I know, I know—I promised that the next six reviews would be given to the Brits and Canadians, but I wanted to express my deepest admiration for the people of Scotland who took the time and effort to protest the arrival of The Grand Cheetohead, who dropped in to play a round of golf (and true to form, he cheated). The protest signs were quite creative, so here are some of my favorites:

• Oh, So You’re the American Idiot Green Day Was On About!
• Yer Maw Was an Immigrant, You Bam!
• Keep Orange Fizzy, Not Fascist!
• (Woman on bagpipe) At Least This Bag of Hot Air Serves a Purpose!

I checked my list of Scottish possibles, and Amy was second on the list, right after Admiral Fallow and just before Belle and Sebastian and Biffy Clyro. As I’d already covered at least one album by Admiral Fallow and Belle and Sebastian, Amy won the day. In case you’re wondering, no, I did not have Annie Lennox on my list as the Eurythmics are not my cup of tea (but I do appreciate her many humanitarian efforts).

Amy has released six studio albums, but I thought it best to start at the beginning, for reasons that will become obvious shortly. Let’s do it!

*****

Amy was born in Bishopbriggs, conveniently located a few kilometers from Glasgow, the renowned UNESCO City of Music, noted for its diverse and vibrant music scene. In her early teens, she attended T in the Park, a major music festival held in a former RAF airfield. The experience turned out to be a life changer, as she explained in an interview with NPR: “You just have to have a song that you’re desperate to play along to, and for me it was ‘Turn’ by the Scottish band Travis,” Macdonald says. “I went to see them headline the Scottish T in the Park Festival, so after that festival, I went home and taught myself all of the Travis back catalog with an old guitar and a little chord book.” In addition to the song’s strong melody and rock instrumentation,  she might have found this verse particularly inspiring:

I want to sing to sing my song
I want to live in a world where I belong
I want to live, I will survive
And I believe that it won’t be very long

In a couple of years, she started writing songs and performing in Glasgow pubs and coffee houses.

Her next big step might seem rather quaint given the massive changes in the music industry, but it is said that Amy Macdonald was the last musician to win a recording contract by submitting a demo CD. I have no way to verify the veracity of that claim, but I do know that today’s A&R pros spend more time searching for talent on YouTube, Bandcamp, Spotify, internet sources and social media, and less time padding their travel expenses on the road. Amy responded to an ad in the NME from a fledgling production company, and owner-songwriters Pete Wilkinson and Sarah Erasmus fell head over heels in love with her songwriting talent. Wilkinson spent several months working with Amy in his home studio and they eventually landed a contract with Vertigo Records.

This Is the Life was Amy’s debut album, released in July 2007, a month before Amy turned twenty. Within a few months, this young woman that no one had ever heard of had a worldwide hit:

• #1: Denmark, The Netherlands, Mexico, Scotland, Switzerland, U.K.
• Top Ten: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden
• Top Twenty: Iceland, Ireland, Poland, Portugal

Well, that’s pretty much everywhere in the Western World except for a few European stragglers, the Canadians, and the home of the brave and deaf. The album “peaked” at #92 on the U.S. Billboard chart and none of her five subsequent albums have charted in the USA. As Amy noted in an interview on Headliner, she faced two significant challenges: “I think being a woman in this industry does make everything more difficult . . . I always felt I was being judged a lot harsher than a male counterpart would be. When you’re a female, it’s about how you look, what you’re wearing, about your hair and what you weigh.” She also noted that “I think it can also be harder for Scottish artists to break through, I don’t think we always have great support. Sometimes you have to battle that little bit harder.”

One of the barriers faced by Scottish musicians when attempting to make a splash in the lucrative American market is that Americans have little patience for “foreign accents” (as Blur found out when Damon Albarn decided to sing in his native voice). This weird hangup and its consequences are explained in a piece from the tourism site Love Scotland:

Most Scottish people don’t sing with a Scottish accent primarily due to the influence of popular music and the standardized accent that dominates the industry. This phenomenon, also known as linguistic accommodation, refers to the unconscious process where singers adjust their accent to match the accents they are frequently exposed to in music. Considering that the majority of popular music and influential artists are American or English, the accents used by these artists heavily influence the singing accents worldwide, including Scotland. Therefore, the Scottish accent becomes neutralized, resulting in a more ‘Americanized’ or ‘Anglicized’ accent when singing.

