Amanda Shires’ ‘Nobody’s Girl’ is one of the year’s most honest explorations of heartbreak

Two years after a crushing breakup, singer-songwriter Amanda Shires is sitting in an empty hotel bar, her arms shaking as she reads a page from her notebook. She’s been stumbling, she says, in interviews, struggling to explain how she transformed one of the deepest pains of her life into art.

The work in question, “Nobody’s Girl,” fits into a tradition of great heartache albums. And yet it deviates from it. Brazenly honest, pointedly detailed and possessing the sort of vulnerability that feels like an outstretched hand to the listener, Shires’ exploration of grief is part examination of the difficulty of moving on and part work of self-help. “Nobody’s Girl” is the album as personal quest — for healing, for understanding and for being heard.

“You probably never get over it, completely,” Shires says of heartbreak. “I don’t think you get over it completely.”

Does that scare her?

“No,” she says quickly. “It’s proof of life. It’s proof of taking a risk. It’s proof of heart. You did it. You allowed yourself to love, and to open up to a person and to not be a coward to the most dangerous thing, love.”

It’s a topic Shires knew she would have to address, either in song or in interviews. Shires was once one half of a relatively high-profile couple on the Americana music scene. Her late-2023 split with singer-songwriter Jason Isbell garnered tabloid headlines, in part because the fraying of the marriage was captured in the documentary “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.” At first, she tried to avoid cataloging the divorce in song. “I tried to write songs about cars, or anything but anything I was going through,” Shires says.

Amanda Shires’ album “Nobody’s Girl” reflects on her public divorce with fellow musician Jason Isbell.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

She quickly reversed course. “Nobody’s Girl,” which was released Friday, isn’t shy, even referencing by name one of Isbell’s best-known tunes.

“I don’t write for people. The only thing I tried to keep in mind was Mercy,” Shires says, referring to her young daughter with Isbell. “I wanted to keep in mind that she’ll hear it, and that’s good. What I want her to see is that when you go through hard things, you can make something beautiful out of it. Life doesn’t always go as planned, but you don’t crumble. I mean, you might crumble, but you can find yourself through rebuilding.”

The interview began with tears. I confess to Shires that I’m more than 2½ years removed from my own traumatic breakup, one that still manages to derail my days. Dozens of self-help books and therapy sessions later, I’m still on the prowl for something that makes sense of it all.

That’s what drew me to “Nobody’s Girl.” While it’s a rootsy album rather than a collection of advice, it’s a cluster of songs that seek to illuminate what often feels unexplainable — that is, not just the loss of a partner but an imagined life and the reality that we’ve been permanently changed.

“I don’t know where you’re at, but everybody else can keep love,” Shires says. “For now, I’m not interested in that. If we should choose to do it again, when we have decided to potentially experience it again, why do we do that to ourselves?”

It’s a comment that figures into the title of the album. “Nobody’s Girl” is a journey of reclamation. “The Details” struggles to come to terms with someone’s one-sided point of view — “No matter how clear I keep the memories,” Shires sings with fragility, “he rewrites them so he can sleep” — while “Not Feeling Anything” captures a unique post-heartbreak numbness, when, as Shires sings on “Lately,” “the silence is too noisy and the music is too loud.” Throughout, it’s an elegant work, drifting from slow-burning waltzes to atmospheric explorations.

The album is also a recognition that while heartbreak has confounded poets since the beginning of time, it remains an unknown. Our culture expects us to, after a relatively short period, just get over it, as if a few nights out on the town will do the trick. That’s not how it works, and that’s where Shires’ songs such as the stark “Maybe I” and the warm piano ballad “Living” come in, compositions about being back home, alone, spilling wine and surrounded by the ghosts of a former lover. “Just existing can be hard,” Shires sings. “Maybe living is an art.”

I joke to Shires that, as a man, most often the unsound advice I have received is to simply go look for a rebound.

“I don’t know where you’re at, but everybody else can keep love,” says Amanda Shires, whose new album, “Nobody’s Girl,” deals with heartache.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

“Oh, my God. That’s what people suggested to me too,” Shires says. “Like, go on a date or whatever, and I went on a date. It just feels like you’re trapped in a weird interview prison. Suddenly, you have to tell someone to not eat off your plate. That’s not cool, man.”

