Carrying Lightning

Carrying Lightning is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Amanda Shires. Self-published and released on May 3, 2011, the album was co-produced by Shires, David Henry, and Rod Picott. Writing in The Austin Chronicle, reviewer Jim Caligiuri wrote that the album "finds her balancing dusky overtones with occasional buoyancy. In the process, the fiddler and singer-songwriter lands somewhere between the perkiness of Dolly Parton, whom she resembles vocally on occasion, and the disquieting poetry of Richard Buckner".

In a list published by American Songwriter, the magazine ranked the third track on the album "When You Need a Train It Never Comes" as the fifth-best song of 2011.