I’ll bet that only the most passionate fans know that Nazareth hails from Dunfermline, Scotland, because Dan McCafferty sounded like all the other screechy, high-pitched vocalists featured in heavy metal bands. As for Amy, her origins are apparent in the use of the Gaelic “o,” which I find rather charming. In addition to listening to many of her songs, I also watched several of her interviews on YouTube. In both cases, I found her articulation excellent and had no problems understanding every single word, whether she was singing or talking. The bottom line is that it’s tough for anyone with a “foreign accent” to make it in a country with a long history of xenophobia . . . a country that unfortunately dominates the music business.

Oh, well. America’s loss turned out to be Europe’s gain.

If you’d never heard of Amy Macdonald and happened to run into This Is the Life while rummaging through albums in your favorite music store, you may misread the credits listing Amy’s talents as “vocals and acoustic guitar” and assume she’s some kind of folkie from a faraway land. Nope! In addition to Travis, she has listed The Killers, Paul Weller and Bruce Springsteen as major influences, all confirmed rock ‘n’ rollers. Though she has a full band and a string section backing her up, the consistent presence of her assertive strumming gives the album a feel similar to an impromptu sing-along rock-a-thon with friends and neighbors. Her contralto voice is confident and assertive, wringing every bit of meaning from her lyrics, most of which involve true-life experiences with broad appeal.

On with the show!

*****

Note 1: All songs written by Amy Macdonald except where noted.

Note 2: Amy is a huge fan of the capo, so when presenting chords, I will supply the capo fret and the unfretted chord position (so a C major chord with a capo on the 5th fret will use the G chord position).

“Mr. Rock & Roll”: The opener begins with a lovely, slightly melancholy passage combining gentle strums, keyboard, and brushes set to a relaxed tempo. The passage gives way to Amy’s sprightly strumming in a quicker tempo using the chord positions D-Dsus4-D6/9-D on the 7th fret. After four go-rounds, she begins her vocal while the rhythm section of Adam Falkner on drums and Jamie Sefton on bass propel the song with solid forward movement. The driving rhythm continues in the chorus, where a new chord pattern mixing sus4 and minor 7th chords is introduced, enhanced by a wash of synth strings reminiscent of a Moody Blues mellotron. The arrangement is well-designed, with touches of electric guitar, piano, and a brief appearance by the string section.

The underlying message here is “opposites don’t always attract, but they should.” The tendency to couple with partners in the same social strata, clique, or background may seem a safe bet, but you’ll miss out on opportunities to expand your horizons and grow. From Songfacts:

Amy Macdonald explained to the Liverpool Daily Post that this song is about people rather than music. She said: “The whole message is just be yourself. It’s about two people who’ve been pretending to be something they’re not in order to fit in with a certain group, and because of that, these amazing people who would have got on so well and made a brilliant couple pass each other by. Both of them have been feeling that they’ve had to fit in elsewhere, but they’ve missed out as a result.

Amy shares two stories of ships passing in the night, the first involving “Mr. Rock & Roll” and “Rock Chick of the Century.” I think the dilemma and contrasts are best expressed in the second pairing:

“This Is the Life”: “Mr. Rock & Roll” was a big hit in the U.K., but “This Is the Life” was the single that opened the doors to the continent, topping the charts or climbing into the top ten in most of Europe. The backstory unfolds in two segments:

(Shortly after release) Amy Macdonald explained on her website how she came to write this song: “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 realized, this is the life.” (Songfacts)

(Update) Macdonald explained in a video posted on March 30, 2023, on her official TikTok account that she wrote the song when she was 16 years old. She shared that one night she went out using her sister’s ID and had an amazing time. However, the next day, she was caught and grounded, spending the entire day in her room. It was during that confinement day that, inspired by the unforgettable night before, she wrote the song. (Wikipedia)

I secured my fake ID at sixteen, so I suppose I could claim that Amy and I have something in common, but there’s no way in hell I could have written such a great song at that age.

“This Is the Life” celebrates the amazing power of music to bring people together. When I watch videos of live performances where huge crowds sing in unison to their favorite tunes, I always tear up. Then I wonder, “Why can’t we experience this kind of happiness all the time? Why do we treat music as a pastime and not an essential need?”

Amy establishes the tempo with a few strums of muffled guitar, cueing the rhythm section to follow her lead. Swooping synth figures soon follow, supported by a sweet lick on electric guitar. If you read the lyrics without the benefit of music, you’ll notice that the meter is unbalanced, more like free verse than lyrical poetry. Some lines are shortened and some are jam-packed with syllables. “How in the hell is she going to make that work?” you wonder.

