There's a song in everything: a Q&A with musician and songwriter, Amy Annelle
"Once I finish the song, I embrace the song."
Welcome to Revisionary, a Q&A series where artists talk about revising, redoing, and how to make what you create even better.
This is some deep lore but in 2020 I got my first New York Times style section byline writing an article about how the pandemic had led to a backyard chicken shortage. I put out a call for interview subjects who’d gotten pandemic chickens and got the number of a musician in Austin, Texas: Amy Annelle.
It’s a good thing I was franticly on deadline and didn’t google her before the interview or else I might have been too nervous to give her a call. Amy has released 12 albums, most recentlyThe Toll which came out in September 2024. She’s an Americana songwriter and folk musician. One of her songs crowned the soundtrack to a film staring Frances McDormand!
When I was brainstorming musicians to talk to for this article, Amy was the first person I thought of. Her voice is soulful and a little haunting and I urge you to check out all of the songs she mentions in this interview and then just pick an album, press play, and let it roll.
She was kind enough to join me from her home in Austin, Texas (where she currently has new baby chicks who we did spend a full ten minutes talking about once the Q&A was over).
Read on for Amy’s wisdom, why to trust that a good idea won’t slip away, how to create while living with chronic illness, and so much more.
Tove Danovich: Just to get started, can I ask you to introduce yourself and talk about the work you do.
Amy Annelle: I am an original songwriter, musician, and performer. I have released 12 full length albums, started going back to 1999, I think, or 1998. And I've worked in Portland and Austin and New York and spent a lot of time living out of a van and just kind of offered myself up to the muse and the world to see kind what could come through me.
TD: I use the word “revision” to talk about writing but is there something that comes to mind for you when you’re wrestling with something?
AA: I never put a word to it. The revision process has been this very private secret room in my mind. When I'm working on something, there’s nothing I can do to stop the revision process. It just starts working itself through me and I can't really explain it. It's like my brain is trying different intervals and trying different phrasing and trying different words.
Depending on where I am in the songwriting process, there's a lot of different details that are coming into place. And some of it happens when I'm actually sitting down with a pen in my hand or a guitar in my hand. But a lot of it happens almost automatically in my spirit, you know, in my creative place. Once it's in there that's almost all I can think about.
“If I'm paying attention, there's a song in everything.”
-Amy Annelle
TD: Is that for a single song or is it sometimes a lot of things at once?
AA: It's often when I'm working on a single song that I have that singular focus.
TD: Can you tell me about a piece lately that wasn’t working or just wasn't hitting the way you wanted to and how you approached that?
AA: You know, I have things that pass through me that I let go. Woody Guthrie describes songwriting as sort of like reaching into the stream and catching a fish. Sometimes you can get the fish and you can take it out and look at it and it's real. Other times, you know, the song just barely brushes you and it's not ready to come out yet. So it just disappears down the stream.
I don't really mourn those. I think it's part of the creative process. There’s a lot of little ideas that I'll write down that I don't go back to. But once I start writing a song, I finish the song. And once I finish the song, I embrace the song. So it becomes part of my repertoire.
TD: How do you know when something is finished?
AA: Again, it's a gut feeling that I have worked over the piece in such a way that it's feeling natural to me. The little marks that have come up intuitively are being hit. And I just know because I get excited. That working-over period can be really obsessive and all consuming.
I wrote a song that's on album Pull Tabs and Broken Glass. It's the first song on the album. And it just started out with me picking up all the pull tabs and broken glass that get washed up in my backyard every time it rains. This place has a rough history. And the story of the house was asking to be told. It was like “pull tabs and broken glass scattered on the ground.” That was the first thing and then the whole song started kind of building itself, revealing itself to me. I think the last thing that I came up with was the first verse.
Songs don't necessarily happen in order. It's just, I think, an intuitive thing again as a songwriter to know, “oh, that's the second verse.” Like, the first verse has to accomplish this part of the storytelling process. So “this is more of a second verse” or “now we need a bridge and it's gonna have to say something totally different”.
I don’t know. I just love songwriting. I love that there's a huge mystery component about it. I've been doing it for a long time. So the surrender comes naturally.
TD: I always describe my writing as being like I have a puzzle where I don't know what it's going to look like, but I can tell these pieces fit together here. So I'm just going through everything I have and fitting the pieces. When it’s complete, it’s done and I can finally see what I’ve been making. But a lot of that does come with experience, of course.
I know it's hard to kind of think back so long ago in your career, but is there a way that it feels different when you know “this song works” or “this song's done now”, 12 albums and a very long career in versus when you were newer to songwriting?
AA: I think the songwriting process has evolved since I write out of myself, you know. I'm not like, “I'm writing a song about that couple that's looking each other a certain way across the bar,” I write from experience mostly. So as I have changed and grown as a person, my songs have as well. And I think I trust more what is gonna come out.
The first line in in “Pull Tabs and Broken Glass” is there's a song in near everything. That’s a little idea I've been playing with: everything sounds like a song, you know. If I'm paying attention, there's a song in everything.
