Email this article | Printer friendly page The Road Not TakenBy Alex Rawls |
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Amanda Shaw is leading her band through a driving, blues-rock tinged version of “Hot Tamale Baby.” As she dances around the stage, there’s no denying that she’s becoming one. At Voodoo just months earlier, children—her long-time audience—danced in the front row with their mothers next to dudes taking pictures of Shaw with their camera phones. But as the title song of Shaw’s new album—Pretty Runs Out-suggests, she isn’t counting on her looks:
I’m not my cowboy boots / I’m not my faded jeans
I’m not my hazel eyes or what it is you think you see.
I’m not the Body Shop / I’m not these fancy nails
I’m not those high-priced glossy, shiny details.
Read beyond the magazine pages.
They don’t tell you that a supermodel ages.
Shaw co-wrote the song with New Orleanian-in-Nashville Jim McCormick, and it might seem like 17 is a little early to sing about fading looks. But as a teenager who has also done two made for TV movies for Disney, she has dealt with 14 and 15-year-olds who were already lunching on salads with dressing on the side. And as a Louisianian from north of Lake Pontchartrain, she has always been distantly linked to Britney Spears, who emerged from the New Mickey Mouse Club as a young teenager and had her first hit at age 17. Her turbulent last few years show quickly looks can go, though to keep it real—except for the bald look, most young men in America would hit on a woman who looks like Spears does now. It’s only by the unrealistic yardstick of show business that Spears’ looks have declined.
For Amanda Shaw, Britney represents a road not taken, a path that might have been available to her had she wanted it. Other potentially lucrative roads opened themselves to Shaw, but instead she opted for humbler roads as someone who wants to stick around for a while.
Shaw can be very much a 17-year-old. As someone raised with manners, she refers to McCormick as Mister Jim, Rounder Records’ Scott Billington as Mister Scott and me as Mister Alex. She doesn’t drive and doesn’t want to because she’d rather buy shoes than spend money on gas. She gets flustered when asked if she has a boyfriend—she has one—and when she talks about her band, “Mister Ronnie” Falgout, “Mister Brint” Anderson and “Mikey” Barras, she talks about how they fit in her social life like uncles, whether its getting together for family barbecues or hanging out watching a Saints game. “Mister Ronnie has a camp down in Lafitte,” she says, “and we go fishing in the summers there.”
She has played the fiddle since she was 8, cut her first album, Little Black Dog, when she was 10, and I’m Not a Bubblegum Pop Princess at 13. She was in the Disney movies Stuck in the Suburbs in 2004 and Now You See It in 2005. Disney’s recording arm expressed interest in signing Shaw and, her mother Renee says, “Her lawyer said it was a good deal if we wanted to make a lot of money.” But the family—Amanda included—turned it down. “We wanted Amanda to be ready to take charge of her career when she turns 18, so we’ve made sure she’s been a part of every decision that affected her career,” Renee says.
After her experiences with the made-for-TV movies, Shaw had soured on Disney. “The mouse wasn’t so nice to work for,” she says without elaboration. She’s reluctant to talk too much about Disney because the company still means so much to so many people, but after taping a line reading for Hannah Montana, she withdrew from consideration when she realized it was a Disney project. Doing the movies did help her come to a moment of clarity, though. “They made me realize how much I love my music.”
Instead of signing with Disney, she signed with Rounder Records, the Massachusetts-based label that has traditionally focused on roots music. “Mister Dino [Gankendorff, her lawyer] said, ‘You can go with Disney. They have a lot of money, can get you out there, and can make you a big star. Or, if you’re really into your music, you can go with Rounder who doesn’t have Disney’s budget, but you’ll be more free as an artist.” Once she made her choice, the challenge became what record to make. Her first two albums were albums of kids’ music, but, Shaw says, “that’s because I was a kid.” It took almost two years to make Pretty Runs Out because it was hard to find material that reflected someone who was changing so quickly. “Sometimes we’d start picking out a song or writing a song, and because it took so long, a year later we’d decide ‘This doesn’t fit us anymore,’” she says. “We had written a few songs that by the time we recorded the album, the band had outgrown them.”
According to Rounder’s Scott Billington, they considered 30 to 40 songs for album, all of which seemed right at one point or another, but most of them ended up seeming too young or like songs she needed to grow into. They considered songs by Donovan and Etta James among others before deciding on songs by Diane Warren and Eleni Mandell along with songs Shaw co-wrote with McCormick, Shannon McNally and Anders Osborne. In each case, the writing experience was a learning one.
“I learned so much from him,” she says of Anders Osborne, who wrote “Wishing Me Away” with Shaw three or four years ago. “I learned about how the vibe’s got to be just right.” When McNally agreed to write with her, she wasn’t sure what they were going to do and thought she’d show Shaw her process. “It’s a bit of a daunting task to write a song with a 15 or 16-year-old,” McNally says. “You don’t want to put words in her mouth, and it’s really got to come from her.”