She pulls it off with perfect phrasing and an innate feeling for rhythm, breaking the flow at all the right times and speeding up her delivery when necessary. Better still, the words paint a vivid picture of Amy’s night on the town, and her delivery captures both the anticipation and the sheer joy of a night drenched in music:

Oh the wind whistles down
The cold dark street tonight
And the people they were dancing to the music vibe
And the boys chase the girls with the curls in their hair
While the shy tormented youth sit way over there
And the songs they get louder
Each one better than before

And you’re singing the songs
Thinking this is the life
And you wake up in the morning and your head feels twice the size
Where you gonna go? Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna sleep tonight?

She sings the chorus five times, and never comes close to slipping up on the line, “And you wake up in the morning and your head feels twice the size.” The speed of her delivery mirrors the emotions we feel at peak excitement levels, when the words rush out like a river spilling over its banks.

The song is enhanced by delicate management of dynamics, slowly raising the volume and intensity as we run through verses and chorus, and ending with a brief change to stop time when Amy’s voice takes a gentle turn as she sings the closing line, “Where you gonna sleep tonight?” I think the answer to that question is, “Who cares where I sleep? I’m having the time of my life!’

“Poison Prince”: Pete Doherty inspired this song as well, but not in a good way. This talented singer, songwriter, poet and painter has a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and a rap sheet a mile long. He was clean when he played the gig that inspired “This Is the Life,” but soon relapsed, a pattern that would continue for years on end.

Amy explained her motivation to write the song in an interview on Hot Press: “If I write a song about something, I’ll be honest and say what it’s about,” she states. “It’s not a secretive thing. The Libertines were a big part of me growing up, and to see him go down that horrible path with all the drinking and what-not, that had a big impact on me and still does. Watching him self-destruct made me feel something, so I wanted to write about it.” Her disappointment in a musician she deeply admired is captured in tones of genuine disgust:

Oh, who said life was easy?
Who said life was fair?
Who said nobody gived a damn
And nobody even cared?
The way you’re acting now
Like you left that all behind
You’ve given up, you’ve given in
Another sucker of that slime

Some kinda poison prince
With your eyes in a daze
Some kinda poison prince
Your life is like a maze
And what we all want
And what we all crave
Is an upbeat song
So we can dance the night away

As for Doherty’s reaction, he thought the song was called “Poisoned Prick” and asked, “Why would I want to hear a song like that?” BECAUSE IT’S A WAKE-UP CALL, DUMMY!

Amy and the band rock pretty hard on this one, driving this sucker like there’s no tomorrow to a fixed chord pattern in the key of A#minor (first fret capo positions: Am-C-F-E). The song was released as a single but failed to catch fire, probably due to its limited subject matter.  It’s certainly not “an upbeat song so we can dance the night away,” but the feelings are real, and that’s good enough for me.

“Youth of Today”: As a fellow millennial who also ran into members of previous generations who couldn’t get their heads around our ethos, I can appreciate Amy’s frustration with their often uninformed judgments. My problem with the song is that I wish they had continued the softer, more reflective arrangement of the first minute-and-a-half instead of switching to overdrive—it gives the song an ominousness that isn’t reflected in the lyrics. Hmm. Maybe Steven Wilson can fix it up in a jiffy.

“Run”: My favorite song on the album presents a challenge that many of us are facing during these dark and confusing times. As interpreted by Songtell, “Run” is about “a person who is asking for guidance and support from someone else, indicating that they feel lost and in need of direction.”

The crew in the booth nailed the power levels for this marvelous example of songwriting excellence. The background music is suitably restrained in the two verses conveying sensual exhaustion, conflict-weariness, and the drag of the daily grind; the sound intensifies in the bridge, when the lyrics shift to feelings of alienation and doubt regarding the purpose of life; and in the chorus, where Amy expresses her deeply-felt desire to live life to the fullest no matter what obstacles stand in her way, the boys in the booth follow her lead by supplying the full power treatment:

But I will run until my feet no longer run no more
And I will kiss until my lips no longer feel no more
And I will love until my heart it aches
And I will love until my heart it breaks
And I will love until there’s nothing more to live for

I love those lines so much that I dusted off my calligraphy skills, wrote them down on parchment, framed the finished work, and hung it next to my work desk so I can see it every day. I’ll leave things there and let you experience the awesome restorative power of the song:

“Let’s Start a Band”: As you may have figured out by now, Amy primarily writes about her own experiences in life, and at this point in the timeline, she had dreams of becoming a rock star. In this song, she shares her dreams with someone who has also expressed interest in the music biz, but she’s not sure he has the same level of drive as she does. Though the lyrics express confidence, the music is somewhat melancholy, as if doubt still lingers beneath the text:

Give me a guitar and I’ll be your troubadour
Your strolling minstrel 12th century door to door
I don’t know anymore, if that feeling is past will it last
Oh, how can you be sure?

