Amy Blaschke

Amy Blaschke 

Amy Blaschke’s songwriting marries intimacy with pulse. She writes songs that are as beautiful as they are restless, causing your jaw to drop and stay dropped. Her tunes often bubble with melancholia, but they refuse to wallow. This is expressive and empowering stuff.  The instrumentation is mostly sparse here, yet Blaschke’s songs transmogrify and build.  The tracks on her sophomore 2003 self-titled album play as uncut, authentic excerpts from her interpersonal relationships. Her songs feel mostly akin to in-the-moment conversations rather than aftermath reflections, which instills them with a deep sense of urgency.  Blaschke excels at communication. Her words resonate in a straightforward, yet provocative way.  Her blunt, personal, yet universally relatable lyricism is an active force.  Her direct, confessional words sting, but it is a purposeful kind of sting to invoke change and growth. Her songs are so moving that they truly can change people. Her unparalleled commitment to honesty and forward motion inspires you to say how you really feel more often, and challenges you to communicate more fearlessly, more freely. To call her instrumentation minimal and her compositions soft is misleading. Soulful acoustic guitar merges with propulsive percussion and sonorous bass, creating a gripping musical intensity that eschews talk of sonic minimalism. That Blaschke’s dreamy, airy, singular purr is perhaps the most affecting instrument in the mix is a testament to the sheer vitality of her recordings.

Note:  Amy Blaschke’s new record “Desert Varnish” is out soon, and will be available via her website http://www.amyblaschke.com.  This is the first Amy Blaschke record released under her own name in a decade (her aforementioned self titled record came out in 2003). “Desert Varnish” is also Blaschke’s first recording since her 2007 album “Of Honey And Country” released under the band name “Night Canopy”.