LUCIDMEDIA

Amy Sky Talks About Love, Pain The Whole Damn Thing

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Monday, 28 May 2007 09:27

Ms. Sky's 2007 performances are sheduled across Ontario, Canada until the following year.

Mr. Donaldson delves deep into a conversation with this Canadian music icon, as she talkes about love, life and labour:

In Canadian music, Amy Sky is one of the giants. Sure she may not have the name recognition with the kids that Simple Plan and Avril Lavigne have; but that's okay, Amy Sky doesn't make music for them. Since her debut album Cool Rain, Sky has cultivated a dedicated and diverse fan base. She's worked with some of the biggest names in music, while working on her own music and dedicating time to charity work and raising her two kids. I recently got the chance to talk to Sky about her life, her career, her new greatest hits album Life Lessons, and her new Rogers series Nine Months and One Year, which follows expectant mothers through their pregnancy and first year of motherhood.

Is ten years after your debut album a good length of time to release a greatest hits collection?

I think it depends on the number of albums an artist has put out in those ten years. I put out four albums, and I've managed to have so many hits on the radio too. It started with the fans at the concerts and them come up and saying, "can have all these songs on one record".

How much input do you get as to what goes into a greatest hits collection, and what's the process for putting it all together?

Well you can do whatever you want. In my case, like I said, I wanted to choose the songs that I'd sing in my live shows and that also were the most popular songs on the radio. So that's how I went about choosing them, and fortunately for me, the songs that have been hits on the radio are mine, and my fans, favorite songs. A lot of people have songs on the radio that they hate and its the album cuts that the fans like, but in my case it's one and the same

One of the new songs on the album is Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game", what made you choose to cover that song?

Well for one thing, I just always loved that song. I've struggled for years to make records that were in this kind of country/pop crossover vain. I lived in Nashville for three years, and I lived in L.A. for seven years. When I was in Nashville they told me I was too pop; when I was in L.A. they told me I was too country. So in the late 80s Chris Isaak came out with this song that was a such a huge hit and it was exactly in that no man's land of "what style is it?" And I just wanted to tip my hat.

I loved the song, and to me [Isaak] was someone who successfully crossed between the two genres. So it was kind of a touch stone to me saying, "Hey, this is where I come from. I'm not pop, I'm not country. I'm just this singer/songwriter combination of both." So stylistically it was a tip of my hat to that genre, and as a writer you do your best and write great songs and someone comes along and makes you say, "God, I wish I wrote that song." And that's how I feel about that song; I wish I wrote it, so I recorded it.

I actually wanted to ask you about genres because you get airplay on adult contemporary radio and your videos are shown on CMT. Do you think that since your struggles in the 80s where people were trying to define you, do you think genres even matter anymore?

You know what, I think they matter less and less; particularly in an iPod and a download world where people love eclecticism. And I think artists love eclecticism, no body wants to be pigeonholed. I mean you have stuff that you resonate more strongly to, but you want to be able to express yourself in a variety of ways. I think the business side is finally beginning to understand that. But artists didn't invent genres. Artists just do what they do, and businessmen try and stick you in a hole.

I'm not going to ask you something silly like do you have a favourite amongst your songs, but is there any one song that the majority of fans tell you is their favourite?

That's an easy question. It's the song "I Will Take Care of You", and it was on my first CD Cool Rain. It's a song in that the idea came to me because my daughter, who's my first child, was born on my birthday, on a September afternoon, September 24th. It seemed to be an amazing metaphor for becoming a parent, which is giving your own birthday to your child. It's the whole circle of life. At the same time, the same year that my daughter was born, my father was diagnosed and ultimately circumed to Parkinsons' disease.
So again there's the cycle of life, there's birth, there's death, there's joy, there's sorrow and there's the legacy we pass, from one generation to the other, of love. And if you're lucky enough to have the skills and the ability to show your child what it means to be compassionate and be unconditional in your love, then they'll have that as a gift to give to there own children and that is a gift that comes back to you as a parent.

