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On the second stop of her tour, singer-songwriter Amanda Marshall had a pre-concert meet-and-greet with fans.
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It was in Montreal, but Marshall said few of the participants seemed to be from Quebec.
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“In the space of 15 minutes, there was a mother and daughter who flew in from Utah,” says Marshall in an interview with Postmedia. “A woman came in from Brazil. A guy came in from California. Another guy was in from France. It was the most ridiculously diverse group of people. We were in Quebec and I think out of 10 people maybe four of them were from Quebec… I keep saying this, but it’s really true, I came into this with no expectations. I had zero expectations.”
At the time of this interview, Marshall was only two shows into the tour, which is in support of this year’s record Heavy Lifting. It swings into Calgary’s Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on June 30. It’s her first album and tour since exiting the spotlight in 2001 and the early meet-and-greets are a testament to both the devotion of her geographically far-flung fans and proof that her 20-plus years away from recording and touring has made many a heart grow fonder.
By now, Marshall’s disappearance from the spotlight is old news but an unavoidable topic as she embarks on a cross-country tour. Few Canadian artists disappeared so completely from the music scene as she did two decades ago. Marshall made a few appearances over the years, but fans had a difficult time getting updates. In 2019, she briefly emerged for a “big summer tour of two shows,” including a stop at Oxford Stomp during the Calgary Stampede to open for Bryan Adams. At the time, she had no website and no presence at all on social media.
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It turns out the exile, while self-imposed, was in response to a lengthy legal battle with her long-term manager. Her attempts to sever ties led to the dispute, which put a long hold on any new material. As for live performances, Marshall performed once in 2010 and did a few shows in 2017 before the two dates in 2019.
But she had been prepping a new album, off and on, for 15 years. She held it back in part because she feared it would be ensnared by the legal dispute. But it also gave her plenty of time to tinker with the sounds and write new songs. By 2017, she became more focused on recording.
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“I really just wanted to make an album I loved, something that I was truly happy with,” she says. “Because I kind of, on some level, knew I might never get this chance again. Once you open that door, once you let people hear it, it doesn’t really belong to you anymore. So I wanted to make sure it was something I loved. But with the reception of the project, not just the record but the tour and the media appearances I’m making, I’m overwhelmed. I’m shocked. The emails, the letters, the text messages: It’s ridiculous. I keep saying it’s kind of like slipping back into a warm bath and you’re shocked that the water is still warm.”
Heavy Lifting doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does have a bit of a different tone than previous work. With her powerful, smoky vocals, Marshall is still capable of belting out blues-rock anthems with confidence and polish. But she did want the music to reflect where she is now in her life.
Marshall was a teenager when she began turning heads as a precocious blues singer on Toronto’s Queen Street scene in the late 1980s. She was taken under the wing of the late Jeff Healey and became a Canadian superstar by the age of 23 when she released her self-titled 1995 debut. That album included hits such as Birmingham and Sitting on Top of the World and kicked off a six-year period involving A-list producers, world tours and millions of albums sold. Her follow-up, 1999’s Tuesday’s Child was produced with Don Was and had co-writes with Carole King. Her third record, 2001’s Everybody’s Got a Story, was co-produced by Peter Asher.
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She was in a store a few years back when she had an epiphany about the new tone she wanted for the album. It was after hearing the track I Hope She Cheats, a song written and performed by Marsha Ambrosius, a U.K. artist who performed in the R&B duo Floetry.
“It was so clever and so funny and there was such a vibrant swagger to the writing and I love it and it changed my perception of my own record and I wanted to imbue the rest of the record with that tone: that clever humour, really sarcastic and funny,” Marshall says. “I really dug it. So I went home that night and I wrote the arrangement that appears on my record, which is quite different than her original arrangement.”
It’s the only cover on Heavy Lifting, which Marshall also produced, and is the opening track on the record. Marshall originals, including the soulful Dawgcatcher and funky I’m Not Drunk display a similar irreverence.
There are also darker moments. On Special, Marshall sings about a young girl being tempted and propositioned by an older man with promises of making her famous and getting her song “on the radio.” Given that Marshall entered the business at such a young age, the song could be interpreted as at least semi-autobiographical. But Marshall said it was inspired by a much more chilling story from her childhood in Toronto about a school-aged athlete being lured to her death by a man pretending to be a photographer and promising to get her into the paper.
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“That really stuck with me, because I was at an age where that stuff has an influence on your brain,” she says. “As I got into the entertainment business, there were the obvious parallels between that localized tragedy and then the broader, more amorphous tragedy that strikes all the time. Girls get lured into porn and all kinds of stuff. The overriding theme is ‘I can do this for you if you do this for me.’ Is there any phrase in the English language more tempting than ‘You are so special … ‘”
Special and the other 10 songs on Heavy Lifting are currently being road-tested on the tour. Marshall and her band did not play any of the new material during the 2017 and 2019 shows. She says fans are already singing along to the new tracks. As for the future, does Marshall have any long-term career plans?
“My agent is going to hate this: No,” she says. “I’m every agent’s dream. I’m one of those people, my agent calls and says I have work and I’m like ‘Argh, work … really?’ This thing is, it’s a joke. I love the work and I love doing the job. But, no, I don’t really have a plan. The immediate plan right now is that we’re going to finish the tour. Currently, we are looking at other markets overseas, and that’s really exciting. It’s funny, we’ve done two shows and it feels like we’ve been on the road forever. It’s weird to get right back into it and your comfort level goes up immediately.”
Amanda Marshall plays the Jubilee Auditorium on June 30.
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