Amanda Shires – Nobody’s Girl (ATO) (13th Floor Album Review)
Amanda Shires’ Nobody’s Girl is a luminous, defiant chronicle of life after the end of both a marriage and a musical partnership with fellow songwriter Jason Isbell.
Shires has always written with unflinching intimacy, and here that candour is paired with a soundscape that glows like a city at midnight: synths and piano drifting through air, strings cutting like neon.
She builds that world with producer Lawrence Rothman, whose widescreen touch first defined 2022’s Take It Like a Man. The tight core band, Peter Levin on piano and synthesiser, Fred Eltringham on drums, Dominic Davis and Pino Palladino sharing bass duties, with guitars from Rothman and Joe Kennedy, creates warm organic rhythms anchored by electronic shimmer.
Within Shires’ catalogue, the album feels inevitable. The domestic calm of My Piece of Land gave way to the restless experimentation of To the Sunset, then the storm and confrontation of Take It Like a Man. Nobody’s Girl arrives as resilience and independence. In parallel, Isbell’s Reunions and Weathervanes trace his own mid-life reckonings. Heard together, the two bodies of work map the slow unravelling of a shared life, and in this album Shires is moving on to the next chapter in her own story.
The record moves like the stages of healing. The journey starts with the orchestral drama of Intro Invocation which leads into A Way It Goes. This has a slow drumbeat and hushed synths, and Shires’ vocal rising over bassy swells singing of spending “a year looking inward and healing,” until the music itself seems to move forward. Piece of Mind is rawer, a full-band rock surge where she concedes “that was a real fucked up way to leave,” before softening into the hope that her former partner will “find your missing piece of mind.” On Lately she captures the mundane ache of aftermath, “listening to Billy Joel… fight the blues with more blues,” set to mid-tempo piano and quietly insistent drums. By the final track, Not Feeling Anything the album has travelled from opening drama to the slow piano led defiant close “I did it anyway.”
Shires’ voice is clear, expressive, and capable of carrying both ache and assurance in a single phrase. She relies on tone and phrasing to do the emotional work. But that restraint, while powerful, is sometimes undermined by production choices that lean towards a more polished, radio-friendly sound. On tracks like Streetlights and Stars or Friend Zone, the gleam of synths and strings can smooth over the edge that makes her most compelling: that slight country quaver, that lived-in voice telling hard truths and lyrics that hit hard – “I wish I could be exactly what you need”
Nobody’s Girl stands as the elegant next piece in the narrative arc across Shires’ albums; the domestic peace of My Piece of Land, through the restlessness of To the Sunset, the storm of Take It Like a Man, and now through heartbreak and healing to self reclamation. Heard beside Isbell’s own recent albums, it feels like the other half of a conversation. Shires claims her freedom in her own language, asserting, as she sings in A Way It Goes, that “there’s a way love goes, it goes away” and that she alone gets to decide where next.
John Bradbury
Nobody’s Girl is released Friday, Sept. 26 on ATO Records