And yet you can't control that process as much as you would like to. You can't always just sit down and have something wonderful come out of you. I think I've learned that process needs to rest sometimes as well and that there's no berating it or forcing it.
I trust my rhythms more as I've gotten older. I think songwriting was pretty terrifying at first and maybe involved a bit more…I don’t know if torture is the right word. [We both laugh here.] But when you first start out at anything, the self-criticism is pretty loud. But it's less of a battle now than it was when I started.
“You have to continue to create art, whether someone is noticing how brilliant it is or not. You're going to be making your song, your sound, your words, whether somebody notices it or not.”
-Amy Annelle
TD: You mentioned earlier that you don't feel bad kind of letting things go. Has there been anything where you're like, “I just wanted a song to come out of this so badly”?
AA: I have a song called “The Nightjar's Blues” that was on my album The Cimarron Banks. There was this little melody. [Amy sings]. It was so lonesome and winsome. I had that melody in my head probably for years. And then it became the loop that wrapped up that song.
If there's a depth to certain ideas, they don't go away. Eventually they will be able to express themselves in a piece. I just have to trust that process.
TD: I love that. The little melody sounds so much to me like a songbird melody. [ed note. Due to the limits of text, you can’t hear Amy sing during the Q&A but you can listen to the song the melody became part of!]
AA: That song’s partly about women creators and women being artists. The nightjar is the whippoorwill and it’s a song about how the bird actually says its own name. We named it a whippoorwill, but it was saying “whippoorwill” before we decided to call it a whippoorwill. It was just naturally expressing its inner song and its inner beauty.
I think it has to do with sometimes knowing that you have to continue to create art, whether someone is noticing how brilliant it is or not. You're going to be making your song, your sound, your words, whether somebody notices it or not.
TD: Oh, that's so beautiful. And, of course, I love a bird metaphor.
Can you talk about what's inspiring you lately in your work? Or where you turn for inspiration?
AA: I'm kind of going through a transition right now. I was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis just in September 2024. So that was a huge piece of information. The diagnosis came with a steady progressing of some symptoms that can be very debilitating. So I just naturally kind of gave myself time. Cause I've been on this chronic illness journey for a long time.
You know, I was already living with and trying to manage stage four endometriosis, which was debilitating in itself. And then to have to reframe my whole body with MS and to know that it was cooking along for decades before it got me here was…it was a lot. I had to get on a new IV treatment and see some specialists. And I gave myself time to take care of myself.
But what's inspiring to me right now is that I have the whole next album, the songs are already written. And one of the musicians—I play with brilliant musicians here in Austin—one of them is really wanting to work with me on the next album and do something different.
So I'm inspired by the opportunity to collaborate and dig into my songs in a whole new way. And to know that there's not a timeline on that because I have to really pace myself and work when I'm feeling up to it.
That's been a whole revision process of just being a lifetime, a life for a musician and not being able to hit all the marks that I see some of my peers being able to hit and knowing that that's not a reflection on how hard I've worked or the quality of the music that I've produced.
There are limitations to living with chronic illness. I've had to sort of adjust my expectations and know that my work is out there for people to hear. Even if I'm not doing a 30-day tour of the US or being asked to play big festivals or any of that stuff.
It's different living with a disability.
“If it's telling you that it's just not quite happening, it's okay to let it go because you have an unlimited supply of new ideas and inspiration.”
-Amy Annelle
TD: Definitely. I feel like I have struggled the most with the mismatch between my hopes and expectations for myself and what I'm actually able to do. Which is often out of my hands for whatever reason.
AA: And you’ve done some incredible things. Like you have a really beautiful career for someone looking from the outside.
TD: And you as well. 12 albums is so many. I think that’s amazing. I would love to have 12 books.
AA: And I don’t know if you’re aware but I had a song version of Townes van Zandt’s song “Buckskin Stallion Blues” that was in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. That was sort of a big deal that happened.
[Ed. note: The song plays over the final scene of the film, a crime drama about a mother (played by Frances McDormand) who puts up three billboards to call attention to her daughter’s unsolved assault and murder. The song is a perfect coda.]
TD: You never know when something like that is going to come along.
AA: And it happened at a very dark time for me and it was almost like Townes was like, “Down and out songwriter, you made this version of my song and it's good and here you go!”
TD: Yeah, you just have to keep putting good work out and hope the right people will come to it.
AA: Yeah.
TD: Do you have any advice with someone who is struggling with a revision?
AA: Don't beat it to death and trust your gut. If it's telling you that it's just not quite happening, it's okay to let it go because you have an unlimited supply of new ideas and inspiration.
So I would say don't get too attached to something. If it's not working, you'll make more.
Thank you so much to Amy for her time and music. You can visit her website, follow her on Instagram, and support her directly by listening to and buying her music on Bandcamp. Her music is also available to stream on Youtube, Spotify, and all other platforms.
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