Spotlight: With Dark Lyrics and Upbeat Sounds, Amber Run Showcases Raw Emotion
WELL-SEASONED IN THE ART OF CREATING EVOCATIVE MUSIC — Amber Run, consisting of Joe Keogh, Henry Wyeth and Tom Sperring, has a powerful ability to tell honest stories that resonate with their listeners. Often singing about difficult and personal subjects their music can be a great aid to people in times of need. “It’s a real kindness that you can help people when they need helping,” Keogh shared. Following the release of Philophobia in 2019, the band are ready to begin releasing new music again.
“52 Blue,” their first single since the release of their third album Philophobia, was debuted on May 14 this year and is part of the new music to be released over the coming year. The track is desperately lonely and cold with lyrics taking you on a journey of solemn introspection. The opening lyrics begin “Was I born just so I could die?” and goes on to ponder many different questions. “There is a clarity of thought in it, but it just kind of rambles in on itself a bit,” Keogh explained. Having been written and recorded during lockdown, the band are conscious that “52 Blue” has been subconsciously affected by their feelings during this past year. “You write what you feel and what you know,” Sperring said. Despite this, the band is trying to focus on other aspects of life and remind people there is still a world outside of COVID.
The base track of “52 Blue” consists of Keogh’s vocals and guitar input into one microphone. This was originally just to share the tempo and key, however the band fell in love with the bleakness of the sound. “Sometimes there’s an honesty there — there’s a rawness to it; you’re not overthinking it,” Keogh elaborated. “You haven’t had someone go, ‘Maybe try this.’” They produced “Amen” in a similar fashion, with only two takes to get the main track, and this filled it with the raw emotions of confusion, anger, and sadness after the loss of a loved one. Recording like this creates a very real and honest sound that the band embraces. “If there are warts in it and if there are issues in it, you can see them as beauty marks rather than scars,” Keogh said.
Conveying emotions and honesty through their beautiful use of harmonies throughout their music, Amber Run has always enjoyed using such harmonies. In their early material, they experimented by constructing them in different ways, such as in “I Found,” as they sang the individual notes of the chords — like in choral music — and this became inspiring to them. “I think the human voice is such a beautiful instrument, and you can definitely hear emotion on a piano, or on any instrument, but you can really hear it in the human voice,” Keogh said. “You can hear the vulnerability, you can hear the happiness — so why not take advantage of that.”
Along with “52 Blue,” the new music due later this year will encompass a specific tone that is very “of and in the moment,” Sperring explained. The band wants to explore themes that they are being felt in the present, rather than looking back on feelings of the past. “The coming-of-age story is incredibly well-documented, but it seems to always be when you are from the age of 16 to 21, or something — that sort of age — but we have found that our mid to late twenties have been a lot more character-defining,” Wyeth explained. They want to explore the feelings of not being centered and settled that so many their age feel, and in doing so, their new music has gained a very deep and stark sound. However, this is not a pattern their music always follows — sometimes the lyrics and instrumentation can be at quite different ends of an emotional spectrum.
For their second album, For A Moment, I Was Lost, the lyrics and instrumentation convey similar feelings. The writing of this album was a frustrating and dark time for the band, portrayed perfectly in the music. With dark, thoughtful buildups during the main parts of each song, you can truly feel the tension before a massive release of frustrated energy is heard at the end. However, when writing Philophobia, the music ended up with a juxtaposition of lyrics that were often dark alongside instrumentation that was upbeat, positive, and rocky. It wasn’t until Amber Run released an unplugged EP with songs from Philophobia that the emotions written about were truly realized; writing in this way is something the band enjoys doing.
When writing, Keogh often spends a long time engaging personally with a song. He has never seen writing music as a joyful place and uses it as a cathartic exercise. When he needs to sit and write he will be in a certain headspace, which is often not a happy one. Keogh, Wyeth, and Sperring do an excellent job of naturally building their instruments around the lyrics of the song, explaining, “we are all quite good at understanding each other’s creative impulses.” The band also records with a guitarist and drummer who brings their own sound and style. “We give an overarching view of what we want it to be, but they are the masters of their instruments,” Keogh explained.
Amber Run really comes into their element when performing live, putting on shows that take the audience on a journey of emotions, using their extensive catalogue of songs to captivate the audience and manipulate their emotions accordingly. They want highs and lows during their sets, so that “the bigger stuff sounds bigger if you have a point in the set where you take it down to bare bones.” This is an element that they learned from a young age, taking inspiration from their favorite bands that had an eb and flow to their sets. While playing live, it is evident that the band is invested in their work, and they connect emotionally with each song, this emotional investment then reciprocated by the crowd.
The band have a UK tour planned this summer to support the release of their new music.
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