Stream Amanda Shires' 'My Piece of Land' via NPR

By way of NPR comes a treat to get you to the end of the week: A First Listen of Amanda Shires' My Piece of Land, her Dave Cobb-produced album which is available everywhere next week. 

The first tunes released from the album — "Harmless" and "When You're Gone," the first a sparse tune and the second more of the foot-stomping variety — foretold something good and the full album follows through on that promise and turns out to be a mix of both. Tracks like "Pale Fire" and "Mineral Wells" are more quiet, spotlighting Shires' voice which often flutters from line to line like a bird or, well, a fiddle. Other songs, like My Love (The Storm) lean more heavily into powerful instrumentation, while opening tracks "The Way It Dimmed" and "Slippin'" settle in somewhere in between.

Shires, of course, is one half of a Nashville Americana power couple and her husband, Jason Isbell, can be heard on guitar and backing vocals throughout the record. She also shares his knack for turning a memorable phrase (a talent she's been fine-tuning, pursuing an MFA in poetry at Sewanee). 

She wrote the album while pregnant with the couple's daughter and one song in particular, "Nursery Rhyme," is directly about the experience of waiting for the baby to arrive. A native Texan, Shires talked to Texas Monthly about the song:

The fiddle-playing, warble-voiced singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, wife of Americana music poster boy Jason Isbell, was “pregnant as hell” when she wrote her new album,My Piece of Land, out September 16. She had been trying to stay busy in anticipation of the arrival of their daughter, Mercy. When all of the domestic chores were done, she turned to writing songs like “Nursery Rhyme.” A playful ditty that begins with the refrain “If you aren’t tip-toeing, then you’re stomping across my mind. / And I know it’s time, I know it’s way past time,” the song talks about pulling weeds, washing the car, and staining the deck as ways to preoccupy herself.

“After doing everything I could possibly do, then I was left alone in the house to face myself and unpack what I was feeling,” Shires said. “I had to start thinking about the child I’m bringing into the world. And that’s why I started writing the record. And that’s how that song started.”

Shires has a few Nashville gigs lined up later this month, including one with John Prine at the Ryman and an in-store at Grimeys. She returns to Nashville in October for a show at City Winery. You can pre-order My Piece of Land here and listen to it below.