East Nashville’s Amelia White knows all too well that the road is a harsh mistress. “Sleeplessness and miles pile on the soul. It can bring you down, or it can bring you ’round,” she sings on “Rainbow Over the East-Side”, a track from her dark, moody new record, Home Sweet Hotel. Like most singer-songwriters, Amelia travels to scratch out a living. Sadly, the endless parade of coffee houses, bars, and house concerts tend to overshadow any attempts to have a life at home with somebody you love. That tension is at the heart of her new record, produced by Marco Giovino (Band of Joy, Buddy Miller).
Born in Virginia and bred in Boston, Amelia graduated from staging plays in her back yard to writing songs as soon as she acquired an acoustic guitar. The writing came quickly and hasn’t stopped since. She came up through the ranks of Boston’s highly competitive coffeehouse scene. Things reached a point when she sought a more conventional job and life, so she moved to Seattle. A few gigs later, she had a production deal to make a record, and a couple of years after that, she made the move to Nashville. Amelia recently signed a publishing/TV/film sync deal with the upstart Nashville company American Echo Records.
Home Sweet Hotel comes on the heels of a string of well-regarded releases and song features in television shows like Justified and Summerland. According to journalist and Music City Roots host Craig Havighurst, Amelia comes from “that classic place between singer/songwriter, jangle pop and country that come from the beating heart of the Americana format. Her voice is plaintive and real, and her songs each have some fascinating crystalline shape that invites close attention and touch.” Like a road stop in the Midwest somewhere, Home Sweet Hotel uses acoustic and electric guitars, sometimes soft and delicate, others rocking and loud that works to highlight Amelia’s voice and its quiet urgency.
“I started writing ‘Home Sweet Hotel’ in a Days Inn in Allentown, PA.” she says, “I was thinking about how many people who don’t do music are intrigued with the touring lifestyle of a musician. The road holds temptation and adventure and heartache all in one suitcase. It can be glamorous one day and down-right humiliating the next.” Amelia goes on to say, “This new record, in a lot of ways, it’s about love. There are definitely a lot of songs about living your life away from home, and then you come back to your family. It’s almost equally split between aspects of beauty in the hard weird life on the road, and how good it is to come home to your lover feeling like you’ve accomplished something.”
Home Sweet Hotel opens with ‘Dangerous Angel’, a track filled with a subtle but undeniable sensual tension. It’s a darker track that finds the narrator haunted and tortured by an unknown entity. “Dangerous Angel” is one of the standouts on this record. The title track is a bluesy roots number that explores the hardships and loneliness that comes with being on the road for a living. “Home Sweet Hotel” finds the narrator coping with being away from home, missing her loved ones and missing out on all the little every day things that go on back home, while she’s away. “Dogs Bark” is a bluesy sardonic punch at people who gossip/talk too much about other people, while “Rainbow Over The East-Side” is a defiantly optimistic salute to her adopted home town of East Nashville.
Home Sweet Hotel closes with the slow, thought-provoking “Six Feet Down”, a track that creatively addresses the old saying “you can’t take it with you when you go (pass on)”. “Six Feet Down” tells the listener that “all we really have is what we leave behind”, ultimately, that’s our legacy. It’s an excellent way to close out a dark, moody, thought-provoking record. At a time when a good number of artists are trying to record upbeat, happy, fun music in the hopes of getting radio play, Amelia goes the opposite direction with this record. Instead, she gives the listener their money’s worth, offering intelligent, creative songs that will make the listener stop and meditate on their meanings and messages. I’d recommend this record to anyone looking for good music with a raw, dark mood.
Originally posted here.
