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AMY MACDONALD
On this site i have collected
bits and pieces,
with and about Amy Macdonald.
Enjoy the words, and not at least the music.
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Who is Amy Macdonald ?
Amy Macdonald (born 25 August 1987 in
Bishopbriggs,
East Dunbartonshire is a
Scottish
singer/songwriter.
Her debut album,
This Is The Life, was released on 30 July 2007 and has
now sold over 1,200,000 copies worldwide. Her first single,
"Poison Prince", was released on 7 May 2007. She has played
shows at music festivals such as
Glastonbury,
Hyde Park,
T in the Park, and
V festival. Amy is signed to record company
Vertigo, the same record label which hosts
The Killers and
Razorlight.
Amy Macdonald started playing on-stage acoustic gigs at the age
of 15.
Her main
influences include
Travis and
The Libertines. After playing several shows across mainland
Europe, Macdonald plans to play at various festivals such as V
Fest during the summer of 2008.
She is a self taught musician and started to
play her father's guitar after being inspired by
Travis at the T in the Park Festival in 2000,
where she heard Travis' song
Turn and wanted to play it herself.
Amy Macdonald started her trade at various pubs
and coffee houses in and around Glasgow at the
tender age of 15. She regularly played open mic
slots at the city's Brunswick Cellars on
Sauchiehall Street. She sent a demo CD
away to an advert in the back of NME magazine
and was signed to production company
'Melodramatic'
Reviewers often describe Amy Macdonald as softly
spoken but with a booming singing voice. Despite
her Scottish origins, her singing voice has been
described as partly Irish. She has also called
herself a slight
tomboy. On her
MySpace blog, she mentions cars, such as
Audis, and video games as her interests.
Macdonald has also expressed how fast her life
is moving when she mentions her admiration when
meeting other singers from the UK such as
Travis's
Fran Healy and
Elton John (who is a fan of her work.)
Amy Macdonald gained some press coverage when
she questioned whether the 2007 winner of
The X Factor,
Leon Jackson, was suffering from
tonsillitis. This was because Amy Macdonald
herself was suffering from tonsillitis at the
same time but she was still able to perform on
stage at Glasgow and at the BBC's
Hogmanay Live show the same night.
Amy Macdonald is also the first artist to have a
single featured on
Bebo/
iTunes
"Free single of the week" program starting 23
June 2007. The free single,
Youth of Today,
was written when she was 15 years old. The video
for her next single,
L.A. has been filmed
in
Malaga,
Spain. She has also appeared as a musical
performing guest on several popular British and
foreign shows such as
The Album Chart Show,
Loose Women,
Friday Night Project,
Taratata (France), and
This Morning. Her next single will be
This Is the Life from the album of the
same name. She won the best newcomer awards at
the prestigious silver clef awards.
NOW TO THE INTERVIEWS:
TIME NOW FOR THE SONGS:
Click the picture and hear all songs
from the album "this is the life"
How did it all start
for Amy Macdonald ?:
It's all Pete Doherty's fault. No, it's down to Red Hot Chili
Peppers. Or do we finger Fran Healy of Travis? Nah, sod it, let's blame Ewan
McGregor and Jake Gyllenhaal. They're movie stars, proper ones. They're used to
shouldering serious responsibility.
If it weren't for these artists, Amy Macdonald wouldn't be
the teen-sensation singer-songwriter she is now. She'd still be kicking round
Glasgow, an undergraduate at university, studying social sciences with an
emphasis on geography. The highlight of her year would continue to be her annual
pilgrimage to T In The Park, whereat she and her mates would party under canvas
for 48 hours, forget their own names, and maybe see some bands. Amy Macdonald
would still be a nobody, instead of a somebody out of whom great songs just
flood. Amy was 12 when her world wobbled on its axis. She was on a family outing
to Rothesay on Scotland's west coast. Her gran gave her some money to treat
herself. Instead of buying a tenner's worth of ice-cream she bought a CD: The
Man Who by Travis. It was the first album Amy ever owned. She was blown away:
simple songs (Driftwood, Why Does It Always Rain On Me?, Writing To Reach You),
sung brilliantly, roaring powerfully in her ears and in her head.
Inspired, adolescent Amy picked up one of the guitars her dad
had lying round the house. He never played them; he'd never been in a band and
had only 'mucked about' on the instrument with his pals when he was younger. And
Amy just taught herself how to play the thing. There were no genetic influences,
nor even lessons. Just a good ear and few chord patterns found on the internet.
And a huge, burning, raging desire to write and play songs.
At first she would just play tunes she loved from the radio.
