Carrying Lightning

“Let’s not give away what all the songs are about,” requests Amanda Shires via email — shortly after an hour-long interview discussing exactly that. “I think I prefer for the listener to decide for themselves what stuff means, because I always hate it when I think a song is about a horse, and then it turns out to be about a damn trip to France …”

And so, by artist request, there will be no handy track-by-track cheat sheet for Shires’ new Carrying Lightning. But if you really can’t deduce what the songs are all about on your own, then consider yourself equally blessed and cursed, because odds are you’ve never been knocked on your ass by the wrecking ball of human desire — the kind so lovingly bottled by the young Texas songwriter in the album-opening “Swimmer, Dreams Don’t Keep”:

“April was the last time I think I saw you

You were carrying lightning

The way you walked into the room,

If I was a flower I would’ve opened up and bloomed

I say I don’t care, but I’m a liar

Look how easy a heart can catch on fire …”

That same charge of romantic/erotic tension courses throughout the entire album, which sways from innocent daydream (“Swimmer”) to restless longing (“Love Be a Bird”) to explosive lust (“Shake the Walls”) to blissful contentment (“Sloe Gin”) and, finally, back to wistful fantasy (“Lovesick I Remain”). The specific, behind-the-scenes details — such as who or what inspired each particular song, or to what extent each stems from Shires’ own life vs. her sheer imagination — need not be divulged or even probed, because, as the mysterious little messenger in “Ghost Bird,” “all feathers and a heartbeat,” puts it best, “Baby, we’re all running from the same things: broken hearts, broken homes, the tired and the loneliness …”

“I guess the theme of the record as a whole is just, ‘get wrecked in love — and be loved,” says Shires. “Or, to steal a quote from Sylvia Plath: ‘Wear your heart on your skin in this life.’ That’s my platform.”

The quote may be borrowed, and the emotional terrain of the songs universally relatable, but Shires’ voice is distinctly her own. Her Texas twang and fetching vibrato (“less goat, more note!” she teases herself with a laugh) can dance playfully around a melody or haunt a line like a mournful ghost, and she deftly employs her fiddle/violin, ukulele and even whistling skills to similar effect. The resulting sound is a beautiful but woozily surrealistic swoon — as well befits an artist who cites Leonard Cohen and alt-country dark horse Richard Buckner as two of her biggest musical influences. Or, as a review in Americana UK once observed: “At times, her energetic, jittery vocals and eccentric lyrical subjects mark her out as a young female heir to the godfather of strange, Tom Waits. In her more conventional moments, Shires sounds like the weird young niece of Dolly Parton.”

In fact, Shires is just a down-to-earth, self-effacing West Texas gal currently residing in Nashville, working her tail off trying to find her niche in the music industry as an independent artist. In the recent Hollywood movie Country Strong, she played the fiddle player in the band backing Gwyneth Paltrow’s fictional country superstar. In real life, Shires runs with a decidedly more left-of-mainstream-type crowd, including Jason Isbell (she sings and plays fiddle on the former Drive-By Trucker’s latest, Here We Rest) and Justin Townes Earle (she’s the lovely model gracing the cover of his 2008 debut, The Good Life). She also maintains strong ties to the Lone Star State, recording and occasionally performing with the Lubbock band Thrift Store Cowboys (which she joined while still in college) and sometimes even teaching fiddle at Texas Playboys’ singer Tommy Allsup’s summer music camp. She was only 15 the first time she played onstage with the Playboys (the Western swing band made famous by the late Bob Wills) — a mere five years after she coerced her father into buying her first fiddle, a lime-green Chinese instrument from a pawn shop in dusty downtown Mineral Wells, Texas.

In 2005, while still a regular member of the Thrift Store Cowboys, Shires released her solo debut, a mostly instrumental showcase for her traditional fiddle chops called Being Brave. But the fertile Texas music scene was overripe with side-person work for the talented young player and backup singer — so much so that Shires feared sliding into a complacency that, left unchecked, threatened to stunt her growth as a songwriter. So she relocated to Nashville — “to get uncomfortable and make myself grow some guts,” as she put it once — and dived headlong into the process of writing and recording the first two albums to really put her on the roots-music map: 2008’s Sew Your Heart with Wires, a collection of duets co-written and recorded with singer-songwriter Rod Picott; and what Shires calls her “true” solo debut, 2009’s West Cross Timbers. Both were met with enthusiastic reviews and radio support, with the former being voted the fourth best debut album of 2008 by FAR (Freeform American Roots) Chart reporters and the later reaching No. 21 on the Americana Music Association Chart. The Gibson Guitar company featured Shires on their website as one of 2009’s breakout artists, and No Depression called West Cross Timbers one of the 50 best releases of the year.

Shires was eager to get right back into the studio, but a busy touring schedule — averaging 120-160 dates a year, including at least one or two annual trips to Europe — necessitated that the follow-up to West Cross Timbers, be recorded piecemeal. “We did it over the course of 16 months in multiple sessions, just coming back and forth home to Nashville between tours,” she says of Carrying Lightning, which she co-produced with Picott and David Henry at Henry’s True Tone Studios. Fortunately, although it was hard to find time to lay down tracks, writer’s block was never an issue for her.

“Some people only write when they’re at home, but I just write, whenever or however I can,” Shires says. “We ended up recording 20-something songs for the album, and the hardest part was trying to decide which ones to use. But having the whole process take so long is what ultimately helped give the record its shape and focus. I was really able to think about which songs fit together the best, as opposed to just, ‘I’m going into the studio to make a record, and in two weeks I’ll be done.’ I had a lot of time to sleep on this one.”

In fact, even now that the record’s mastered, pressed and ready for release, Shires still isn’t quite finished with it. Taking full advantage of the DIY promotional opportunities afforded by the age of social media, she plans to film videos for every song on the album, with “When You Need a Train It Never Comes” and “Lovesick I Remain” already uploaded to YouTube and more on the way. “We just shot one for ‘Shake the Walls’ today, and ‘Ghost Bird’ will be next,” she says. “I want ‘Ghost Bird’ to be animated.”

What’s more, she’s still haunted by some of the songs that didn’t make the Carrying Lightning cut — if only because they didn’t quite fit the theme of the rest of the record. Some of these she hopes to release before year’s end as a separate EP.

“They were just too dark and would have seemed too random, I guess,” she says of the orphan tunes. How dark? One of them apparently involved a girl getting her skin sliced off.

“Actually, that one was kind of a love song,” she admits with a sheepish chuckle. “Maybe I should have left that one on the record!”

“Godfather” Waits would be proud.