As far as introductions go, it's hard to imagine one better than the chorus that Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby—aka the Highwomen—deliver on their striking debut album. "We are the highwomen, we sing a story still untold," they declare on the set's opening track. "We carry the sons you can only hold." It's bone-rattling confidence, and the new country supergroup backs it up, both in person and on their album. "I feel like little girls will hear the Highwomen and be changed by it," Morris says on a sweltering late July afternoon in New York City. The group is in town to perform on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and when it wraps, Morris will return to her massive, career-expanding solo album cycle and GIRL world tour. "It’s going to be the background music and the defining music of their youth."
In many ways, it's as revolutionary as it sounds. Recent years have seen the country music establishment all but block women from ascending to the top of the music industry. Radio programmers have ignored a slate of seminal releases. (Peep Kacey Musgraves's airplay stats if you need proof. The singer won Album of the Year at the 2019 Grammys with her woozy Golden Hour LP, which has yet to land a radio hit.) Meanwhile, festivals have reserved the bulk of their top slots for male performers, who are also disproportionally favored at award shows. And when it comes to touring opportunities, A-list male stars almost exclusively only offer their opening slots to younger male artists.
But as Carlile, who released one of Esquire's Best Country Albums of 2018, correctly asserts, their desire is not without precedent. "I can think of so many anthemic songs [from female artists] from my teenage years and my childhood," she says. "I forget how lucky I am to have grown up in the '90s. That story was just being told. Every time I turned on the radio, every time I went to a concert."
The group's 12 new songs (some written for this project, many culled from each of the women's thick songbooks, all produced by Music City producer du jour Dave Cobb) deserve the chance to fill that void. Swerving between bright, modern country, jangling two-step, and bleeding heart guitar anthems—all carried by genuine, inclusive messaging and warm, four-part harmonies—they are devastating, charming, and, above all, undeniable. (As the group sings late in the set: "Heaven is a honky tonk.") Listening doesn't just feel good, but vital.
Esquire sat down with the group for a round of cappuccinos, coffees, and Diet Cokes and conversation about friendship, feeling starstruck, and what it takes to launch a revolution.
ESQUIRE: The idea for this group arrived before the four of you ever actually got in a room and sang or wrote together. When everyone finally got together, were any of you in any way surprised by how well it all worked?
Amanda Shires: It was like listening to the best headphones you’ve ever put in your ears. And Brandi is really the reason that this happened. If it weren’t for her, I would still be sitting in my closet, too scared to trust anybody with something that is so important to me. And she got Maren in this band! I didn’t even know Maren!
Natalie Hemby: We call her our wide receiver. Which, I don’t really know anything about football but...
Brandi Carlile: I think you have to be gay to accept that as a compliment! [Laughs] To be called wide-anything is an evolved perspective. But when Maren had asked me to do “Natural Woman” with her when she was being honored on CMT—and maybe I’m just like a wooey old lesbian and I take everything too cosmically—I was just like, “Man, there’s something really special about this person.” She’s completely embraced by the establishment. She’s beautiful; she fits. And she’s invited someone to do this with her that doesn’t fit and isn’t accepted by the establishment, and to sing a song called “Natural Woman,” when I’m very clearly a different kind of woman. [To Morris:] I don’t know if that ever occurred to you, but I thought it was really poignant. And it changed a lot about my career. It caused people in the country music community to take a second look at me. So when Amanda started talking about the Highwomen, I was like, “You don’t know it, but you’re talking about Maren Morris.”
Maren Morris: I’ve always been a girl’s girl. I have a sister. My mom’s a hairdresser; I grew up in a salon. I’ve just always been surrounded by women. So I feel a kinship with that gender. And some of my best heart to hearts, that have changed my molecules, have been with women. So I’m just really proud to be in this project.
Unlike many bands, there is no lead singer in the Highwomen.
Carlile: [Engineer] Tom Elmhirst kept sending me these mixes and I just couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with the vocals. I started getting really molecular about what was going on with my headphones and I noticed that they were panned, in a sense. So there was Natalie here [at one level], Amanda here, Maren here, and me here. I told him, “It’s going to go against everything you believe in, but each of the voices needs to come at us all at one volume—mono—through the speakers. No panning, no left and right. No anybody louder than anybody else.” When he sent it back, he was like, “I love it. It’s totally new.” And it’s also a metaphor.
To say each of you is far too busy to be starting a new band is a massive understatement. Maren, you are mid-album cycle and on tour; Brandi you are still on tour for last year’s By The Way, I Forgive You. Amanda you tour with your own band, plus your husband, Jason Isbell, and his 400 Unit backing band. Natalie, you literally have credits stretching deep into the Top 40 on country radio at any given moment. When you all announced this idea, did anyone on any of your individual teams raise any concerns?
Carlile: Everybody that works for me is going to live just a little bit of a shorter life because of this project.
Shires: The idea was never, “Let’s make a supergroup.” I just was thinking and talking to Dave [Cobb, who produced the LP] and he put me with Brandi, and then all this extra awesomeness happened. It was just about getting the right people—and Brandi is excellent at that.
Carlile: I had a really hard time finding a group of girls that would include or accept me when I was in school. And I think there’s a part of me that’s always going to be trying to assemble friend groups so that I don’t get left out.
