, has spoken out on the divorce onstage and in interviews. (“We weren’t plate-throwers, and we weren’t yelling in front of the kid,” he told the Wall Street Journal in March, “[but] it got to the point where, if something really good happened to me, I wouldn’t even mention it, because I knew it would hurt her … It made the atmosphere unbreathable for a while.”) Nobody’s Girl, however, is Shires’s chance to share her own truth about the breakup.

“Everybody in my life always wants to know what happened. And that’s fine. That’s a natural question. But it was also like, ‘This could be the wrong time to be asking me this question.’ I’d rather not cry at you. I really want to look tough. I only cry in my pantry with Golden Oreos,” she says, curled up on a velvet bench in TheraPaint’s cozy Womb Room, a soothing, rust-colored space stocked with meditative tools and punctuated by the occasional chime. “Luckily, I’m not like George Clooney. There’s only 200 people that care about my life story.”

She’s being modest. Across her eight solo studio albums, Shires has become one of contemporary Americana’s most celebrated voices with a devoted fan base of her own. (During a recent Americanafest showcase at Nashville’s famous Exit/In, Shires loyalists were already singing along to her new material.) She’s an accomplished musician who plays a number of instruments, including the ukulele and the piano, but the fiddle is her passion. She picked up her first at the age of 10, and by 15, she went pro, touring with Western swing legends the Texas Playboys, which formed as the backing band for King of Western Swing Bob Wills in the 1930s. In 2019, Shires co-founded the country music supergroup The Highwomen with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, and Maren Morris. And if all of that didn’t keep her busy enough, she completed her master of fine arts in poetry in 2017.

“You get into a marriage, and you make concessions. I put a lot of my energy into something. I made those choices to build another life that I thought was going to last forever.”

Despite having been in the public eye for so long, when it came time to work on her ninth studio album, the last thing she wanted to do was make a divorce record. While in the studio with her longtime producer, Lawrence Rothman, Shires tried to leave out the songs she’d written about the experience. “It felt like a storm that was never gonna end,” she says, but “I’m in a different place now. It’s not that I don’t remember those things or know [that person] — I know them inside and out — but it’s also like trying to compare that person with this other person.” Her friend Shooter Jennings (a three-time Grammy-winning producer and the son of legendary country singer Waylon Jennings), however, pushed her to bare all. “‘You can’t just skip an entire part of your life for the next part,’” she recalls Jennings telling her.

At a moment when divorce narratives — Miranda July’s All Fours and Anna Marie Tendler’s post-John Mulaney memoir Men Have Called Her Crazy the most enduring among them — continue dominating the zeitgeist with their unflinching honesty, Nobody’s Girl is a compelling addition to the canon. If you want to dig deep into sadness, Shires mines her low points on “Lose It for a While” and “Lately.” If you want fiery indignation, she lets it rip on “Piece of Mind.” (“If you think I could ever hate you, you’re wrong / But that was a real f*cked up way to leave.”) But on lead single, “A Way It Goes,” which Shires calls “the heart of the record,” she also grapples with what kind of story to tell at all: “I can show you how he left me / Paint a picture, growing flowers for nobody,” she sings. “But I’d rather you see me thriving.”

“I thought about why it bothered me at that time to answer questions like ‘what happened?’ or ‘how are you?’ and stuff like that,” she says. “The reason is because I would rather you see me in a happy time.”

“I took a jujitsu class to try and get cuddled. He’s like, ‘No, that’s not what we’re here for.’”

In conversation, Shires is warm, open, and hysterically funny. When I mention that her often goofy personality is in stark contrast to her onstage cool-girl persona, she laughs. “I’m not cool. I was never cool. I didn’t even become cool when I got my braces off,” she says. “Fiddle wasn’t the cool thing to be doing, but I learned to go, ‘F*ck it, I’m playing it anyway!’ But I spent a lot of time alone. I spend a lot of time alone.”

