Amy Martin: Feeling music do its magical thing
Published: March 5, 2009
The following Q&A with Missoula musician Amy Martin is reprinted, with permission, from the March/April 2009 issue of State of the Arts, the Montana Arts Council's newspaper, and is part of a regular series of Career Profiles. Visit art.mt.gov.
Amy Martin was born in Iowa and has lived in Montana since 1999. She has recorded eight albums of original music. Her most recent release is Ask the Planet, which was commissioned by the Biomimicry Institute and features the Missoula Coyote Choir, a singing group comprised of youngsters that she founded in 2007. The album also features Dar Williams, Bill Harley, Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn and others.
In her current position as the community music director for the Missoula Family YMCA, she is organizing classes, workshops and ensembles for kids and adults of all ages, abilities and backgrounds, with the goal of inspiring as many people as possible to make music.
You can find out more about all of these projects, as well as listen to Martin’s music at the following websites: www.amymartin.org, www.asktheplanetcd.org, www.biomimicryinstitute.org or www.ymcamissoula.org.
How did you know this is what you wanted to be?
I have always loved to sing, and as a kid I would sometimes stay home “sick” from school to sing and play Broadway tunes at the piano. I think in my gut I knew then that music was central to my path, but it took my conscious brain a while to catch up.
How did you get started in your career?
The first money I made playing music was 45 cents dropped into my guitar case as I sat playing guitar and singing on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago. A woman in a business suit gave it to me. She didn’t smile or say anything, just dropped in her change and kept going. It felt like a million dollars.
What were the pivotal moments on your path to building your career?
Singing for tips on the wharf in San Francisco. Performing a full half-hour (!) of my own songs at a coffee shop for the first time. Landing in Missoula and schlepping my demo tape (it really was a tape) around town, looking for gigs. Making my first CD with $5,000 that my grandmother left to me in her will. Asking for and receiving community support to help make my subsequent CDs.
It’s been fun to open for the Indigo Girls and Ani DiFranco, fun to play a few big stages here and there. But what’s really mattered in the long run are the thousands of ways that listeners and other supporters have reached out to me, with encouragement, help booking and promoting gigs, and coins of various sizes dropped into my guitar case, actual and metaphysical. Most important of all are the moments of feeling music do its magical thing, whether it is in the recording process, on stage, at home alone, or in conversation with someone.
What role did education play?
Understanding the fundamentals of music theory makes everything richer and more fun for me. Also, having had some vocal instruction helps me keep my voice healthy, and frees my voice up to just be my voice, rather than the vehicle for tons of neurotic fear (which is easy to do with an instrument that lives inside your body).
Equally helpful to me as a songwriter is the exposure I’ve had to writing, literature, history, politics, meditation, etc. – but that makes it sound like I’m Ms. Erudite, which I’m not. Just curious, and lucky enough to have grown up in a house with books. A big part of my continuing education courses are walks with my dog in places that humans don’t dominate.
What role did your family and friends play?
Friends and family have been and continue to be central to my development as an artist. Partly because they support what I do creatively and cheer me on, and partly because they know many other parts of me, and help me stay alive and engaged as a whole person.
Did help come from some unexpected places?
Yes. More examples than I have time to recount, delivered in endlessly surprising ways. It’s been one of the most moving parts of this journey.
Did obstacles appear in unexpected ways?
I think the obstacles are bit more predictable than the help, actually.
How do the financial resources come together for you to produce your work?
That’s a question I’m continually trying to answer. Making albums is expensive. I’m increasingly committed to working with the best musicians I can find, and spending the time we need to do it well. That process requires many people’s skills, talents and time, and everyone deserves to be paid for their contributions. It’s highly collaborative, involves complicated equipment – more like making a movie than writing a novel.
I’m in an interesting position at the moment of having dozens of songs I want to record, and better access to top-tier musicians, engineers and other collaborators than I’ve ever had. The only thing lacking to bring all these elements together is money. I’m not sure how I’m going to find it, but I feel like I will, somehow.
What advice would you offer artists in Montana who are trying to build their careers?
The mainstream economic systems we’re born into don’t support art-making. So, we need to change them. And we’re not going to accomplish that using the same thinking that got us into this art-starved state. I’m not transforming anything if I limit my goals to becoming the best little artist-capitalist that I can be.
I really think artists are being called right now to re-make our worlds around us; to paint outside the lines, or redraw (erase?) the lines entirely, inch by inch.
An economy created only by non-artists will never serve artists’ needs. It will always include art as afterthought if it includes it all. Yet, this world is crying out for art, it is desperate for more creative approaches to our problems, more nourishing celebrations, more beauty in the sights and sounds of the ordinary day.
It’s a supply-demand situation: all these artists longing to give their gifts, and all these places where those gifts are sorely needed. What’s blocking the exchange from happening? What’s damming the flow? It’s up to us to figure that out, and to start getting that wild, colorful, wonderfully freaky art-maker energy working for the greater good.