You re-wrote the Highwaymen anthem—originally performed by Johnny Cash Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson—with the blessing of the original scribe, Jimmy Webb. What was his response when he heard “Highwomen”
Shires: It took him a couple weeks to respond. He probably gets sent versions of that all the time. But his wife sat and listened to it first and then she played it for him. I had sent him a work tape—which is beautiful—and I said, “If you need us to do anything different, if you want make any changes, we want to honor your song and by no means take it over.” And he said it was dead on and that we didn’t need any help at all. It felt good, because that could have shut it down.
Carlile: If you were nervous, you didn’t tell me. You were like, “It’s going to be fine!” [Laughs] “He’s going to love it!” But it’s really cool coming from—how old’s Jimmy?
ESQ: He is 73.
Carlile: It’s really cool coming from a [73-year-old] man. And he’s The Tunesmith! He’s written so many great songs.
You four are actually not the only voices we hear on this album. Yola stops by on the title track while Sheryl Crow is also featured on "Heaven Is a Honky Tonk." Plus, both Miranda Lambert and Lori McKenna dot the writing credits.
Hemby: Sheryl is like the original Highwoman. And she doesn’t know she’s Sheryl Crow.
Carlile: In the recording sessions, everybody was so freaked out and star struck, but she just like showed up with no makeup on and her glasses. And she just wanted to support; she just sat in a chair and played bass. It was really cool.
Shires: It took me like three times talking to her to be cool. [Laughs]
Hemby: By the way, I feel that way about all of these girls! I mean, I have known Maren since she rolled into town so I felt comfortable around her but, everybody else, I’m like, I have magazines at home with all of their faces on them! I’m a huge fan.
Shires: I’ve learned a lot more about myself working with these women. I feel like I’m a better singer and I’m better at paying attention. It’s different. My whole life had been bands that were men-centric—and that’s a great thing, I know a lot about how to handle myself—but I think I was missing something. I guess now I’m Shel Silverstein, I found my missing piece.
A number of these songs are brand new, but many are culled from each of your individual song books. Maren, “Loose Change” was one of the earliest demos of your own that made its way around Nashville. What was guiding the song choice for this project?
Morris: So many things like this can go wrong. You don’t have a focal point, or they become too cheesy or earnest, or you don’t know the theme of the record. But top to bottom, our record is very much about women’s stories. There’s not really a whole lot of pining for a lover or unrequited love. It’s all really relatable, whether you’re a man or a woman listening to them.
Hemby: We didn’t want to do the “men suck!” kind of thing.
Shires: We did say, “We are not going to do sassy music on this.” And what I gathered from y’all was about wanting to be inclusive. So maybe in our subconscious, or whatever you want to call it, we knew that that was what we were trying to do.
Carlile: That’s what Hemby does so well, I think. She’s never being quiet because she doesn’t have anything to say, she’s gathering who you are and what you want to say and your thoughts and then she’s going to find a way to help you say that. So these phone conversations were like therapy sessions, really. We were just talking about women; women’s stories and women in country music, women in Nashville, girls we knew and the fights that they had. The next thing you know, it’s like, boom, “Crowded Table,” boom, “Redesigning Women.” We were spinning.
“If She Ever Leaves Me” is a phenomenal song. And, as it’s sung from you, Brandi, to another woman, it is also revolutionary in country music.
Shires: She cut that hungover as hell!
Carlile: I had gone out the night before with Miranda Lambert and she fucked me up sideways. [Laughs]
Shires: You tried to sing that whole song a key lower! [Laughs]
Morris: You would be able to answer or say this better but, I feel like, there are kids realizing they’re gay in Alabama—and across the country—and they’re listening to Spotify or whatever and they’re not hearing anyone on those platforms like them.
Carlile: Not being told that [being gay] was a shape that I could fall into, or a template that I could live inside, as a young person really sent me mixed messages—to the point when my first daughter was born, I was reverting back to teenage shame and wondering if I deserved to be called her mother, because I didn’t carry her and I hadn’t seen the family shape that I needed to see to feel like, “Okay, this is my spot.” So hearing a song like that, that was written by basically a heterosexual married couple [Shires and her husband, Jason Isbell, penned the tune], that kind of advocacy is a big deal. But it did make them nervous. Jason says it was like bringing Spike Lee a Civil Rights film. And, when they sent me that song, I was getting on a cross-country flight, and it wouldn’t download. So six hours they were waiting. When I landed and listened to it, I was like, “Oh my god.” No sooner did I hit send than Jason responded: “Oh thank God!” [Laughs]
Is there the full-circle mentality for this where, in writings songs about your own experiences and your own female perspective, you realize you are also offering those songs to women who are out there desperate to hear from someone who is feeling the same thing as them?
Morris: I remember being at summer camp as a kid and my counselor would wake us up every morning with “Wide Open Spaces” by the Dixie Chicks. That was the soundtrack. And I feel like little girls will hear the Highwomen and be changed by it. It’s going to be the background music and the defining music of their youth. And women, like Dolly’s age and older, will love to hear it and see themselves in it. It’s just good music. And it’s music that people need to hear and that they desperately want to hear right now. It’s like a heap of medicine.
Carlile: Women tell the stories of the other half of the human race. And it’s really important for young girls to hear songs that are about the experiences they may be having or are going to have in life. I can think of so many anthemic songs [from female artists] from my teenage years and my childhood. I forget how lucky I am to have grown up in the 90s. That story was just being told. Every time I turned on the radio, every time I went to a concert. And we all got little girls. It just makes sense that we could affect or maybe move the needle on those stories being told by more women in country music. We want to get in and we want to hold the door for all the women that are trying to do it.