Then one day she was sat in her big sister's room. Big sis was obsessed with
Ewan McGregor, and had a wall full of posters of the Trainspotting star. Amy
thought about this, and wrote The Wall, 'about how people idolise stars'. "You
never fail to amaze me," it went, "everything you do is out of the blue..." It
was rubbish, but the sentiments displayed a switched-on wisdom beyond her years.
The first song Amy wrote that was any cop was Fade Away.
Again, it was her sister's love of famous people that sparked her imagination -
Red Hot Chili Peppers were the culprits this time. By now Amy was in her third
year at school (Year Nine in England). A community music group called Impact
Arts visited her school. Local musicians, including someone who was in Eighties
Scottish pop band The Bluebells (Young At Heart), came to work with kids
interested in music. Amy was head and shoulders above her peers, and was soon
doing shows round Glasgow organised by the Impact team.
It was just her and her acoustic guitar onstage. She was 15.
Mostly she would play her own songs, but chucked in a few covers: Everybody
Hurts by REM and Mad World by Tears For Fears Ð 'but it was the slow version,'
says Amy, 'the one from Donnie Darko. It wasn't a single yet, and I never
imagined it was gonna be the Christmas Number One. I just loved Jake Gyllenhaal.
He's just the most beautiful thing that's ever been created.' Clearly not above
a little star-worship herself, Amy later wrote a song about the actor, called
LA. It took her five minutes. She's that into him (and she's that gifted).
Soon she had a gig in Starbucks in Borders Books in Glasgow.
A good reception at their Friday night open-mic spots led to her doing the same
at the Edinburgh branch, and landing gigs in Glasgow venues like the Barfly. She
started hanging out with other teenage musicians. 'Me and my pals used to sneak
into a pub on Sauchiehall Street on Saturday afternoons when we were 16, so I
could play at their acoustic spot. We'd hide at the back till it was my turn. I
got a good reception and that egged me on a bit.'
She left school early, having secured places at two
universities. She deferred entry for a year and stayed home, writing and playing
and reading NME. And going to see Babyshambles. A lot. 'God knows how many times
I've seen them,' she grins. 'I saw Pete Doherty's first gig in Glasgow after he
left Libertines. It was a great night - he did a little acoustic thing at the
aftershow party too, and we got into that. Then me and my pals went back to
someone's house and just sat, passing the guitar round, singing songs. It was a
brilliant night. The next morning I wrote This Is The Life about it, cause I
realised, this is the life.'
During her year off Amy began sending off demos Ð recorded on
eight-track in her bedroom Ð to labels and management companies and talent
houses who advertised in the back of NME. After a couple of nibbles of interest
she was taken on by Melodramatic Records, a London-based production and
management company run by Pete Wilkinson. He helped Amy, still not yet
officially an adult, record better-quality versions of her songs, and he spurred
her on creatively. Within six months she'd secured a publishing deal with Warner
Chappell and a record deal with Vertigo, home of Razorlight and The Killers.
Last year, with Wilkinson producing in Soho and rock legend
Bob Clearmountain mixing in Los Angeles, Amy Macdonald recorded her debut album.
It's brimming with great tunes. As well as This Is The Life there's Mr Rock &
Roll, sung in Amy's rich, bell-clear, gutsy vocal and possessing a compelling
rhythmic punch and a chorus surely set to wow those T In The Park masses.
Barrowland Ballroom Ð studded with honky-tonk piano and blaring brass Ð is her
fast-paced, skiffling tribute to the iconic Glasgow venue and memories of many a
great gig (Razorlight, Babyshambles again, Travis again...).
Footballer's Wife takes ominous strings, thunderous drums and
a haunting vocal and uses them to wallop a pop culture that encourages silly
young women (Chantelle, Colleen) to write their autobiographies. 'They're only
19, 20 years old or something Ð I don't know how anybody could write their
lifestory at this age. It's pathetic.' Ever the patriot, Amy has recorded a
version of a modern Scottish folk classic, Caledonia. She's heard that Paolo
Nuttini has sung the song live, but Amy doesn't care. The song moves her. And
that's all she wants from songs, whether other people's or ones she's written
herself. That's what Travis did to her all those years ago, and what Ð on a good
night Ð Pete Doherty can do to her now.
It's no coincidence that one of the most affecting songs on
Amy Macdonald's debut album is the trumpet-laden, atmospheric Let's Start A
Band: a simple song, sung brilliantly, roaring powerfully in her ears and in the
head, about how magic it is to love a band, follow a band, be in a band. When
you're a teenager, that's all that matters.
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