Amanda Marshall

My musical upbringing. “Music was always a really big part of my upbringing, it was a part of my life and I was very fortunate. I grew up in a household where I was really afforded the opportunities to find out what I liked and what my strengths were. My parents really encouraged me. They cultivated my interests in the arts, in sports, and they made sure I had every chance to find out what it was that I was good at, what I liked… Music was always the thing that I came back to.”

Singing myself to sleep. One of my earliest memories is being recorded by my parents when I was two or three. I’m sure the tapes are still around somewhere. They used to do that a lot, ’cause I used to sing in the bath a lot, I’d sing myself to sleep They really made a point of letting me hear myself on tape when I was a kid. I remember that being a really big deal. I think my first memory of being on stage was when I was five or six and in a school production kind of thing, but it was always a very positive aspect of my life as a kid. I always got a lot of positive reinforcement. I think when you’re a kid, you do things to merit the approval of the adults around you… When you get a lot of really positive reinforcement from the adults around you that makes you want to keep doing whatever it is that you are doing. Singing for me was always like that, I always got a lot of really positive feedback from the grownups around me and that made me want to do whatever I could to get back up on stage.”

For the love of music …
“Singing for me was always going to be a part of my life. Nobody can chart the future and you never really know exactly what you’re life’s going to be and how it’s going to turn out. You can make plans, but even the best laid plans tend to fall apart. For me, I never knew what the path was going to be for me, but I always knew that music would be a big part of it. And I always knew that it was something that I really, really wanted. It was something I wanted to be a part of. I loved being around it and I loved being on stage. It was very natural for me and I would do everything in my power to seek it out… I made myself as available as possible to any production that was coming through my high school… I was always a part of extra-curricular activities at school, part of the school choir that kind of stuff… I think it’s very important when you’re a kid because it kind of gives you your bearings… it gives you a solid foundation. I was lucky because I was able to take a certain amount of formal training when I was a kid. I had a pretty extensive background as a classical sort of musician, and got to learn how to read music and how to write music. That’s not necessarily the most important aspect of what I do know, but it was definitely part of building a solid foundation. Music is a language like any other language and the earlier you learn to speak it, the more fluent you are going to be as you grow up.”

From meeting Jeff Healey, to life on the road. “When I was 17, I was just on the verge of graduating from high school and Jeff Healey, (a talented young Canadian guitar player), his album had just come out and was sort of breaking internationally… He was becoming very successful and I was a big fan of his. I went with a girlfriend to see one of his shows. I’d never seen him perform live before and I was just really swept away by the whole evening. I had a wonderful time and I wanted to meet him, so we went backstage.

We were chatting with him and I said, ‘You know I really want to do what you do. I want to be on stage. This is what I think I want to do with my life, and I don’t really know anything about the music business, and I’m not in a band… I don’t have my own band, I’m in high school, but I think this is what I want to do.’ He very graciously invited me to this jam at a club in downtown Toronto. He said, ‘Tomorrow night there is sort of an acoustic open mike night and if you want, get your dad to bring you down… (’cause I wasn’t old enough) I’m going to be there, it’s my birthday. If you want to come down, I’ll get up and I’ll play guitar for you, and that way you can see if this is what you really want to do.’ I said OK and got my dad to take me down the next night.

I got up on stage and I did a song. Jeff played guitar, and we did a couple more songs… At the end of the set, he approached me and said, ‘You know you’re really very good. If you’re serious, and if this is really what you want to do… Here’s what you should do: There is a vast collection of musicians who live in Toronto. (It’s a small community, but there is a large number of people at the same time) You should start pulling from that community, a group of musicians that you want to play with. Pick 15 of your favorite songs, put together a little repertoire, and start playing. There’s a whole big collection of clubs in Toronto and just start playing those small clubs and that will help you get your bearings.’

And I did. I put together a band, and I was very fortunate, I met another guitar player who was a club musician. He really helped me get my bearings. He helped me put together a show, and showed me the ropes, and that was how I got started… I started playing in these clubs… About three months later, after having played locally, I started to gather sort of a following (I was quite young and people were sort of interested in me because I was so young…) Jeff offered me an opening slot on his national tour that was going across Canada and down into the United States. I went out with him and the next thing I knew with no record or record deal, I was singing in front of thousands of people every night, and it was huge deal. Fortunately for me at that point, I didn’t really realize what a big deal it was, so I wasn’t intimidated. It was still fun for me. That’s how I got started. About six months later I got a record deal and I started making a record.”

