Four months after news broke that she and Jason Isbell were divorcing, Amanda Shires opened a pair of concerts for Isbell in Colorado. The singer-songwriter, who addresses the end of her marriage and the reclamation of her independence on her new album Nobody’s Girl, says she played the gigs simply because she always keeps her word.
“They were booked early on and confirmed, and the deals were inked, as they say,” Shires tells Rolling Stone on this week’s Nashville Now podcast. “I always do what I say I’m going to do, always.”
Onstage at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on night one in May 2024, Shires changed the words to her song “Stupid Love” to allude to her now ex-husband’s dental work. She says she wasn’t jabbing at him, but rather making an observation that Shires says was overblown.
“Some of the things I said on that first show were kind of taken out of context. And Jason was there and he knew what I said and how things came across. They got sensationalized,” she says.
“When I sang that song ‘Stupid Love’… I changed it that night to ‘you’re smiling so much you kissed me with your crooked teeth,’” she continues. “They thought I was making fun of him, but I was trying to make a separation like, I never kissed the new teeth — I kissed the old teeth.”
Shires releases Nobody’s Girl on Friday, Sept. 26. “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.”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Charley Crockett, Gavin Adcock, Margo Price, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Dasha, and Clever.
