Editor's Note: Amanda Shires is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for September 2025. Learn more about the Nashville fiddler, singer-songwriter, poet, and painter, and her new album Nobody's Girl, due out September 26 via ATO Records, in this feature. Keep an eye out for more from Shires all month long.
Women have always been written out of history. Their trailblazing, pioneering accomplishments, to be sure, but even more so, the loads of quiet, unsung physical and emotional labor they do to keep those around them afloat and thriving. From girlhood, women are conditioned to smooth out the edges for others by being accommodating and hospitable, by putting themselves — their needs, ambitions, dreams — last. And what begins in youth only proliferates through marriage and matrescence.
When the chapter of her own history that included a divorce from her longtime partner Jason Isbell began to take shape in public last year, Amanda Shires almost didn’t write herself back in. Much had already been speculated and said without her input, and even though she certainly had plenty of perspective to offer, she was tired of herself. After the expected wallowing and the hangover from countless sleeves of Golden Oreos subsided, she found herself in the studio with her longtime collaborator, the producer and musician Lawrence Rothman, and she remembers thinking, “I am so bored and annoyed with myself.” That’s the trickiest thing about grief. It’s exhausting and lonely and processing it requires some self-absorption.
Despite Rothman’s protestations, she’d scrapped all the songs she’d written about her divorce in favor of making an album about what she deemed the more important things going on in the world. But it was a phone call to her old friend Shooter Jennings — to vent about her frustrations with the album and her disagreement with Rothman — that became the catalyst for finishing Nobody’s Girl, her ninth solo record, out this month on ATO Records.
