A Deeper Dive Into The Highwomen

When country supergroup The Highwomen’s self-titled debut album dropped last September my wife and I picked it up and enjoyed it. We have followed Brandi Carlile’s career and have seen her multiple times at Austin City Limits Festival. We’re big fans of Amanda Shires and have seen her several times, both as a solo act and as part of husband Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit band. We love Maren Morris’s My Church but at the time didn’t know much more about her, and we weren’t familiar with Natalie Hemby.

Left to right: Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires

However, I never took the time to catch all the lyrics, understand who had written and sang lead on which songs, and figure out some things about the album that puzzled me.

So in the last month, with the help of Marissa R. Moss’s Rolling Stone article I went back through the album and ended up even more impressed by the work. Here are my thoughts on a few of the songs.

Let’s start with the opening track, Highwomen, their take on the Jimmy Webb song, Highwayman, most famously recorded in 1985 by The Highwaymen consisting of Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. The four immortal characters in the song are a bandit (the bastards hung me in the Spring of ’25, but I am still alive!), a doomed sailor, a builder of Boulder Dam who slips and is buried in the concrete, and starship pilot on a never-ending trip across the universe, sung by Nelson, Kristofferson, Jennings and Cash, respectively. 

Carlile and Shires, with Jimmy Webb’s blessing, rewrote the lyrics including adding a closing chorus and changing the refrain from “I will still remain” to “we will still remain”. The four characters became an immigrant mother from Honduras who perishes while safely delivering her children to America, a healer seen as a witch (“the bastards hung me at the Salem gallows hill”), a murdered freedom rider in 1961, and a preacher whose “teaching was unrighteous for a girl”.

What puzzled me was that the freedom rider stanza was sung in the first person by someone who sounded Black, and I couldn’t figure out which verse Morris had sung. It turns out that Yola, the British pop/country singer, had joined them for the recording session to do that verse. (Sheryl Crow is also on the track singing backup). Carlile is the immigrant, Shires the healer and Hemby is the preacher. In the closing chorus the women have fashioned an incredible statement of fortitude and persistence:

We are The Highwomen

Singing stories still untold

We carry the sons you can only hold

We are the daughters of the silent generations

You sent our hearts to die alone in foreign nations

It may return to us as tiny drops of rain

But we will still remain

It’s amazing what you can find on YouTube! Here’s a live recording for Sirius XM in which Morris does the freedom rider part, but in the third person. That’s Jason Isbell on guitar.  

Here’s one at Newport with Yola and Sheryl Crow.

And here’s one with Mavis Staples doing the Yola part!

The Rolling Stone article calls Crowded Table the band’s “mission statement” and I totally agree. Written by Hemby with Carlile and Lori McKenna, it’s a song about inclusion, support and love:

Yeah I want a house with a crowded table

And a place by the fire for everyone

Let us take on the world while we're young and able

And bring us back together when the day is done

In a Variety interview Carlile describes how Hemby, an accomplished but not well-known outside of Nashville songwriter, joined the band. The then-trio invited her to come down and sing Crowded Table with them and they liked how she sounded with the band so much they asked her to join!

Here’s them singing it recently on Jimmy Fallon.

My Name Can’t Be Mama is a funny and powerful song by Carlile, Shires and Morris in which they, successively, explain why their “name can’t be Mama today.” 

For Carlile it’s because the “ceiling still is spinning from a night that went too late”:

I used to sleep this off and let the shame just melt away

But not for tiny feet in hallways calling out my name

It's not that I don't love you, I wouldn't touch the hands of time

It's not that I don't long to feel your tiny hand in mine

I'm not a perfect woman, Lord, I don't wish it all away

My name can't be Mama today

For Shires it’s because the road beckons:

Know it wouldn't be easier to just quit the road and stay home

I'd lose myself inside the halls, unsatisfied and alone

Sometimes all I want is to run back to you at night

To rock you to sleep, to keep the blues out of your eyes

I'm not the kind of woman that would throw it all away

But my name can't be Mama today

And for Morris, she’s just not ready (that has recently changed!):

I drive my mother crazy out here traveling the world

Free-wheeling in the city, I'm a solitary girl

I'm living in the moment, knowing there might come a day

But my name can't be Mama today, uh-uh

It's not that I don't want to, I just don't want to today

I'm not a fan of mornings and I love my chardonnay

No, I'm not saying never, I won't wish it all away

But my name can't be Mama today

Another surprise came in If She Ever Leaves Me. It’s Carlile singing to a cowboy in a bar,

I see you watch her from across the room

Dancing her home in your mind

Well, it takes more than whiskey to make that flower bloom

By the third drink you'll find out she's mine

 

I've loved her in secret

I've loved her out loud

The sky hasn't always been blue

It might last forever

Or it might not work out

If she ever leaves me, it won't be for you

This is a tremendous new country song (and isn’t it great to hear Brandi’s voice singing country again!). The surprise here is that she didn’t write it. Isbell and Shires did (with Chris Thompkins), based on Isbell’s idea!

Cocktail and a Song is a devastatingly beautiful song written by Shires in dealing with her father’s passing:

Daddy passed me his bottle of tequila

Said, "Time's running out

We're gonna have to pretend it's a margarita

It's the order of things, it's the way it goes

Don't you look at me, girl, like I'm already gone"

 

The day is close, it won't be long

Couple of cocktails and a song

And don't you let me see you cry

Don't you go grieving

Not before I'm gone

My Only Child is Hemby’s love song to her daughter, dealing with her inability to have more children, written with Shires and Miranda Lambert, and accompanied by Shires’ haunting fiddle:

I know you wish

You had a brother who had blue eyes just like you

I know you wish

You had a sister you could tell your secrets to

Maybe we'll miss

Having four sets of china on the table

But I guarantee you this

You mean more to me than branches to a maple 

 

Pink painted walls 

Your face in my locket

Your daddy and me

Your tiny back pocket

Mama's first love

Last of my kind

You'll always be my only child

Wheels of Laredo is a powerful song about love in a time when people are separated by artificial barriers, sung by Carlile, who wrote it along with her musical partners, Tim and Phil Hanseroth, who also play throughout the album:

On a winter night in Webb County, Texas

On the North Bank of the mighty Rio Grande

I was watching the jungle fires a-burnin'

Across the border of a not-so-distant land

And the echoes of the church bells that were swingin'

Could be heard from Guadalupe Market Square

There was a girl down there in the south side of the river

She had feathers tied into her long black hair 

 

Said if I was a White-Crowned Sparrow

I would float upon the southern skies of blue

But I'm stuck inside the wheels of Laredo

Wishing I was rolling back to you

I’m looking forward to when the band can tour again but in the meantime Morris and Shires have both released very compelling songs of songs of social justice, which I have covered in another blog post, Southern Artists Speak Up.