You've collaborated with a lot of different artists; is there any one collaboration in your mind that stands out as the most memorable?

I couldn't say that one was more memorable then the other, they were all memorable for certain reasons. Roch Voisine, when I wrote with him back in 1995, when we wrote "Deliver Me". What was memorable about that was we met each other, had lunch and wrote the song in the same day, this incredible song that just flew out of our mouths. It happened so quickly, there was just such chemistry there.

It was really exciting when I worked with Heart. I got to stay with them in Seattle, and I had a very young baby and Ann Wilson had a very young baby, they were almost the same age. So that was a real experience, you know-songs from the rock 'n' roll nursery. The nannies would take care of the babies in the morning, because we'd work till like two or three in the morning. Then we'd sleep in and hang out with the kids in the afternoon, and then we'd get to writing. So that was a cool thing. And working with Ann and Nancy Wilson, hearing her play "Cherry Blossom Road" on the guitar, it was unbelievable. I can hardly play guitar myself, and hearing them play I just kept pinching myself.

Of course, writing with Olivia Newton-John, who I've collaborated a lot with this past year, it's really been fun. We're very like-minded people with very similar interests and similar takes on philosophy and psychology, and all of that translated into the stuff we were writing together.

You've written a lot for other artists, is there a difference between writing for yourself and writing for others?

It depends. When you're actually sitting and writing with the artist you're very conscious of choosing lyrics that reflect their persona and there comfort level and there stories. And also channeling the melodies to what sounds best on their voice. What is the same, both writing by yourself and writing for someone, because a lot of songs of mine that other artists recorded, I just wrote them myself and they ended up recording them. You write from a place of truth, you don't write trying to create something fictional, you just write trying to give yourself goosebumps. And that is the same when you're sitting there writing with the artist or trying to write something yourself, you try to connect to that place that is real.

I wanted to ask you about the show you're doing Nine Months and One Year on Rogers, what appealed to you about hosting this particular TV show?

Obviously, I've written a lot about the themes of motherhood and family and children. As a writer and as a performer you're really interested in communicating, and what you're communicating through songs or words or stories or documentaries, in some sense it all feels the same; you're taking information, sharing it and enlightening people. I was approached by the producers to host the show and it felt like a very natural thing. I'm very interested in women's issues and that's what the show's about.

You've talked a lot about the issue of post-partem depression, and it's certainly come up int the media quite a bit this pasty year with all the back and forth between Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields. Do you think that discussion of post-partem depression been politicized without really real insight into the issue itself?

No it didn't. The whole Tom Cruise/Brooke Shields thing was whether post-partem depression was a mild little condition that you just need to take vitamins for and it went away, or whether in many cases it needs a more head on treatment that possibly needs drugs and anti-depressants or other kinds of therapy. It will be interesting to see how Tom Cruise feels about that watching his wife go through the post-partem period, because he has two adopted children from before so he's never saw what happens to the biological mother in this period of what some people like to call "baby shock".

I don't think that the sound bytes that you heard between Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields only scratch the surface. If you read Brooke Shields' book, it's a brilliant book and one of the best I've read on the process and onset of the condition, the acceptance by the mother and the treatment of it. It's a journey that I, myself, went through with the denial, You know-"It's all in your head" and "It doesn't really exist". But it's a very severe, debilitating condition that left untreated, well we've seen some very tragic examples in the news of mothers killing themselves and their children, and that's extreme, but's points on a curve. It's a mental health/mood disorder, a serious problem, it's not just a case of a case of feeling a little weepy because you gained a little weight. That has nothing to do with it.

Well, I'll wrap up by asking, what are your plans from here, anything that stands out that you'll be working on in the next year?

Well I'm working on a very exciting project with Olivia Newton-John, another record. I've produced three songs for her on a record that came out last October, and we're hoping to have a whole record come out this October. And I can't really say anything more about it other to say that it's a dedication record, and it's very, very interesting. I think musically and lyrically it's one of the most interesting projects I've ever worked on.