Amanda Shires, who plays Tampa Pig Jig at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park in Tampa, Florida on Oct. 21, 2023. Credit: Photo by Brent Stirton / Design by Joe Frontel

Birds mean a lot to Amanda Shires. She wears wings onstage, and the songwriter-fiddler who earned a master’s degree in poetry from Sewanee: The University Of The South, references taking flight frequently on record. Shires, 41, once detailed how birds move from land and sea and deploy a mode of parenting that’s perhaps more evolved than a human’s. She even keeps close to a dozen chickens on the rural Tennessee property she shares with her seven-year-old daughter Mercy and husband Jason Isbell. Last summer, Shires told Salon, “I don’t even eat birds, I love them so much.”

And while it’s safe to assume that she won’t be tasting any wings after her set in Tampa this weekend, swine is another story. “I like the hell out of some pork,” she told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

She likes Tampa Pig Jig, too, especially the festival’s origins as a neighborhood barbecue to raise money for a friend with the rare kidney disease. As it enters its 12th year, the nonprofit has raised more than $5 million for focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, and spawned events in Silicon Valley, the Rocky Mountains, and New York. But as Shires told CL, organizers have “kept it sort of philanthropic and then barbecue-y.”

“Just the idea of doing something for a friend and helping others. It sucks, but it’s good that there are good humans out there that can keep paying things forward and trying,” she added.

Shires has been doing a lot for others lately, too. In 2022, as abortion rights came under attack by a conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, she penned a Rolling Stone op-ed that detailed the life-threatening ectopic pregnancy she ended in August 2021. Her advocacy allowed others, in country music and beyond, to share their own stories and destigmatize women’s health care.

She even told Yahoo that, “I feel like the God that I believe in gave me the brain and the thinking and the knowledge to know what I should be able to do with my body. … And I think that if I didn’t have the wherewithal to make those decisions they wouldn’t have been given to me by some creators in the first place.”

Her latest album is a collaboration with the late Bobbie Nelson, who opened doors for women in music, and her record before that, Take It Like A Man, is one of the most transparent, dynamic and colorful chronicles of matrimonial strife to date. Parts of it are drenched in Memphis horns, others are buoyed by masterful pop ballads. Her collaborator, Los Angeles-based musician and producer Lawrence Rothman, told NPR Shires’ vocal kindred souls are Dolly Parton and Stevie Nicks. And all of Take It Like A Man wears the bravado of live sets from The Highwomen, her supergroup with Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby.

The album almost didn’t come out either. Rothman added that Shires was so frustrated with the music industry that she had given up on music. But songs were piling up as her marriage to Isbell—who had some rough nights in Ybor City in his drinking days—started to feel unsavable. On “Fault Lines,” in vivid detail, she starts taking inventory on who keeps what, and what to tell people when the split is finalized.

“There’s nothing left to fix. You can say I lost my grip. Say whatever feels better or whatever. You can just say I’m crazy. You can say it’s all my fault,” Shires sings. “But no one’s gonna be asking me.”

But they did. Recent interviews have been painful recollections of the rough patch, and partners who listen to Take It Like A Man together should know that the album is pretty much a gateway drug to couples therapy.

“That’s a high compliment, thanks,” she told CL, laughing, before adding that she knew her and Isbell’s marriage would come under the microscope when she released the album. “Marriages have ups and downs, and I am glad that people are getting more comfortable talking about it without it feeling like there was a betrayal. And I’m glad we’re not in that down part anymore, but also don’t know what the future might bring. So I’m happy to live in the present moment as it is a good one.”

And the good times will roll when Shires lands at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park.

She has a deep love for Tampa, where community radio station WMNF 88.5-FM was the first to play her music, and she was close with the late John Prine, who kept a home in Gulfport. Revisiting all the memories, plus spots Prine and others loved, isn’t the hard part of losing someone, she told CL.

“When you consider looking for somebody that’s not here anymore for advice or a laugh—that’s when I kind of feel the losses the most,” Shires added.

And while Pig Jig is a party, don’t necessarily expect Shires to back down from speaking her mind. She’s been critical of the low percentage of women on country radio, attributing the problem with the format to the fact that “there’s a bunch of old white men still in control,” but also found something of a silver lining.

“The good news is that who the fuck listens to country radio,” she told CL. “Hopefully those guys will retire to go play golf. Like they’ll let us young kids that have some ideas and bigger ideas about the world takeover.”

At the festival, she opens a stellar lineup headlined by Brad Paisley, alongside The Head and the Heart, and Shovels and Rope. Pig Jig’s other booking, Riley Green, recently came under scrutiny when he removed “Bud Light” from his lyrics after the brand gave transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney her own commemorative can. Shires told CL that she’s never heard of Green, and surrendered that there will always be dummies out there no matter what anyone does.

“All we can do is keep trying to show people a different path and see people as people, like get out and meet some people instead of just standing there in your privileged place of man-ness, and comment on things like Bud Light,” she said. “Like go the fuck the hell. What do you know about this world? Who are you anyway?”

Shires joked about dressing up like a Bud Light for her performance, but said she won’t be saying Green’s name out loud at Pig Jig.

“I don’t believe like that. I’m all about acceptance and letting people be people,” she told CL. “I feel like I just naturally counteract that kind of energy.”

Tickets to see Amanda Shires play Tampa Pig Jig at Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park on Saturday, Oct. 21 are still available and start at $125. Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.