She focused Shaw on her own thinking and the moment, hoping to find something there that might prove to be material for a song. At the time, Shaw’s family had migrant workers living in their backyard working on their house, and they had become part of the family. According to McNally, “She jumped into this story about how a construction company had brought these people up from Mexico and ditched them there and didn’t pay them. The neighbors took advantage of them and she didn’t think that was right and immigration laws were all wrong. I thought, ‘Okay, Post-Katrina economics and immigration law—that’s going to be an easy song.’ She jumped right in the deep end.” McNally helped her focus on the song on the feel-good part of the story, the dinner at the end of the day.
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The song, “Chirmolito,” named for a type of salsa, shows her youth a bit in the vocals, where she lightly mimics McNally’s drawl, but it also marks a musical territory that isn’t strictly defined by Acadian roots. She takes all the solos on her fiddle, but the groove and vibe is closer to Creedence Clearwater Revival. On I’m Not a Bubblegum Pop Princess, she did songs by the Ramones and the Clash, and frequently performed “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” live, but in those cases, she jumped from style to style. On Pretty Runs Out, the blend is more organic than it has been in the past. She still does a medley of reels and of Dennis McGee songs that highlight her fiddle playing, but beyond that, the album is largely country-flavored roots rock with her voice and fiddle giving it a Louisiana identity.
Just as Shaw picked an ambitious subject for “Chirmolito,” McCormick found her very conscious of what she wanted to say on “Pretty Runs Out, a title she picked from a notebook McCormick keeps of hooks and titles. He first imagined the title as being for a song sung by an older woman to a man leaving her for a younger lover, but he realized the song found its proper home with Shaw.
“She shared a lot of the same ideas about the temporary nature of surface beauty,” he says. “She had a lot of thoughts of her own, strong thoughts. We talked about that, what messages are we putting out there?” McCormick writes in Music Row in Nashville, has the song “We Rode in Trucks” by Luke Bryan on the country charts, and recently had songs cut by Trace Adkins, Randy Travis and Rodney Atkins. He also co-wrote “Woulda Coulda Shoulda” from Pretty Runs Out, and over the Christmas vacation the two got together to write again.
“She’s very musical,” McCormick says. “She’s ahead of the curve. She’s got a vision for who she is and who she wants to be and how she wants to present herself.”
McNally similarly left the experience impressed. “She doesn’t want to be big more than she wants to be good. She’ll come into her own. Songwriting is a lifelong process; you hope the songs you write at 20 you’ll still want to play at 60. She’ll figure it out.” McNally also talked with Shaw about some of the challenges young women face in music, referring to Britney and Hillary Duff among others. “The important thing is to be successful with your clothes on,” McNally says.
Shaw has grown in the last few years in more ways than one. In 2006, she dealt with major loss for the first time when her guitarist Scott Thomas died of a heart attack. Shaw found out about his death while she was onstage at a gig that he was uncharacteristically late for.
She also became involved in a cause for the first time, signing on at 14 for a part in the IMAX film Hurricane on the Bayou. When the project started, it was a cautionary tale about the importance of Lousiana’s coastal wetlands in which Tab Benoit shows Shaw around the bayous and the ecosystem that would be lost if a hurricane were to hit the Louisiana coast. It’s a cause she now supports, and she missed Thanksgiving to be in Sudbury, Ontario for an opening of Hurricane on the Bayou. “The real problem is our environment. We need our wetlands and we need to take of that because it will take care of us and protect us.”
Hurricane Katrina made the footage that had been shot prophetic, and to add to the drama, Shaw’s grandmother and grandfather in Lakeview were missing for two weeks. “They were first sent to Shreveport, and then they were put in a shelter in Hammond,” Shaw says. The hurricane not only forced her to face mortality as it did with all of us, but it brought some of the complicated facts of life into clearer focus. They got charity food for the first time. “A church in Minnesota wanted to send us money,” she says. When her family tried to talk them into giving money to someone less fortunate, the church insisted it wanted to give it to them. “It was a really humbling experience.”
Then again, there are so many ways in which Shaw is very much a teenager. She gets giddy recalling Elaine episodes of Seinfeld. She loves the Saints and was excited when she received a text message from Drew Brees’ wife. She a senior at Mt. Carmel who will graduate this year (albeit as an independent study), and she’s looking forward to going to Tulane next year.
Shaw is still finding her singing voice, but she has already learned to make sense of seven years of show biz experience. “Everything is building blocks,” she says. “If not for taking those little steps, I don’t know who I would be or where I would be at.” With Pretty Runs Out, she took the first steps toward becoming a songwriter, something that is important to her. “I wanted to start being able to write music, so that way it came from me and the band.”
Amanda Shaw has twice said no to paths that might have led to money and fame, but think about those who have said yes to it. Who takes Hilary Duff serious as a singer? Is anybody paying enough attention to Miley Cyrus’ music to decide if she’s talented? And if she is, will anybody ever give her credit for it? It’s possible to envision a number of musical futures for Shaw—roots rock if she wants one level of success, or country music if she wants to follow in the footsteps of 17-year-old Taylor Swift (who she shared a bill with last month during Metairie’s Family Gras). Where this all goes, though, is a question for another day.
“It’s important for me to start finding myself in my music,” Shaw says. “I don’t want my age or my fiddle playing to be a gimmick. I want to be a serious musician when I grow up.”
Amanda Shaw and the Cute Guys play a CD-release party Saturday, February 9 at the House of Blues’ Parish.
Published February 2008, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 21, No. 2.
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