And how do I know if you’re feeling the same as me?
And how do I know if that’s the only place you want to be?

In the next verse, she expresses her dreams in more contemporary language, and lo and behold . . . her dreams are about to come true:

Give me a stage and I’ll be your rock and roll queen
Your 20th century cover of a magazine
Rolling Stone here I come, watch out everyone,
I’m singing, I’m singing my song
Give me a festival and I’ll be your Glastonbury star
The lights are shining everyone knows who you are
Singing songs about dreams about hopes about schemes
Ooooh, they just came true

The instrumental-choral passage that follows becomes dark and dreamy, perhaps reflecting the disorientation involved in any major life change, even if it is a change you wanted to make. She finally accepts her new situation and suggests to her unnamed pal that they start a band . . . and the real band rocks hard all the way to the fade. What I like most about the song is Amy’s willingness to share her dreams . . . and her vulnerability.

“Barrowland Ballroom”: Here Amy celebrates the many nights she spent at Glasgow’s leading concert venue, reliving the experience and wishing she were on that stage. I think many of us have attachments to the venues where lasting memories were made; for my Dad, it’s Fillmore West; for me, it’s 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley. When one of our cherished venues is wiped out by the wrecking ball in the name of progress, the experience can be quite traumatic, as Ray Davies described in “Come Dancing”:

The day they knocked down the palais
My sister stood and cried
The day they knocked down the palais
Part of my childhood died, just died

The song is light and joyful, set to a fast shuffle beat to mimic the nonstop positive vibes. When the EU lets me have a real vacation without interruption, I’m heading for Glasgow to check out Barrowland.

“L.A.” (Macdonald-Wilkinson): It turns out that Amy is an accidental genius in the field of musical marketing. From Songfacts:

The Glaswegian singer/songwriter admitted on her internet blog that she never really liked this song much herself. She wrote on her MySpace: “So I’ve thrown myself right back in at the deep end and have been rewarded with a lovely chart position of 48! It’s more embarrassing than anything else. If I’m honest I really don’t like ‘LA’ all that much and don’t think it represents the album one bit.”

After that comment, the song climbed seven places on the charts, aided largely by its appearance on the soaps EastEnders and Coronation Street. Since the producer claimed co-credit for writing the song, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it made the cut.

In explaining her role in the songwriting process, Amy told BBC Berkshire that the song’s origins involved her admiration of actor Jake Gyllenhaal, then told the interviewer, “Well, I was just thinking and I thought everyone has somebody that they idolize—be it an actor or a sports player or a singer or whatnot. But I think in general that people should value their own dreams and their own achievements, even if we don’t do things as great as being in a Hollywood blockbuster. Just be proud of what we achieve ourselves.”

Unfortunately, those sentiments are only mentioned in passing, and the “laid back” arrangement isn’t a particularly good fit for Amy’s intensity. It’s not a bad song, but I agree with Amy—it doesn’t belong here.

As always, I’ll let my readers weigh in:

“A Wish for Something More”: When you look at a chord chart and see that nearly all the chords are minor, you might reasonably expect that a sad song will soon fill your ears. That’s somewhat true here, but this song about wanting more out of a relationship than “just friends” mixes touches of humor with expressions of unfulfilled desire.

The song is split into two time signatures: a bouncy 2/4 in the verses and a driving 4/4 in a faster tempo in the chorus. Amy sings in the upper reaches of her range, where her voice is pleasantly sweet, but no matter where she lands on the scale, her voice is tinged with vulnerability and a touch of impatience with the “just friends” relationship. The opening verse places the story in autumn or early winter, when the lack of cloud cover adds bite to the low temperatures. Weather aside, Amy wants to tell her “friend” that she’s ready to mate with him, warts and all:

Oh the sun is shining far too bright
For it to still be night
Oh the air feels so cold
So cold and old
How can it be light?

Oh let’s take a walk outside
See the world through each other’s eyes
I wish I was your only one
I think you’re beautiful but your hair is a mess
And your shoes are untied, but that’s what I love best

In the chorus, Amy occasionally leaps to the top of her range, her voice reeking with desire and willingness. Alas, this is not a conversation but a retrospective internal monologue, so I doubt that the friend is aware of the “take me, take me” vibes she’s putting out:

And I, I wish I was the one
You lonely, lonely son
And you looked at me that way
I wish for long lingering glances
Fairytale romances every single day
And you look at me and say
I’m your best friend every day
But I wish for something, wish for something more
Oh, I love you like a friend but let’s not pretend
How I wish for something, wish for something more

In the end, she’s still wishing for something more. If she had related her story to me, I would have told her, “Don’t give up. If he views you as a friend, you’re halfway there. Tell him how you feel!”

