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Amy Courts

Amy Courts possesses a raw beauty when it comes her music. The honesty and vulnerability displayed on These Cold And Rusted Lungs made for one of the best debut LPs of 2008 and the Nashville singer/songwriter is hoping this leads to bigger and better things. For now, she’s waiting to go to Africa through her sponsorship of Mocha Club and hoping to tour as much as possible between now and then. We recently caught up with the independent artist to discuss life after the release and hear more about her passion a world away.

Soul-Audio: Six months after coming out, what’s happening with the life of the album?

Amy Courts: We are just traveling and touring as much as possible and gaining as much momentum as we can from the radio play and the reviews that have come in. But it’s weird because it’s a really slow time with touring and it’s pulling teeth to book any shows. But we’re just wanting to get away as much as possible. But my life is much the same – just writing and also my husband is making a new record, so we’re working on that together. But we’re playing and writing as much as possible.

SA: How much collaboration do you guys do with one another?

Amy: It depends really. I’m not good at writing with other people. I’m just not good at the co-writing thing. But I’ve tried with a number of people and it’s the hardest yet most successful when it works with my husband. There’s an intimacy in writing that is so hard to explain. You’re putting everything on the line when you’re writing anyway and when you’re doing that with somebody else, you’re throwing raw material at them where they can say that something is bad. It’s hard to not take that even more personally when it’s someone you’re close to and somebody that you always want to impress.

I think he’s the best writer I’ve ever known so I want it to be good. I want to write something good with him, but then the songs we come up with – and that’s only been two or three times that we’ve actually gotten songs out of efforts – have been the best that I’ve been a part of. In that way, it’s both tense and really satisfying when it works. In the actual recording process, he plays all the guitars on my work and a lot of background vocals. Then I do all the background vocals on his stuff. Then we can go out and play shows together and play our own songs and each other’s songs and be a set for individuals. We’re lucky that way.

SA: So you mostly write separately?

Amy: Yeah for the most part.

SA: Does he struggle in the same way that you do?

Amy: It’s not as hard for him, but I don’t know why. I think he looks at it less as a vulnerability and more of a collaboration – sort of a “I’m going to put the best of what I have into and she’s going to do the same and hopefully it’s better than both of us on our own.” But he’s more optimistic than I am in general. [Laughs] And he’s not nearly as sensitive or take things nearly as personal as I do.

SA: Does your music reflect that personality difference – for him and yourself?

Amy: Yeah, I think so. You’ve heard my music and the songs are honest and testimonial. Paul has a tendency to write about other people. He’s an observer, so he’ll look at other people’s situations and write about them. Or even if he’s writing about his own circumstance or story, he’s better at pulling the lens out and look objectively rather than being right in the middle of it. It’s rare that he will be in the middle of it, but it’s amazing when he does it.

SA: When he pulls back the lens on you, does that catch you off guard? Does he ever write about you as a subject from that far-away distance?

Amy: We have a lot of conversations about that stuff because he’s so much of a sounding board and so much of a reality base for me. It’s really easy for me to melt into whatever I’m thinking about and just drown in it whether it’s good or bad. He’s really good at telling me to back up and look at it from a real standpoint, not just this hypersensitive one. He’s just a big picture thinker, if that makes sense.

For instance, a random example is that I’ve been training for a marathon. My knee just started hurting in the training and I had to take a really long break from training at all. I was sitting there going, ‘God doesn’t want me to run the marathon. He wants me to be a dead runner and everybody to be better than me.’ Paul says, ‘Amy, you’re running 10 miles. Your body is acclaimating to that and you’re building a runner’s body. God isn’t do anything to you.’ He has a good way of making me see the big picture. He asks me, ‘Are you really thinking that way?’ [Laughs] It can get interesting.

SA: I wanted to ask you about working with Neilson Hubbard (Matthew Ryan, Kate York, Matthew Perryman Jones)? How did you guys come together?

Amy: I had went to this concert of Matthew Perryman Jones and he was just incredible live – maybe one of the best performers I’d ever seen. He’s captivating and immediately I got the CD. I was already lined up to work with another producer that my manager at the time had set me up with. I was lukewarm about his production work, but I was like, ‘Well, that’s okay because we’re only doing an EP and I have a limited budget, so I’ll just work with him.’ But I heard Matthew’s record and immediately fell in love with the production. It was so warm and rich and layered without being busy and crazy.

So I found his name on the back of the cover and I emailed him from his website. I said, ‘Hey this is crazy but I’m making a record and I have no idea if you’re still producing or what, but I’d love to talk to you.’ He wrote me back that day wanting to meet and a month and a half later, we started working on the record. He was perfect. He just let the songs be what they were. The first time I went into the studio, the producer was amazing, but he was much more of a pop producer. He was much more commercial. So he took a lot of the songs and restructured them and eliminated some other aspects. With some songs, I thought he was killing the song. The song as I wrote it didn’t even exist anymore.

Working with Neilson was the exact opposite. We went in and I don’t have a good ear for production as it is. Paul came with me and Neilson just kept everything as it was, just building around it like a skeleton. He gave it a body and skin and muscles rather than removing bones and putting new ones on. He was very easy to work with and he’s so inclined and in tune with the artistry of it rather than the commercial aspect of it. He’s interested in making a piece of art that a few people will really appreciate as opposed to something typical that everyone will like for a day. Being in the studio with him was just so easy. He let me be who I was and as far as vocal performances and everything…

I’ve had to do one line over and over and over again with other producers. But with Neilson, he just said, ‘We will do three straight takes of the song all the way through and I will pick the best one and then use the others to cut and paste when necessary. But I want it to be as live as possible.’ I think that put the magic in the record for a lot of it. So many of those songs were single take recordings that really captured a very live and very raw and emotional feeling that you don’t get when you do it over and over and over.

SA: What’s happening with your involvement with Mocha Club? Have you seen anything happen there?

Amy: It’s been incredible from a personal standpoint working with Mocha Club. My own passion for Africa has grown in general and it’s also widened my perspective on life. It’s taken me out of my viewpoint in so many ways and put me into a place where I don’t want to get on stage and sing songs, but I want to give people something to do. I don’t want them to just have a good time and leave with a CD of songs. I want to give them a chance to be involved on a global scale. As I present it and watch people, especially young people and seeing 13-year-olds give up their allowance to join Mocha Club, is so beautiful. You’re thinking, ‘You’re so young and you make 10 bucks a month and you give seven dollars of it to kids in Africa.’

Also, just for me, being a part of Mocha Club has gone from telling people about Africa to wanting to physically be in Africa. Over the last two years, I’ve been searching for a chance to get to Uganda to visit the people there. I don’t know why, but they are the people God has given me a huge passion for. They’re my family and I don’t even know them. I had some opportunities to go with various organizations and each time it hasn’t worked out or else God has made it clear that it was not the opportunity to take. That’s been discouraging at times, but you realize that if God is saying no to this time, then it means something is coming. God doesn’t want me to go just for no reason.

Finally, last November, the directors of the village of hope in Gulu, which is the project I support through Mocha Club, were here in the States for a leadership banquet. I got to sit and talk with them and we worked out everything basically for me to go to Gulu and spend the entire month of October with them in the village of hope. To finally have that come together and know that you’re not only supporting them but you get to meet them and bring something back is amazing. And hopefully I can go back every year. I have a feeling I will want to. [Laughs]

Photo Credit: Amy Sondova