Spotlight: Amanda Shires
If there’s such a thing as a “typical” road that most young singer-songwriters take from picking up their first guitar to releasing their debut album, it goes something like this: You get enough songs together to shyly test out at some open-mic nights, eventually segue into happy-hour gigs, opening slots or shows of your own on slow nights at a local club or coffee shop, build a small following, save up some cash or find an investor, hit the studio and, voila — debut album. For all intents and purposes, your music career starts now.
Amanda Shires took a somewhat more scenic route. In the 18 years between picking up her first instrument (a pawn shop violin) and recording what she playfully insists on calling her “first” solo album, this summer’s West Cross Timbers, Shires played with a kid’s western swing band, performed onstage with the surviving members of Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, taught fiddle at Playboys singer Tommy Allsup’s summer music camp, toured and recorded three albums with the Lubbock-based alt-country band the Thrift Store Cowboys, knocked out a solo record of instrumental fiddle tunes and recorded a duets album, 2008’s terrific Sew Your Heart with Wires, with Nashville-based songwriter Rod Picott (with whom she’s also toured Europe — twice).
Somewhere in there, she also got to open for and meet her hero, George Jones, and swap Bob Wills/Playboys stories with Chris Isaak and his drummer during a chance encounter at the Denver airport. He talked her into playing a couple of requests on her fiddle, which earned her a fun little anecdote and celebrity blurb for her Web site: “She played so pretty that Kenny and I missed our plane,” goes the Isaak rave. “America needs pizzicato.”
Add it all up, and it’s clear that Shires — though hardly “getting old,” as she puts it — has a lot more miles on her career odometer than the average 27-year-old rookie singer-songwriter. Which goes a long way toward explaining why West Cross Timbers, though charmingly naïve and vulnerable around the edges, plays more like a confident stride forward than a tentative baby step. Songs like the opening “Upon Hearing Violins,” a spry, catchy breakup anthem, and the darker revenge fantasy “I Kept Watch Like Doves” skip lightly but assuredly down well-trodden confessional roads, pointing early on toward a solid but not otherwise remarkable introduction. But then you come to “Mineral Wells,” and all of a sudden Shires sounds like a writer with hundreds of songs and decades of seasoning under her belt.
Fittingly, it was the last song she wrote for the record. And it’s her favorite, too.
“Yeah, that’s the one that I think shows me at my best,” she agrees. Not surprisingly, it’s also the most explicitly personal, addressing with striking lyrical economy (and an equally minimalist arrangement) the subject of her parents’ divorce when she was a toddler and its longstanding effect on her own identity. “Something happened in ’84/Ended up with two places to be from/the only tree with leaves in Lubbock with roots in Mineral Wells.”
“I was born in Mineral Wells, but I have to claim to be from both Mineral Wells and Lubbock, or somebody gets pissed off,” she explains. “My dad lives in Mineral Wells, and my mom lives in Lubbock. The song started out being about them, in the verses, but then in the choruses it started being more about leaving where you’re from, or divorcing where you’re from. Not in a mean kind of way, though; it’s just kind of about wanting something that you can’t have at the moment. It’s about missing something … a loss.”
Mineral Wells and Lubbock share equal claim to Shires’ music roots. It was in Mineral Wells, on a trip to visit her dad, that she felt love at first sight for that fateful pawn shop violin (“It just looked real exotic and mysterious to me,” she says. “I’d never really asked for anything before, but I begged for it.”). Her dad caved and bought it for her, but it was her mother, back in Lubbock, who had no choice but to sign her up for private lessons. “I sounded horrible,” Shires explains.
Her teacher was Lanny Fiel, who’d spent years in Nashville playing rhythm guitar with Jimmy Buffett before coming back to Lubbock and eventually starting the Ranch Dance Fiddle Band, a sort of School of Rock with a concentration in traditional western music. In addition to opening shows for Allsup and the Texas Playboys, Fiel and his young students performed concerts and dance workshops at area elementary schools. “We were kids teaching kids,” Shires says, “because if that oral tradition doesn’t continue, it could get lost really quickly, you know?”
Shires later paid loving tribute to that tradition on her 2005 instrumental album, Being Brave, and her fiddle-band roots still show through the cracks of West Cross Timbers, most notably on the closing cover of the 1920 tune “Whispering.” But it was her years playing with the Thrift Store Cowboys that really expanded her musical horizons and pointed her in the general direction of where she is now. The rest of the Cowboys (all guys) had all been playing together for a few years by the time she met them at South Plains College in Levelland, but she fit right in, adding her violin and occasional harmony vocals to the band’s atmospheric Americana — a moody, twilit sound not unlike the one that haunts “Mineral Wells” and other West Cross standouts like “Mariann Leola” and “Unwanted Things.”
Shires still considers herself a member of the Thrift Store Cowboys, who may return to the studio this winter to record a fourth album. But if the studio’s in Texas, she’ll have a long commute, as she’s lived in Nashville now for the better part of the last year. She first went out there to work on a record (never released) with songwriter/producer Buzz Cason, a friend of Fiel’s, and ended up staying just for the sake of self-motivation.
“I was starting to get a lot of work as a sideperson in Texas, and I felt like staying there was just enabling me to be a little too comfortable,” she says. “So I moved to Nashville to get uncomfortable and make myself grow some guts, and to do what I truly want to do, which is write and sing my own songs.”
West Cross Timbers is proof she’s doing just that. But that only begs the question: Is she still suitably uncomfortable?
“Very!” she laughs. “I’ve only been there nine months, but it’s been a really good learning experience. I’ve already met some really great songwriters, people like Rodney Crowell and Darrell Scott.
“I definitely see this being it,” she says of the direction she’s finally settled on with her music. “I don’t know how I’m going to grow, but I’m doing what I think is right.”
