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You're listening to Sound Opinions, and this week we have Kurt Vile performing live at the Goose Island Brewhouse.

I'm Jim DeRugatus, and I'm Greg Kot. But first, Jim and I have two new albums to review by Amanda Shires and Nova Twins.

That's a little bit of the title track. Take it like a man from the new Amanda Shires album.

Amanda Shires, she has had quite a career. The name gets thrown around the Queen of Americana and all these kind of attachments to what she's done career-wise.

She has had a distinguished career, a couple of decades long, where she started out as a teen in the Texas playboy.

She's a very accomplished fiddle player. And sort of made her reputation as an instrumentalist down the fiddle and then grew into a large role as a prominent singer and songwriter, originally out of Lubbock, Texas.

A first solo album appeared in 2005. She's been a member of the 400 unit with her husband, Jason Isbel. She formed the High Women with Brandy Carlisle and Marin Morris and Natalie Hempi, sort of a corollary to the Highway Men, the Supergroup, the Country Supergroup of the 80s.

So a man has been busy. She's been putting out a series of solo albums. The 2018 album to the sunset sort of expanded her sound. And now we're going to find out where she's going next with Take It Like A Man.

Here's a track from the new album. It's sort of buried at the end, but Jim and I both think it's a sleeper track that should be heard. My own galaxy from Amanda Shires on Sound Opinions.

I am my own galaxy, the desert dark, the singing dust, the steered stars, my own delicious.

Still I get the laundry folded and most all of the dish she's done. I keep her running, go she lists, and I get the dead.

That is my own galaxy by Amanda Shires. It is the unlisted ending track, the bonus 11th track on Take It Like A Man.

An album, Greg, that Amanda wasn't even sure she would ever make. Part of her, after 2018's to the sunset, said, I'm just going to be a painter now. I don't know, I might be done with making my own music.

But instead, she decided she had another album in her. You know, Greg, I'm a huge fan of Amanda and everything she represents. And at the risk of having her slap my face the next time we run into her, I got to say this album just lets me down with the exception of my own galaxy.

That is where you get the fire in Brimstone, Amanda Shires, that she brings to the 400 unit, that she brings to the high women, that she has brought to the best moments of her previous six albums.

This one is an attempt to kind of make a Dolly Parton record, but without the Dolly charm, because Amanda is a serious lyricist. And you know, they're at a point, Amanda and Jason, her husband, that I think every marriage hits where the nonstop compromise occasionally wears. But that is what a marriage is, it's compromise.

And you know, that title track, take it like a man she's imagining going out in Tomcatting the way so many men do. What would it be like if I stepped out of the marriage and had an affair, the key line is killer. I know the cost of flight is landing.

But the overproduction, you know, the operatic approach to take it like a man, we have bits and pieces of like Berk Bakerak orchestration.

Well, I know I was praising Julia Jacqueline's Berk Bakerak Dion Warwick kind of strings just a couple of weeks ago when we reviewed that, but that's like recorded in a garage.

All right. You know, this is, is got way too much sheen on it. I wish the whole album was my own galaxy.

Well, agreed that my own galaxy's a terrific track. It highlights all her strengths, I think. Yeah. But I think Amanda was getting a little tired of being pigeonholed as Americana, even though Americana is a wide umbrella.

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