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.”).
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