The subsequent move to North Carolina represented the ultimate no. The night before the family left, Shook had their first beer, cigarette and kiss. A year later, at 21, they gave birth to Jonah. The acrimonious marriage soon ended, leaving Shook broke and broken.
But it also led, in 2008, to a romance with an upright bassist who played Johnny Cash; it was the first time Shook, then 23, had knowingly heard country. They learned “Long Black Veil” and sensed a kinship. “I had been writing songs that felt like that already,” Shook remembered, “but I didn’t know what that meant.”
New songs kept coming. And during the next decade, as Shook and the Disarmers grew from local standouts to a band signed to alt-country standbys Bloodshot, hard drinking and tunes about hard times remained a potent tandem.
Back home, Shook did what they’d always done — put on a different face, a different personality in order to be a stable parent. Still, Jonah could see the damage that the lifestyle of a hardscrabble singer was inflicting. “One of my first memories was my mom getting sick from smoking, bronchitis or something. I was 3,” Jonah, 17, said in an interview. “I knew these habits weren’t going to change overnight, but I was one of the biggest advocates for their sobriety.”
When sobriety finally stuck after several attempts, it also ushered in profound changes for Shook’s songwriting. In the past, barbed songs had given Shook perspective on their own life, but on “Revelations,” the vantage widens. Above electric guitars that smolder with regret, “Jane Doe” shares the story of a woman who ran from domestic abuse directly into homelessness. Loaded with images of the South in springtime, the bouncing country-soul cut “Dogbane” wishes that worries about apocalypse might obviate hierarchies.
New self-confidence radiates from “Revelations,” too, as if Shook liked the person they found after the final bottle. “I had a lot of anxiety about getting better — ‘Am I ever going to be able to write a song again?’” they said. “I had to remember how to get back to that place.”