“Footballer’s Wife“:

Unless you’re an American who has kept up with the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce thing,  you’re going to need a little background information to appreciate “Footballer’s Wife.” From Wikipedia:

WAGs (or Wags) is an acronym used to refer to wives and girlfriends of high-profile sportsmen and women. The term may also be used in the singular form, WAG, to refer to a specific female partner or life partner who is in a relationship with an athlete. The term was first used by the British tabloid press to refer to the wives and girlfriends of high-profile footballers, originally the England national football team. The WAGs acronym came about following an increasing focus on the coverage of athletes’ partners in the late-20th century, and it came into common use during the 2006 FIFA World Cup to refer to Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole, although the term had been used occasionally before that.

After achieving popularity, the acronym became a focus of reality television shows such as WAGs Boutique, WAG Nation, and WAGS. It has since been used by some media in other countries to describe the female partners of athletes in general. Variations have also been developed for other relations, such as husbands and boyfriends, and for other celebrities, such as the wives and girlfriends of celebrities and world leaders. The WAGs acronym is sometimes interpreted as demeaning to women, and it has been criticised by the partners of many athletes as well as by groups such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

I am so relieved that I don’t have to rant about this ridiculous turn of events, because Amy did it for me on Hotpress:

The songs on This Is The Life may place rainy folk melodies in upbeat AOR settings, but they also betray a lyrical disdain for the manner in which the pop industry has become a Saturday evening TV conduit for Madonna-be’s and WAGs.

“I hate the word fame,” she spits, “I hate Britain’s whole celebrity culture, it’s just absolutely ridiculous. The footballer’s wife thing, you have to put up with it day in and day out on the front of some newspaper, it really grates on me. Somebody was telling me a couple of weeks ago about this programme they were watching with primary school children, seven-year-old girls, and when they were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, five out of ten said a WAG. We’ve even got a name for them now! I mean most of them don’t have a purpose, they’re just normal everyday people who grab the headlines for shopping. I’d have no sense of pride about myself, grabbing the headlines for spending somebody else’s money and doing nothing.”

You may read somewhere that Amy did in fact marry a Scottish footballer (since retired and now a coach), but she is NOT a “Footballer’s Wife.”

Her disdain for fame is on full display here, and she uses examples of people who earned fame and suffered from it to point out the differences between the understandably famous and the tag-alongs:

Oh, Mr. James Dean
He don’t belong to anything
Oh, he left before they could get him
With their ways, their wicked ways

Oh, Marilyn Monroe
Where did you go?
I didn’t hear all your stories
I didn’t see all your glory

But the footballers’ wife tells her troubles and strife
I just don’t care, in the end who is she to pretend
That she’s one of them
I don’t think so

As the song proceeds, Amy expresses her belief that “there must be something more” than this silly obsession with celebrity, which she views as a tasteless form of exploitation:

Oh, I don’t believe in the telling of your stories
Throughout your life, there’s just something unappealing it
Don’t catch my eye
It don’t catch my eye

Oh, I don’t believe in the selling of your glories before you
Leave this life
There’s so much more to see, I don’t believe
This is how the world should be

The song begins dramatically with a Hollywood-esque string arrangement by Audrey Riley that transmits a sense of looming tragedy. After a brief transition passage with soft guitar and drums, Amy begins her story, backed by light electric guitar and background strings. The song continues with dynamic shifts mirroring the tone in Amy’s voice—louder when expressing disgust, softer when conveying the sadness of it all. Though some may be disappointed that the album ends with a downer, I think “Footballer’s Wife” was an excellent choice because it reflects Amy’s commitment to truth-telling while revealing her promising potential.

*****

In an interview with Billboard London published on Reuters in support of her follow-up album A Curious Thing, Amy revealed the core values that define her approach to music and celebrity:

All I do is write really simple songs about everyday things that people can relate to no matter where they are in the world. There are no gimmicks. I’ve never been interested in being famous. I just wanted to be onstage, playing my music, and I’ve been able to do that without the horrible side to it . . .

The whole celebrity thing is really interesting, and that’s why we have a million magazines dedicated to gossiping about celebrities. But as a musician, I would like people to talk about me because of my music.

Oh, how I wish we had more musicians like Amy Macdonald.