Shires asks herself questions throughout “Nobody’s Girl,” often as to whether she’s doing OK and musing at one point that she may never be all right. But it’s also full of colorful songwriting, of Shires doing tarot with a mermaid, wandering New York listening to Billy Joel or catching her now-former partner behaving nonchalantly on a home security camera. The latter tidbit starts “Piece of Mind,” a growler of country-leaning rock tune in which Shires is alternately spiteful, vengeful and longing, playing call-and-response with a scorched-earth fiddle because there’s no one else to answer her.

“I don’t know if you got to get closure or anything like that, but it’s the result of not getting closure,” Shires says. “I used the writing to help myself get through this. I felt for a while I had this thing where I wanted closure. I wanted to say some things. There was a time where you had a best friend.”

Shires pauses, attempting to joke that it’s the laundry detergent that’s brought her to tears. After a moment, though, she regains her composure. “What I realized is what you put your big girl pants on and make your own,” she says. “It’s my favorite song to play.”

One song, Shires says, that she’ll never perform live is “The Details.” When it comes up during conversation, she turns to her notebook, ripping out a page that she says she wrote that afternoon discussing the number. It’s the song on the album that most directly addresses her breakup, and does so unflinchingly with a sorrowful piano. “He scared me then, he still scares me now,” Shires sings, and she is worried how that will come across. To love is to be vulnerable, and it also can come with a share of fear and rejection.

“Surely you understand that line,” Shires says, her arms trembling. I do, I say, relating to the song’s sense of dread and eradication.

“I decided to write it out because it seems like a rude thing to say,” she says, and then Shires begins reading from her notes. “The scared part isn’t about the physical fear,” she says. “It’s about the emotional fear of being rewritten. And the scared part, for me, is being afraid because being erased is being treated like you never mattered. A lot of artists and writers have a fear of being misrepresented and erased, and that’s why that is there.”

Amanda Shires’ “Nobody’s Girl” is a journey of reclamation.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

The song references Isbell’s 2013 tune “Cover Me Up.” I didn’t ask Shires about the nod to the track that was supposedly written for her, an unguarded acoustic number exploring the excitement and anxieties of a fresh passion, but she offered an explanation. “Why name-check the song? Because that became kind of a mythology. And myth isn’t always truth. I didn’t write it to tear anything down. I just wrote it to stand in my story. It’s not a response to anyone else’s work. If someone hears a dialogue between them, that’s because both me and my ex lived in the same marriage, just differently. My job isn’t to counter. It’s to tell my truth.”

Shires pauses and says, “That’s what I wrote down for that. I don’t know if it’s any good or not,” and then hands the page to me for safe keeping. “The Details” is a crucial moment on the album, an acknowledgment, with a dour fiddle and harp, that communication may be forever broken. And that’s when true heartbreak sets in. But that’s also when one can begin to explore the concept of healing.

“I was in the process of this as I was writing it,” Shires says. “This is not about my divorce. It’s about what happened exactly after. It’s the aftermath. A lot of people write about it as the experience is completely over. But I was going through it. Breakup songs are usually this and that when the person is wholly the new version of themselves with their scars and all. It took me a second to get OK with the fact that what I was writing was the process of trying to navigate this. So there’s true things I said that I left on the record.”

When, I ask Shires, did she begin to feel sort of normal, with the acknowledgment that it’s a continued process? She offers one post-breakup tip: games.

“People do pick sides when these things go down, and I found myself with less friends than I realized,” Shires says. “And my neighbor, who I didn’t even know, I went to retrieve some mail, and my neighbor was like, ‘Do you play backgammon?’”

No, she says she told him, asking him if it were like the dice game craps. Shires would become so transfixed that she later hired a backgammon coach and joined a local league in Nashville, the city in which she resides.

“It’s stimulating and all-encompassing,” Shires say. “And then there’s a person there that you’re playing against. This sounds cheesy as hell, but the game is all about what you do with the roll. You’re not gonna get good ones. Somehow that lined up. I had something to do and a place to meet people. I had a new thing that was my own.”

And if backgammon doesn’t work? “You’ve got to kind of, not psych yourself up,” she says, “but you’ve got to fake it till you make it.”

Those were words, I tell Shires, my therapist had told me just last week. I’ve found there’s also another option: One can spend a few nights with the authenticity of “Nobody’s Girl.”