On her new album Nobody’s Girl, out now, Amanda Shires writes in candid detail about her marriage and divorce, never more so than in the song “The Details.”
It’s an elegiac ballad with brooding strings and piano, and devastating lyrics. “You erased the details in our history,” she sings in the chorus. “You rewrite them, so you can sleep.”
The bridge is particularly stark and calls out the famous song by her ex that she helped inspire: “I got him help and then he bailed/what were all those promise for/cover me up, nothing’s ever enough/gonna have to put the house up for sale.”
“I signed up for forever, but forever’s just as long as you live, I guess,” Shires says on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, talking at length about not only the personal loss of her divorce, but the professional one too: Shires regularly performed with her ex-husband. “Going from a partner in that side, too, it was a wild feeling. And just the fallout of that.”
The song, and much of Nobody’s Girl, is about Shires reclaiming her story and, as she sings, refusing to be erased.
“The past two years of my life have made it to where I feel like I can talk about anything, at this point,” she told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “I have always used music as a way to explain what’s going on in my life to myself. And it was a big transition to go from, you know, having been in a marriage for a long time and to suddenly find that I’m not. It takes a lot of learning and self-reflection and, for me, a lot of time to process.”
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