Shires describes the solitude of her divorce plainly. “Sometimes I wouldn’t get out of the bed. I lived on Golden Oreos, double-stuffed Golden Oreos. Of course, I did the things when Mercy got out of school — breakfast, lunch, all that kind of stuff. But there’s this other time that’s not occupied during the day where you just have to sit there and wallow in it,” she says, her Texas drawl turning wallow into waller. “I didn’t realize that I could be taken so far down that I just can’t get out of bed. And then my grandmother died, my dad died, and I got in this wreck.”

She had to learn new coping skills along the way: In April, after making a promise to her daughter, she quit vaping — and not a day goes by that she doesn’t long for it. “Let the record show that I miss it and I love it,” she says, looking deadly serious and deeply wistful. “It’s the greatest joy in my life that I don’t participate in.”

Now Shires has found other ways to fill her time. “I took a jujitsu class to try and get cuddled. I thought that might help me. I went in there, took the class, and at the end, I was like, ‘Hey, so next time I want to be the person that you experiment on’ just to get cuddled,” she recalls with all the timing of a stand-up comedian. “He’s like, ‘No, that’s not what we’re here for.’ I tried pickleball, and I’m no good at that either, but then I tried backgammon, and I really took a liking to that. [...] I like pink champagne. I like pretty things, you know. I love finding a lot of joy in pretty things. Like, I’m not wearing all black all the time anymore, although it is the best and most travel-friendly color.”

“It’s a truth I needed to put somewhere and not carry anymore. Anybody that’s a real man would respect that and respect my space.”

Like anyone getting out of a decade-plus-long relationship, she’s in a rediscovery stage. “We make these little compromises along the way because you’re a couple now,” she says. “You get into a marriage, and you make concessions. I put a lot of my energy into something, and I made those choices to engage in helping build another life that I thought was going to last forever, but it didn’t.”

Those concessions are a big topic of what will likely be the most talked-about track on Nobody’s Girl, “The Details.” The song breaks down what went wrong in her marriage in no uncertain terms, even referencing Isbell’s biggest solo hit, “Cover Me Up,” a love song he famously wrote about Shires helping him get sober in 2012.

Shires sings, “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 / 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.”

“I was never cool. I didn’t even become cool when I got my braces off. Fiddle wasn’t the cool thing to be doing, but I learned to go, ‘F*ck it, I’m playing it anyway!’”

Isbell has a passionate fan base that’s quick to take to social media in his defense. Was she nervous to put out such a strong statement — and possibly face their wrath? Shires stands firm.

“It’s a truth I needed to put somewhere and not carry anymore,” she says. “There was hesitation for sure, and a worry that things might get taken out of context. Or that any part of it might become soundbites or fuel for a fire I didn’t deserve. But in the end, it’s my experience. Anybody that’s a real man would respect that and respect my space, to process and proceed with my life and truth and art. And I only use ‘man’ in that context because my fans are mostly ladies.”

She doesn’t know if her ex has heard the song yet. “Unless it got leaked somehow,” she says, shrugging. “But if he did, I hope that he would respect me for using my voice.”

Shires slips out of the Womb Room to change into jean shorts and a white tank top before her next meeting. But her paint-stained hands aren’t the only souvenir she’s walking away with. After months of time away from her own canvas, she feels inspired to paint again, thanking studio owner Jackie for the creative spark. “The meditation exploration I went on [while throwing paint] got me thinking: You just gotta keep making things. [My daughter], she’s gonna eventually experience heartbreak and changes in her life and grief. I want to show her that even with heartbreak or devastation, or you feel flattened, that you can always make something beautiful. Sometimes words don’t say it enough. That’s why I paint. ”

Add it back to her growing list of hobbies.

“I get to choose how I spend my time and how I manage my life. I get to decide my priorities and change them whenever I want. I don’t belong to anybody or anybody else’s story anymore,” she says, reflecting on the album title. “It’s like autonomy, even though we don’t fully have it as women, right? But we should never have to belong to anybody, we’re not anybody’s property. It’s taking your life back under control, and it wasn’t in control since my ex left. It’s an amazing thing to reclaim your body and your time and your art.”