SPOTLIGHT: The Ache Is Evidence [ESSAY]

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, which came out September 26 via ATO Records, in this feature. Keep an eye out for more from Shires all month long.

I remember the day I took the wrapping paper off the mirrors. I know it sounds dramatic, but I’d kept them covered for weeks. It was easier to not see myself.

In the meantime, I leaned on songs to explain what I couldn’t. Some came pouring out like I was bailing water from a sinking boat, just trying to keep myself afloat. Others had been waiting for years. There were scraps in voice memos, unfinished demos, couplets scrawled on index cards, even whole songs that had to be torn down and rebuilt.

By the time Nobody’s Girl was announced in the spring, the writing was finished. But life wasn’t finished with me. Three months into the divorce, my father had a stroke and then an aneurysm. In February my grandmother passed. In March the divorce was finalized. In May my father died. And in July, I wrecked my truck into a deer, a fence, and a couple of trees.