Amanda Shires

Remember way back when, when music’s Northwest Passage was the perpetual search for a “New Dylan.” Springsteen, Steve Forbert, John Prine, John Cafferty, Dan Bern and the guy who now services your copy machine all were anointed as such at one point or another. But here’s the funny thing about hyperbolic tags: sometimes they’re actually warranted. So let’s just come right out and say it — Amanda Shires is the New Lucinda. Which would make Carrying Lightning, the 29-year-old Lubbock native’s third release, her Born to Run or Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, and, yes, that’s about right. It’s that close to perfect. Like the best of that long line of West Texan songwriters, Shires pulls unique and haunting melodies out of its endless dusty sky and well-beyond-her-years wisdom from the sun-parched, lonesome landscape. Shires has long resined up the bow (she was playing with the Texas Playboys at the tender age of 16), and Carrying Lightning, an album of love’s longing and dark sorrow, makes use not of a dancing fiddle, but of the mournful and wistful violin. The beautiful “Kudzu” is a love song rendered in Shires’ disarmingly seductive Texas twang and built on a firm foundation of horsehair on catgut. On “Ghostbird,” she divines universal insight from a winged muse who helps her see that “we’re all running from the same things, broken hearts, broken homes, the tired and the loneliness.” And when Shires sings “When You Need a Train it Never Comes,” it is with both resignation and irony. But sometimes, when you need a new voice in Americana music, it does come.