Ignition Welcomes Singer/Songwriter Amanda Shires
Just in case the title alone wasn’t a dead give away, Amanda Shires “Down Fell the Doves” is not a record for the faint of heart, faith or spirit.
Not that anyone who heard her last album would have expected such. “Carrying Lighting,” the critically acclaimed 2011 breakthrough that put Shires on the map as one of Americana music’s most arresting new voices (and “Texas Music” magazine’s 2011 Artist of the Year), was a kudzu-tangled web of frayed heartstrings and combustible desire that revealed the one-time “little fiddle player from Lubbock” to be a grown woman unafraid to “get wrecked in love” and dish out the same with keen poetic insight and unnervingly mature, femme-fatale conviction.
The Texas-born violinist and singer/singwriter will bring her heartfelt country- and folk-inspired music to Goshen during a concert at Ignition Garage, 120 E. Washington St., at 7:30 p.m. this Friday, Jan. 17.
“There’s a lot of destruction on this record,” says Shires, the observation coming a thoughtful pause after her somewhat casual dismissal of the album’s “Box Cutters” — a disturbingly beautiful suicidal daydream — as just being “a little bit of dark humor.”
“I wrote that one in a haze of delirious exhaustion,” she says of the song that imagines, amongst other possible exit strategies, the sweet surrender of “a rose-petaled, eyes-closed collapse” in a warm blood bath.
Maybe you just had to be there.
“I don’t know,” Shires concedes with a disarming, self-effacing chuckle, her lilting West Texas drawl as yet unbowed by years of living in Nashville and nonstop touring. “I always hate giving things away, because I like it when people can hear a song and make their own stories. But I believe in that old saying, ‘What happens in the dark comes to light.’ In order to create something, you’ve got to destroy something: You can’t have good without bad, you can’t have life without death or growth without decay. And with everything that happens, you’re learning something; I think that in this record I realized how much of learning and life experience is relearning. And there’s beauty in that. So although there’s a lot of destruction and things falling apart on the album, there’s also rebuilding going on. I think even in the darkest material there’s an inkling of hope.”
For ticket and other information, visit the website ignitionmusic.net or call (574) 971-8282.