Making my second record. “This record was really a pleasure in many different senses. It’s not a huge musical left turn from the first record, it’s sort of a logical extension of where we started. I was very happy with the direction we were going in. I think it’s a slightly less anonymous record than the first record. I made the contribution that I felt was appropriate on the first record but I didn’t really think of myself particularly as a songwriter. I was more an interpreter. I chose songs that were reflective of me but I have fairly decent taste and I chose a good collection of songs. This record, I had just come off the road after two years of touring the first record, so I was really on my game as an entertainer and as a vocalist. You can only get better the more you do it, so for me, this record was really precipitated by a huge explosion of creativity. The record itself took about three to four months to write the bulk of it, by then I had a vast array of different experiences to choose from and talk about. Bits of myself that I could inject into the record. I had a much better sense of what I wanted it to sound like. I was a lot more involved in the production of the album than I anticipated. In the writing and the playing of the record, and the shaping of the album than I expected to be. It was something that came very naturally, it was something that I fell backwards into and I was so happy to really get a chance to record in a relaxed creative atmosphere.”

Collaborating with Eric Bazilian. The first single, Love Lift Me, I wrote with my main collaborator on the record, an American out of Philadelphia, named Eric Bazilian. (Who you might know from his work with the Hooters in the 80s, and most recently, Joan Osborne.) I was introduced to Eric through a mutual friend of ours who worked at another record company. Eric sort of fell at the top of a long list of people that I wanted to work with. It was suggested to me that I go to Philadelphia and meet him, if only just to meet him. This friend of ours said, ‘I’ve known Eric a long time, I think you guys would really hit it off, why don’t you head down to Philly and just check it out?’ So I did. He and I connected pretty much right away. There was a synergy between us. It took about a day of us sitting in a room getting to know one another and talking… I wrote the bulk of the record with Eric. And Eric and I have really developed a kind of partnership where it’s almost impossible for us to sit in a room and not write songs together.”

“Love Life Me” started out as a joke. ” Love Lift Me came about late in the collaborative process for us, and it was written initially as a joke. Eric had written a song called “Love Life Me,” co-written with Randy Cantor, and John Bettis. He played me the song and I really loved the melody. But the song was originally written as a serious ballad, and we both agreed that was not the direction we wanted to go in. I loved the melody and I said let’s play around with it. And we did. We started talking about how people often write love songs that are very serious, very dark and very earnest… about how wonderful love is and how it can change your life… but the day-to-day reality of a lot of people’s relationships, is that people tend to gossip about love. And they talk about how he screwed up my life but I’m so miserable but I love him and I’m going back.. and really it’s fodder for gossip between people. That’s really how the song started out. It started out as a humorous look at the gossipy side of relationships and it blossomed into this great soaring melody and huge chorus that we both loved a lot.”

We’re all just shades of grey. “Shades of Grey is probably the most personal song on the record. It’s probably the only song on the record that is not immediately discernible as a love song, or as a song about a specific type of relationship. Shades Of Grey is my perspective on growing up as the product of a interracial marriage… It wasn’t something that I ever thought about or really talked about. It’s certainly something I’ve never written about. The song came about as a product of fate. Eric and I had been working together for a couple of weeks, and one night sitting in my hotel room I wrote this melody and lyric all at once. It came together very quickly. The next day I went in, and I was very excited. I said, ‘You have to hear this. I wrote this melody last night.’ And Eric said, ‘Oh, I have a piece of music that I wrote last night. I’ll play it for you.’ It was like magic. He played me this music and I started singing the melody and the lyric that I’d been working on and they sort of just meshed together perfectly and we didn’t really change a thing. We sort of messed around with the phrasing to make it fit. To us, it seemed predestined, that the song had written itself. For me, it was an interesting experience because it wasn’t something that I had ever written about or talked about. It wasn’t really an issue growing up, but it was something that I was grateful for the opportunity to put it all down on paper. I think often times, as a writer once you put something down on paper you realize that it was something that was in you that you weren’t really aware of. That was kind of how Shades Of Grey came about.”

