to write songs, like Billy Joe Shaver said,” she says. “One day I’ll write one as good as his.”

In 2008 Shires decided she’d had enough of playing other people’s music and moved to Nashville to establish herself as a singer and songwriter. The first album she recorded there, 2009’s West Cross Timbers, was still in a squarely rootsy vein, but Sew Your Heart With Wires, a collaboration that same year with the songwriter Rod Picott, slightly moved the needle.

The real change came with 2011’s Carrying Lightning, which, like her previous albums, was self-released—and unlike them drew the sort of attention that doesn’t usually accrue to artists who put out their own music, including raves from NPR, Garden & Gun magazine, and Texas Music magazine, which named her its Artist of the Year. The higher profile made sense: Carrying Lightning is a songwriter’s record that found Shires edging away from her roots and entering the territory occupied by Americana artists like Lucinda Williams and Josh Ritter. Her violin is present, but its mournful sound is a far cry from the spryness of western swing fiddling. 

Down Fell the Doves, her first release on a real label, is an even more radical break. From the first track, “Look Like a Bird,” which is made up almost entirely of a one-note drone, a sampled drumbeat, ghostly guitar notes, and Shires’s fiddle and multitracked voice, it’s clear that she has burned off the last vestiges of her western swing heritage, which makes sense to the eight thousand or so people who follow her on Twitter, where she’ll often give a shoutout to Radiohead or 2Pac or the National. “When you’re making your own music rather than working for somebody else, you have more freedom to make noise,” she says. “You don’t get fired for it.” Logan Rogers thinks that Shires is now part of a sorority of artists, such as Neko Case and Cat Power, who transcend categories like country and Americana. You don’t need the full use of your left hand’s ring finger to make a record like this. 

Though you do need to have lived a bit. After Carrying Lightning came out, Shires experienced a classic annus horribilis: in addition to breaking her finger, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend and saw the violin she had played for fifteen years fall and break into shards onstage. Down Fell the Doves is appropriately dark, though Shires resists the notion that the record is a downer. She even insists that the suicide song “Box Cutters” (“Fall from a tractor / into the blades / The sun comes up / Just your bones remain”) is funny. “I think sometimes admitting things just makes them lighter,” she says. “I’m a fan of the dark, but I’m not really a dark person at all. When a bad thing happens, there’s only one way to get rid of it—in a song.” 

In the midst of her broken year, Shires got involved with the alt-country artist Jason Isbell, a former member of the popular Southern rock group Drive-By Truckers. Isbell and Shires seem to bring out the best in each other artistically—they tour together and play on each other’s albums and record for the same label. But Isbell had been a bad drunk for a long time; that’s one reason he’s a former Drive-By Trucker. “Eighty percent of the day he was a person I didn’t know,” Shires says. “But I loved and adored the other twenty percent.” It was Shires who finally helped get Isbell into rehab—a harrowing story in her telling—and she’s proud that he’s been sober for more than eighteen months. “Now I get the person that I was in love with eighty percent of the time,” she says. “The other twenty percent he needs coffee or food.” They married in February.

Signs of the couple’s conflicted relationship—or perhaps of one of Shires’s previous relationships, or maybe just some other couple’s; she’s not telling—are all over Down Fell the Doves, in lyrics like this passage near the end of the album that you could imagine one of her poetry professors appreciating:

He overturned the silver fountain
Now its water’s running mud
And ruined all reflections
And ruined my love.

“Words are my deal right now, even over music,” says the part-time literature student, clasping a marked-up copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses and her scrawled-over sketchbook. “I love ’em. I love the way they sound. I love what they mean.” And there’s music in them too. “I love what they sound like without knowing what they mean.”