***ALBUM OF THE MONTH | August 2022***
Amanda Shires
Take It Like A Man
ATO
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In the seventeen years since Amanda Shires unveiled her debut album Being Brave (2005), the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has unassumingly cultivated an impressive musical résumé, with seven solo albums accompanied by a handful of LPs recorded as part of her husband Jason Isbell’s band The 400 Unit. Revered as a frequent and trusted collaborator, Shires’ distinctive voice and accomplished fiddle-playing have remained in high demand as evidenced by her various contributions to songs by the likes of Neal Casal, Justin Townes Earle and John Prine, all of whom have sadly passed away in the past few years.
Shires’ penchant for curating musical partnerships of the highest order came to peak fruition three years ago, when the Texas native set about implementing her vision of forming an all-female supergroup as a counterweight within the perennially male-dominated country music community. In September 2019, she and her kindred songwriting spirits Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Maren Morris delivered their widely acclaimed self-titled debut album under The Highwomen moniker. Legends-in-the-making themselves, the foursome’s name is a knowing nod to the Highwaymen, the collective comprised of country legends Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, who recorded together from 1985 to 1995.
Featuring ten stirring songs that together embody the virtues of creative endurance, emotional resonance and human resilience, Shires’ seventh solo affair Take It Like A Man is unequivocally her most powerful musical statement and greatest artistic achievement to date. An introspective work of an artist who, lucky for us, has persevered through recent periods of self-doubt, the album’s title and its suggestion of stoic responses to life’s most challenging moments stand in stark contrast to Shires’ soul-baring lyrical content that defines and illuminates the Lawrence Rothman produced record.
“Having to walk through the world, being told that you’re not supposed to show your emotions or you’re gonna be seen as weak,” Shires reflects in a recent Billboard interview. “The whole point of this record is to show strength and vulnerability, how necessary vulnerability is in relationships. You have choices in life and with those choices is the inevitable consequence. It takes a lot of strength to be vulnerable, to deal with your own choices.”
An impassioned confession of grappling with heartache that flips gender constructs on their head, the enthralling, evocative title track “Take It Like A Man” accentuates the dynamic dichotomy between fragility and fortitude, with Shires’ purposefully brittle yet wholly beautiful vocals commanding you to pay rapt attention to her words. She wryly concludes the song by singing, “And I know I can take it like a man…da,” a reclamation of her identity and sense of self-agency. “I wrote that last line, ‘take it like a man,’” Shires explains in an official statement. “Then I changed it. I realized you can try and do what they say and take it like a man and show that you can withstand anything. But truly you can only take it like yourself.”
Punctuated by determined guitar stabs and Shires’ refreshing lyrical candor and clarity, the album-opening lead single “Hawk For The Dove” is a ravishing, visceral declaration of desire with a hint of underlying danger in lines like, “I see you talking, but I can't hear a thing / Too caught up in the way I want you rolling over me / The spurs of hip bones and you pressing in / Come on, I dare you, make me feel something again.” “I want people to know that it’s okay to be a 40-year-old woman and be more than just a character in somebody else’s life,” Shires says in a press release. “The song and the visual representation of the song deal with the emotions that turn prey into predator.”
A trio of standout songs are united in their eloquent examination of love’s volatility. A classic, piano-blessed country ballad that features her Highwomen colleague Maren Morris on harmony vocals and her husband on guitar, “Empty Cups” unfolds as a sobering account of a love grown distant and disenchanted with time, bolstered by Shires’ voice that captivates in conveying genuine, palpable heartache in the tradition of such vocal luminaries as Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton.
Co-written by another fellow Highwoman, Natalie Hemby, the album-closing “Everything Has Its Time” is an astutely articulated lament of love grown stagnant with the passing years, the flame of once-embraced passion and romance reduced to a flicker, in incisive lines like, “There was a time when it was hard for us to say goodnight / I was yours, you were mine / Kissing in the car underneath the streetlight / Now we just walk through the door / Turn out the light and go to bed / Can’t remember who we were before.”
Taking a brave and bold songwriting risk by re-investigating the more fraught dimensions of her own marriage with Isbell, “Fault Lines” finds Shires “trying to explain my feelings about the disconnect in my marriage to myself,” Shires tells Billboard. “I sent it to Jason and he didn’t listen to it, which was fine. He was busy during the pandemic guarding his own mental health, dealing with things in his own way.”
Other notable moments include the organ and horn imbued throwback soul of “Stupid Love,” the piano-driven “Lonely At Night” with its Carole King, Brill Building inspired melody, and “Bad Behavior,” a slow burn of a song about the gravitational pull toward the comfort of strangers, no matter how ephemeral the connection may turn out to be.
A radiant revelation of an album that places a premium on art over artifice and substance over semblance, Take It Like A Man evinces the many gifts of a songwriter who arguably hasn’t reached her creative prime just yet, but is well on her way to experiencing the pinnacle soon enough.
Notable Tracks: “Empty Cups” | “Everything Has Its Time” | “Hawk For The Dove” | “Stupid Love”
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