Amanda Shires Quotes

As a Latin musician, I understand that there are so many places where people don't know who I am. My albums never came out in Australia or Japan.

I'm treating country music like it's a sport. I'm looking at where my competition is and realized I needed to work on my songwriting.

It's hard for me to get shows in the U.S. It's that simple. I don't know what that means. I think it means there's not as much support here for my music?

My music and my fan base is really built off of my lifestyle.

At school, I'd sing in groups in the locker room or in the bathroom, which was like an echo chamber. The problem is I didn't know how to get started singing professionally. The pool hall was my Facebook. I'd hang out there to keep up with what was going on and to let people know where I could be reached if singing jobs came up.

I got about 6037 songs I wrote myself and I'm trying to get them on the market and I just wish people could hear them and stuff but they'll do pretty good.

I want to figure out what kind of artist I want to be, because with the 'American Idol' process, it just works really fast. The night of the finale, they said, 'OK, here are all the label people that you're gonna work with, this is the album you're gonna make and blah, blah, blah.' So it was a pretty fast process, but it's been cool.

I was kind of going that route with my country music. Indie country. Which would work, if I was playing on Americana stages. Unless I had a television outlet like 'Glee'.

He asked my girlfriend if we could come over and sing some of the songs that we had written, which we did. After he heard the songs, he said that he knew someone in the record business by the name of Bob Shad.

I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it.

I've done two albums for Concord Records; one was with Al Jarreau and it did very well for us. The second album was called 'Songs And Stories,' and it had good songs and good performances, but I promised them I would do an album that was more jazz-oriented.

I'm from a little island off of Massachusetts, Nantucket. It's hard getting into the music business from there, but my parents took me to songwriting festivals because I would write and produce my own music.

You know, I get a lot of people pitching songs to me.

I always wanted to make an album, but I knew that I didn't want it to be a musical theater album. It's not that I don't love them - I own every musical theater album ever made - but it just didn't seem right for me.

Well when I made my first record I thought it would be a good joke to have me on one side, have the lable say John Fahey on one side, and this guy Blind Joe Death on the other side.

I started growing my audience in small clubs through word-of-mouth. I started making music that isn't necessarily commercially viable, and it's not necessarily marketable to my peers to a certain extent.

The advice I have for new artists is this - write great songs and play them live as often as possible. Get residencies all over town and crush it.

I started writing songs in high school. And eventually, I got some songs recorded by some major artists, mostly because I was out there performing, and I was working in coffee houses and lounges, and people came to see me and hear my material.

There are definitely a lot of creative people I want to work with. I wanna work with Drake!

Even though there are incredible songs floating around Nashville, it's important for me to have my voice heard.

I didn't have any role models of artists that were in the same playing field as me - making expensive videos, travelling, marketing and promoting an album.

There's a system in place in Nashville, and for a long time, I was trapped in this idea that the only way to do it was to come to town, get a record deal, and do it the way they say. And that system works. But it caters to a specific kind of artist, and I didn't necessarily fit that mold.

When I first started, I wasn't really aware of anything in the industry or aware of who I really was. I just put my music out there and tried to get as many people to hear it as possible. I hadn't really thought about the kind of music I wanted to make.

I've been really trying to put people onto, like, my sound since I was, like, 17, 16.

I was in New York in 2014. It was still cold outside. I was sitting there working on 'Exchange' and 'Right My Wrongs' at the time, and a fan had commented on one of my songs called 'Let Em' Know' that was already on my SoundCloud and said, 'trapsoul movement.'