EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: The Shires Talk New Album ’10 Year Plan’

This past Friday (March 11) British country music duo The Shires released their latest studio album titled ’10 Year Plan’ which sees them returning to their organic country sonic roots with a fantastic soundtrack that brings together a decade of inspiration from the record-breaking hitmakers.

Here we chat exclusively to The Shires to discuss the record in more detail:

Congratulations on the release of ’10 Year Plan’ – how have you found the response so far?

We’ve had an amazing response, lots of people letting us know they love these new songs and we’ve even seen some fans singing the lyrics with us at our recent shows!

This era feels like you’ve returned to your sonic roots, was that a conscious decision, or did it happen naturally?

It was a natural progression for us. Ben took a lot of time during the pandemic to craft these songs. Similarly to how we wrote the ‘Brave’ album (our debut album), He made great demos of each of the songs, Sometimes when you finish a write in Nashville, you come away with just a guitar and vocal recording from the room that day. With Ben creating full demos straight away it was easy to hear how the song would eventually sound. We also worked with the same producer Lindsay Rimes, who we had worked with on our previous two albums. We recorded everything in Ben’s garden shed/studio and sent them to Lindsay in Nashville and he also recorded live musicians over there.

How are you feeling to be able to promote and perform your music again after the lockdowns?

We’re super excited to promote our new album. We were not able to tour or promote our last album and both of us had to grieve that process. We had worked so hard to put it together and were excited to share that with our fans in person but we were unable to do so. We have been waiting for the day to release this album for a little while. It’s always exciting when you have new music.

Your latest LP ’10 Year Plan’ is a celebration of your ten year anniversary, what can listeners expect from the tracklist?

To be uplifted! The past few years have been very heavy and hard to deal with so we wanted to create music that allowed listeners the space to just be happy and smile. We hope that our fans can make some new memories to our songs like they have to so many of our other songs.

If you had to pick one track on the album for us to listen to – what would that be?

Cut Me Loose – it’s a song we discovered while we were writing our second album. Ben was in a bar in Nashville and the songwriter, Lizzy McAvoy was playing it in a songwriters round. Ben asked her after if we could record it for our album, she agreed and we did. However it didn’t make it onto that album, but I still absolutely loved it and it was still one of my favourite songs. I eventually put it forward for consideration for this album and everyone in team Shires agreed it should go on the album. I knew it would be amazing to play live and finally, we got to perform it the other day…it was the best feeling!

What have you learnt since you first started out in music? What advice would you give to your younger self?

It’s forever changing and evolving and you have to move with the times. I haven’t really got advice for myself, I always just trusted my instinct. However, I would say for anyone looking to make it in music, it takes an enormous amount of sacrifice in all areas of your life, so be prepared to miss our of lots of family life and work your butt off – but it’s the greatest job in the world, so very worth it!!

Who have you worked with to craft the project?

Eric Paslay, Jeff Cohen, Jennifer Wayne, Beth McCarthy, Lizzy McAvoy, Katya and our producer Lindsay Rimes.

Are you looking forward to getting back to performing live? Is there anything planned for the tour you can tell us?

Oh, we are soo excited to be going back on tour. It’s been 4 years since we toured with our full band. We’re in the process of putting the staging together, merchandise and the setlist – it’s going to be hard to pick the songs as we’ve got 5 albums worth of songs. We hope that anyone who comes along can leave feeling uplifted!

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