Amanda Marshall talks about new album

By KAREN BLISS -- Jam! Music

 Canadian throaty-pop vocalist Amanda Marshall was always a great interpreter, capable of delivering a Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix song as if the two legends wrote them for her. It was commonly said she could sing a phone book to life. But for the Don Was-produced Tuesday's Child (due May 25), her second Sony album, she sings her own lyrics to life. 

"There are a lot of singers whose strength lies in their ability to project themselves, their voices, into a character," says the 26-year-old Marshall. "I've never really been tremendously good at that. I've always tried to seek out material that was reflective of me. I've always found that I'm better when I believe it." 

Now she does -- because she co-wrote 12 of the new album's 13 cuts, mostly with former Hooters singer Eric Bazilian. "A lot of the things that I had previously passed off, that I thought I couldn't do, writing, expressing myself well and being reasonably articulate in a musical forum, just turned out to be things I hadn't gotten to yet," Marshall explains of her commitment to writing a whole album. 

She calls the songs that poured out "happy accidents". And she's had a couple of those before. On her self-titled 1996 debut -- which sold 2 million copies worldwide -- she co-wrote "Dark Horse" and "Let's Get Lost", and wrote "Sitting On Top Of The World" by herself in 10 minutes. Still, she was never presumptuous enough to think of herself as a songwriter. 

While touring the album, she says she did notice those songs elicit the strongest audience response "which made me think that people were connecting with me outside of my role as just a performer. It made me want to find out what would happen if I set my mind to it and really sat down and tried to write songs." 

What happened was a song about her interracial upbringing, "Shades Of Grey" (undoubtedly the album's best track), the sarcastic "Best Of Me" about how the closest relationships often get short-changed; and "Give Up Giving In", what she calls a "memory song" about quick hellos and goodbyes. 

"I seem to have reasonably good antennae when it comes to detecting, for lack of a better word, 'crap'," she laughs. "When you can sing well, you have to be careful about the material that you choose, whether I've written it or not, because it's almost like putting a really nice coat of paint on a really beat up old car. It may look really nice, but eventually it's going to break down on the highway and the rust is going to show through. 

"I wanted to be very careful with this record because it became very obvious early on that I wasn't just writing a couple of album tracks, that we were actually creating a body of work and I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a bunch of pretty words strung together." 

"I don't think this record is a huge musical departure from the last record and it's not a real stylistic left turn," Marshall adds, "but I do think, just by virtue of the fact that I was so much more closely involved in the actual making of the record than I ever anticipated, that it's a slightly more personal record and a slightly less anonymous record."