Tapping into writing. “Writing for me was a happy discovery. It was like picking up a rock and realizing that the soil underneath it was very fertile. I certainly did not expect to write the whole record. I write now because I truly enjoy it. It’s like finding another piece of the puzzle. Being on stage for me is and always has been where I live. Writing has really surfaced in the last year as something that can be equally fulfilling. For somebody who comes from a live background, it’s often an unnatural experience or an uncomfortable state to get that person in a setting where they are not necessarily their most comfortable or natural. For me, this record was much closer to my natural state. It was much closer to the relaxed, loose creative feeling I get when I am performing in front of an audience. Writing really became that for me over the making of this record. It became like breathing and the closer you get to that state, the more comfortable you are as a writer.”

Writing for others. “Writing for someone else is something that interests me only because in the last year I was really fortunate to hear a couple of the songs that I wrote on the first record, Dark Horse and Sitting On Top Of The World covered by other people. LeAnn Rimes covered “Sitting On Top Of The World,” and a country artist in the U.S. named Mila Mason, covered Dark Horse. That’s always an interesting experience, to hear your music as performed by somebody else. It made me start to wonder what it would be like to write almost as if you were an actress writing for a character. I’m not sure if I’d be any good at it but I think it’s something I’d really like to try. There’s a whole other kind of creative energy that comes from taking yourself out of the equation as a performer… and just writing for somebody else, from somebody else’s perspective and for someone else’s voice.”

Carole King and I. I really lucked out on this record because I really got the opportunity to work with a lot of people that I wanted to work with and that’s not always the case. Simply by virtue of the fact that everybody’s very busy. In addition to working with Eric, I got the opportunity to work with a couple other people… Whether it was introducing them into the equation with Eric and myself or not… Desmond Child was one of those people that we brought in as a third wheel as it were. Whenever you bring somebody else to the table, it really changes the properties of the product. That was certainly the case with Desmond.

Carole King was someone that I was tremendously interested in meeting. I grew up listening to Carole King and I was interested in meeting her and finding out how she worked. I knew that she lived in Los Angeles and I was going to be in Los Angeles making the record. It was one of those situations where I called up her publisher and introduced myself but she was busy… And then one day I got a call saying she’s available for this two hour window, if you can be at this particular place, she’ll be there. I, of course, took off running. It was really a fulfilling experience writing with her. She and I connected right away, which is not always the case. And you never know quite what to expect, particularly when it’s someone you’ve grown up listening to. My experience is that it’s either an extremely fulfilling thing, or a it’s a tremendous disappointment. There’s really never an in-between. With Carole it was absolutely the former. We were totally on the same wavelength when we first met. It was a tremendous education. I had a great time working with her… It was the best education a young songwriter or musician could have. You can’t really ask for anything more.”

Life on the road. “The making of this record was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in the studio. I had a great time making the first record, but when you make your first record I think you assume that the way that it goes is the way of the world, the way making records is. You’re just trying to take everything in and comprehend it all. I was a little bit like a fish out of water. It was very new to me, being in the studio constantly, navigating those kind of new waters. This record was much closer to my own experience as a live performer. I was very relaxed, I really wasn’t aware of any real pressure, other than the pressure that we put on ourselves to write great songs and to get them down on tape as quickly and as efficiently and as close to the way we wrote them as possible. For me, the record was the first time I’ve ever been in the studio and not constantly thinking about getting back on stage every night.

There are two distinct parts to what I do. I love making records and I loved making this one but being on the road and being on stage every night is where I am most happy and most comfortable. I can’t wait to get out and perform these songs, I can’t wait to get out and travel. I think that people really need to understand that when you do what I do for a living, you are literally, if you’re lucky, in a different city every day, sometimes in a different country every day… It really is the greatest education you can get about how much the same people are wherever you go. There are so many small differences between us that separate us, but from my vantage point, and my perspective as someone who travels a lot, the amount of things we have in common, no matter what language you speak, and no matter where you live, and what your cultural differences are…. The number of things that we have in common are astounding. Music really is the last universal language, more so than anything else. More so than movies, more so than music videos. Music itself is something that it doesn’t matter what language you sing in, it doesn’t matter what you look like. If people get what you’re doing, they get it on a universal level and there’s nothing more fulfilling than being on stage communicating with a large group of people and really knowing that even if it’s a different language or even if it’s a different country, they’re getting something out of it. It’s an amazing thing that we get to do.”

See you on the road,

xox
Amanda