INTERVIEWS PRINT

Interview: Anthony D’Amato on emerging from the ‘shipwreck’

Jake Craney
Latest posts by Jake Craney (see all)

Singer/Songwriter Anthony D’Amato recently released one of the best albums of 2014: The Shipwreck From The Shore. We caught up with D’Amato to discuss his background and learn more about the writing & recording of the album. Check out the interview below along with the song “Was A Time.”

 

How long have you been making music? Was there a specific moment when you realized/decided that this was what you wanted to pursue?

I started playing the piano before I even started going to school, so it’s hard for me to remember a time when making music wasn’t a part of my life. It probably wasn’t until high school that I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life. I’d always enjoyed playing songs, but that was when I started writing my own songs, which opened up whole new worlds to me.

 

One thing I love about The Shipwreck From The Shore is the mix of hardships/struggle and also uplifting/positivity in the album. What was your goal for the overall theme or message of the album?

To me, it’s an album about coming out the other side of a difficult time. You’re in a place of relative safety and security and can look back on what you’ve been through and evaluate it from a new perspective. That’s what the image of the album title means to me, this sense of having jumped off this burning ship and making it to the shore and looking back out to sea as the last of it goes under. Because you know you’re going to be okay at the point, you have an opportunity to see the good that’s come from the difficulty in a way that might not be so obvious when you’re in the thick of it.

 

You recorded and worked on this album with a pretty impressive supporting cast. Compared to your previous solo recordings, what do you think the biggest benefit to working with this team was?

Everybody who worked on this album came to it with their own lifetime of musical sensibilities. So while I heard songs certain ways in my head, Sam Kassirer (producer/keyboards) would sometimes listen to my demos and hear completely different arrangements in his head. I’ve always been the kind of person who would just start recording and see where it goes, but working with Sam, we spent so much time talking about what the songs could be before we played the first note. It was really eye opening to see just how many directions a single song could go in different people’s hands.

 

“Was A Time” is a perfect kick-start to get the album going. What inspired the song?

“Was A Time” was written almost as a note to myself about moving on, a reminder that things change and that’s the natural course of the world. Some of those changes are big and some are small but add up over time and some are completely out of your hands. But the part that’s always in your hands is how you grow and develop as a person as a result of those changes you encounter, and this song was meant to keep my eye on that fact.

 

There’s an endearing quality to “Hard To Say” that makes it one of my favorites. What is the story behind that song?

That’s a song about accepting the good with the bad. The last line, “If sorrow’s just the cost of joy / Well I guess I gotta flip that coin” is kind of the thesis statement there. If you want to open yourself up to happiness, you have to come to terms with the fact that you’re also making yourself vulnerable to sadness or hurt. And I think we’re richer as people for experiencing both sides of that coin than if we keep those parts of ourselves closed off and protected forever.

 

When did the song “Calico, Alone” come about in the writing process and why did you decide to close the album with it?

“Calico, Alone” has existed as a song for many years, but the lyrics continued to change and I was never quite satisfied with where it was at. When it was time to make the record, I didn’t even include it in the original set of demos I shared with Sam. But he pushed me to see if I was holding anything back and when I shared that one with him, he immediately said it needed to be on the record. I still didn’t really believe him until we’d finished recording and I heard it fully formed the way he heard it in his head. I finished my last re-write of the lyrics in the car with him on the way to the studio for the last session. I wanted the last song on the album to kind of drift off into the ether. There’s a lot of energy in the record and this just felt like the appropriate way to wind it back down peacefully.

 

I really enjoy the video for “Ludlow.” You combine the melancholy vibe of the song with some interesting & captivating visuals. Tell us a little bit about the idea and how the video came together.

Credit for the video has to go entirely to Adam Makarenko, who is a brilliant filmmaker from Canada. He reached out to me a while back and we’d been looking for a project to do together for a long time. The song for me is about unintended consequences, where things done with the best of intentions slip out of your hands and turn into something you’d never imagined. Adam wanted to visually represent order transforming into chaos, and I think he did a really beautiful job of it.

 

How did your time at Princeton impact/influence you from a musical perspective?

Princeton introduced me to the work of so many incredible writers and poets and taught me how to think really critically about what was special about them. I try to still write from a natural place, where I just document whatever comes out of me musically or lyrically at a particular moment. But when it comes time to edit, I really try to drill down into what I’m writing in a critical way with a lot of the tools I picked up there. I had access to so many brilliant writers on campus (Paul Muldoon, Greil Marcus, Daphne Brooks, John McPhee). Having them critique my songwriting and prose taught me so much.

 

What current musicians/bands are you impressed with? What have you been listening to lately?

My current favorite songwriters are folks like Joe Pug, Josh Ritter, Hozier, Strand of Oaks, St. Vincent, Justin Townes Earle, Typhoon, I could go on forever. I keep a running Spotify playlist of my favorite new songs every year, and if people want to keep up with 2014 they can find it here: Best of 2014 (So Far)

 

What are your plans for the rest of the year and early 2015?

I have a few shows left in NYC this month while I’m home, and then I head to Europe for a big tour later this month into the middle of December. I’ll come back and play a few shows in the US with Nicole Atkins and then it’s Christmas time and I’ll take a little break. I’m going to hit the road hard in 2015, so keep an eye out for announcements soon.

 

Anthony D’Amato – “Was A Time”

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