Amanda Shires Shares Personal Moments on New LP » PopMatters

With the lyrically direct and musically bisected Nobody’s Girl, Amanda Shires tells her side of the story of her divorce from Jason Isbell.

Nobody’s Girl Amanda Shires ATO 26 September 2025

What happens when two musicians get divorced? If Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell’s 2025 albums are any indication, it’s a double-dose of Blood on the Tracks.

After a decade-long marriage that also involved regular artistic collaboration, Isbell formally filed for divorce from Shires in 2023, a process that concluded officially earlier this year. Celebrity divorces of all kinds invite speculation and voyeurism, but a particular watchfulness emerged for these two songwriters, and for understandable reasons. Both have a history of personal openness in their lyrics – think of Isbell‘s best-known number, the ballad “Cover Me Up”. 

Then, the 2023 HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed further opened the shutters on the couple’s marriage and creative partnership, resulting in a tense and, at times, uncomfortable viewing experience. Of course, fame isn’t a license for idle fan speculation, but in the same year the divorce was finalized, Shires and Isbell have offered up their artistic reflections on their ending. It requires no parasocial indulgence to say that the listening public is being invited in to consider the now-wrapped relationship.

Isbell’s stripped-down acoustic Foxes in the Snow dropped not long after the divorce was announced as final earlier this year. Seven months later, Shires doesn’t wait to let us in on the subject matter of her eighth LP, Nobody’s Girl: following a brief instrumental “Invocation,” she kicks off lead single “A Way It Goes”, with a Loretta Lynn-esque quaver in her voice, “I can show you how he left me.” 

Shortly into this tune, Shires for a moment suggests that she’ll merely write around the divorce, focusing instead on the aftermath and her recovery. “I’d rather you see me thriving / Vining my way back up,” she admits, before lifting her voice into a chorus that, for a moment, indicates that her attitude might be that of release rather than confrontation: “Oh, you know, there’s a way love goes / It goes away, away it goes.” This gentle ballad typifies the musically gentle first half of Nobody’s Girl’s style. 

Lyrically, however, it’s not long before the gloves are off for Amanda Shires. At the end of the lamentation of “The Details”, the rhyme scheme breaks down as she delves into diaristic accusation: “He scared me then, he still scares me now / Never will hear me out / The thing is he justifies it, using me / And cashing in on our marriage.” The person who sings that song definitely has some precise ideas about why love “goes away, away it goes”. 

Later, on the distorted rock of “Piece of Mind”, she digs into the depths of her vocal range and growls, “If you think I could ever hate you, you’re wrong / But that was a real fucked up way to leave.” She later confesses that she’d “like to lose it for a while”. A divorce is a hard enough thing on its own; done in the limelight, it’s impossible to find a quiet place where one won’t be studied like an animal at the zoo. So Shires speaks frankly, and by the end of the record, increasingly freely.

Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow picks a different lane than the direct Nobody’s Girl. There, Isbell is frequently self-effacing; on “Gravelweed”, he apologizes, “I was a gravelweed and I needed you to raise me / I’m sorry the day came when I felt like I was raised.” (Rolling Stone asked Shires about that album, and she delivered a professional reply: “I put that record on. I appreciate the musicianship.”

If one didn’t know about Shires and Isbell’s relationship prior to listening to Foxes in the Snow, it might not strike them as being about any one person in particular, but rather a rootsy take on the breakup album. With Nobody’s Girl, Shires doesn’t let her listeners mistake her subject for anything other than what everyone will know it to be about before putting it on the speakers.

Some might bristle at Shires’ approach given the starkness in the way she sings about the now-gone marriage, considering that Isbell’s LP has no moment, at least, as far as this critic can tell, not knowing either singer personally, so bruisingly forthright about the other partner as “The Details”. However, anyone who would characterize Nobody’s Girl as an act of sensationalized lashing out likely already held some kind of bias heading into the listening experience.

Amanda Shires’ album, which finds her doing plenty of stock-taking about her own path forward (“You can’t hold your breath the rest of your life,” she acknowledges on the touching penultimate track), is no cheap airing of dirty laundry. These are honest songs, and anger is a legitimate emotion worth probing. Foxes on the Snow is evidence enough that Isbell wouldn’t call himself perfect.

However, while Nobody’s Girl will likely draw attention for its unsparing lyrics, its real artistic breakthrough for Shires comes in its compositional structure rather than its words. The first four numbers after “Invocation” stick at a mid-tempo pace that lulls even when Shires is at her most cutting lyrically, but then something remarkable happens with “Lose It for Awhile”.

At first, the music is the quietest on the record up to that point, just Shires’ raw vocals and a gently plucked acoustic guitar. Then, after numerous repetitions of “I’d like to lose it for a while,” the drums drop in, and the song opens up into a kind of doomy psych-rock backed by strings. “I don’t love you anymore,” Shires cries, her voice a ghostly thing against the swells of volume.

Following this moment, Nobody’s Girl ventures across several different sonic terrains. “Piece of Mind” conjures a grungy Nashville saloon on a Friday night. “Streetlights and Stars” imagines Shires delivering a Broadway-tinged country ballad, and the Laurel Canyon-indebted “Lately” could be a tune from Warren Zevon’s late 1970s golden days.

In this split that occurs after the turning point of “Lose It for Awhile”, it’s as if Shires takes all the introspection of the first half and purges it in a cathartic jam that opens up a whole new palette with which to color the emotions stemming from the divorce. It’s a singular moment of transformation for Shires, a highlight of her career as a musician, one that breathes life into the staid opening section, making it a more vibrant sonic canvas. 

Listening to the personal journey Shires lays out on this record, I was reminded of the now-iconic 1997 Fleetwood Mac performance of “Silver Springs”, which climaxes with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham looking into each other’s eyes, seemingly channeling the distant passions of their long-ended relationships in such a way that the breakup came alive in that moment decades later. Only time will tell if Shires and Isbell ever afford themselves such an on-stage reckoning, but with Nobody’s Girl, Amanda Shires has created something as steely as the gaze that Nicks pores into Buckingham. It’s hard to look away.