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Dark piano for dark thoughts7/31/2023 ![]() But no, we were supposed to dress like prom queens or pageant winners. I was on People’s worst-dressed list for that tank top! And meanwhile, dudes were out wearing T-shirts. I think about that line, “Mama wants to change that Nashville sound, but they’re never gonna let her.” I’ve been following your work for a while, and your albums are definitely getting darker. Because at one point I just got really tired of being the nice girl all the time and taking it, you know? I’ve got to bring that up with the people who are bringing their egos and their projections onto me. And I’m not going to blame the music for that. …Before, I kind of didn’t feel like I had any agency, and I guess now I do, and I guess I’ve gotten to the point where, if it’s not going to be fun, I’m just not going to do it. But who cares? Like I started saying, no one listens to the radio anyway. It’s sad that they still won’t play back-to-back country women on the radio. Like, remember to play those tunes when you’re practicing to find your joy. So I try to refer back to that in everything I do, even now. I didn’t learn about this other stuff until later. When I would think back on the best times of my musical experiences, they stemmed from the Texas Playboys band, the first band I worked for and played with, where even though they were all old white men in the band, I was treated as an equal. I did learn even further about forgiveness and re-centering myself from her. You’ve spoken about wanting to leave the industry, even. She went through so much, and a lot of that was because of her childhood and the time in which she lived, and a lot was because she was a woman in music, which, as you’ve talked about so many times, is not an easy thing to be. And when you compare that with her own childhood…there’s something kind of dark about that, that now also has hope. I think really, really made the song different, to see the little dark shadows of that song. I loved the way she wanted to take it more dark with the approach. I really like the way “Summertime” happened, because I never pictured myself doing that song ever, and when she said, “We’re going to do Summertime next,” I was like, “Okayyy, how am I going to do this, Bobbie? There’s so many good versions of it.” And she said, “Oh, you just forget all those versions and we play for each other.” Tell me about “Summertime.” It’s one of the most recorded songs in the world, yet this version feels so different from all the others I’ve heard. G&G spoke with Shires about the collaboration. This album, Bobbie’s last, feels also like a love letter to the music she adored, shepherded through by Shires. (Bobbie eventually got them back for more on her life, check out Me and Sister Bobbie, a book she co-authored with Willie.) ![]() Later, Bobbie’s in-laws-powerful people in Hill Country-took her own three children away from her for similar reasons. Bobbie died last year at ninety-one after a difficult life marked by joy and forgiveness: She and Willie were almost taken from their grandmother at a young age because county officials couldn’t see how a woman could provide for children on her own. It’s an album of covers, but it plays like a passing of the torch, one Texas musician to another. The resulting album, Loving You, comes out today. Over six or so trips to a studio in Austin, Texas, that’s just what they did. By the end of that first session, they’d decided they should record an entire album together. In the studio, the two played traditional tunes, happily traded the spotlight, and spent a lot of time laughing. Bobbie, in turn, had grown up adoring Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys-the band that gave Shires her first job as a professional musician at fifteen. Shires had grown up admiring Bobbie, who’d built a career as a side player-the type of musician Shires originally thought she wanted to be. ![]() Shires knew her version of the song could be accompanied by only one pianist-Willie’s sister and longtime bandmate, Bobbie Nelson, whom Willie often called a musical prodigy. And she thought she might want that album to include “Always on My Mind,” a song famously covered by Willie Nelson. But with the encouragement of friend and producer Lawrence Rothman, she found herself working on an album. A string of bad recording experiences had left her reeling. By the time Amanda Shires got into the studio with Bobbie Nelson in the spring of 2021, she was about ready to call it quits on music.
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