Of Note 019: Getting Vulnerable with Amanda Shires, Sudan Archives, and Jeff Tweedy
Howdy folks!
October featured a glut of great music writing, far too much to ever include here. The pieces that resonated with me highlighted how musicians often have something that sets them apart from the rest of us: being comfortable with being vulnerable in public.
In this issue, you’ll find links to stories about Amanda Shires and how she’s dealing with the fallout from her high-profile divorce, how Sudan Archives changed her process to explore new ideas and emotions, and the featured book of the month: Jeff Tweedy’s 2018 memoir in which his vulnerability is on full display.
Amanda Shires: The Other Side of the Story
At Texas Monthly, Natalie Weiner wrote one of my favorite profiles I’ve read this year, deftly and respectfully presenting us Amanda Shires in raw form.
Shires’ split from Jason Isbell has been very public, with the cracks showing in an HBO documentary and then both artists releasing albums inspired by the divorce (Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow earlier this year and Shires’ Nobody’s Girl). With Isbell being the bigger star, he’s gotten a lot of airtime.
Shires’ doesn’t have the same media machine behind her so I’ve been curious about her perspective. Weiner’s profile is full of small details that go well beyond making music into how someone recovers from personal grief.
Shires also got rid of the dress she wore in Isbell’s “Traveling Alone” music video. She sold it on eBay for $750, in part because it felt good to get rid of it but also because she needed the money. She cleaned obsessively (“I’ve got so many scrubbers”) in her quest to “pick one foot up and put it down again” and purchased a new bed. Now, she says, “the ghosts don’t haunt so much.”
I love how the profile opens with a bit of humor as Shires drives Weiner’s car around town. It’s just a hint at how comfortable the two seem to be with each other and foreshadows how vulnerable the piece gets.
Sudan Archives Builds A New Identity
Not every artist fully exposes their vulnerability naturally. One of my favorite artistic tools is the alter ego so it was fascinating to read about Brittney Parks, who performs as Sudan Archives, crafting “The Gadget Girl” for her latest album in Julianne Escobedo Shepherd’s profile for Hearing Things.
For The BPM, she conjured an alter ego called Gadget Girl to explore her interest in science fiction and a desire to demystify her process. The Gadget Girl concept is both a metaphorical vessel, a way to cloak ideas and emotions in the imaginary, and a literal one—she intends to put her musical tools front and center. “We're always hiding the gadgets—when you’re performing, you kind of have your [gear] to the side,” she explains. “But I was like, let's just bring everything to the forefront—expose anything.”
That’s just the start. This wide-ranging profile gets deep on Parks’ influences and what makes, in my opinion, The BPM better than Beyoncé’s Renaissance, which explored similar territory.
Book of the Month: Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy
Jeff Tweedy’s 2018 memoir is older than most books I’d feature in this newsletter, but with the release of Tweedy’s very good (maybe best of his career?) new triple album, Twilight Override, I felt it was a good time to take this off of my shelf, where it has been sitting, unread, for a few years.
If you’ve ever seen Tweedy live and heard him tell a story, this book is written with the exact same voice and tone, a bit shy, but confident and self-deprecating, full of humor natural to a midwesterner. It makes for an easy read that feels revealing and honest.
While the headline stories here are certainly Jeff’s side of the breakups with Jay Farrar and Jay Bennett (which he seems to hold back on, enough to make me want to read the other side of the stories) and his tales from inside rehab.
While those were key to understanding the Tweedy we see today, I found Jeff’s writing about his budding confidence as a young songwriter and learning that his superpower was being vulnerable in public to be the most rewarding.
I’d sung these same songs to my mother, in the quiet of our kitchen, and if I could open up to her and not be destroyed by a disapproving arch of an eyebrow, what could a crowd of strangers possibly do?
“What could a crowd of strangers possibly do?” is a line that will rattle around in my anxious brain forever.
Bonus Links
If you want a much deeper, and more academic dive - into Chris DeVille’s Such Great Heights, check out Eric Harvey’s piece “Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away.”
“The Myth of ‘Electric Nebraska’” by Caryn Rose for Radio Nowhere is a evidence-backed dig into how the myth of an alternate version of Springsteen’s Nebraska came to be.
Steven Hyden’s “The Last Taylor Swift Thinkpiece” in his newsletter is a good overview if you want to read just one thing on the fallout of her new album.
Hyden also has a nice interview with producer Alex Farrar - who has helped Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, and Hotline TNT find their sound - over at Uproxx.
Thank you for reading! See you next month! On time!
Justin Anderson-Weber
