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Canada's new singing sensation is Amanda Marshall. She started singing professionally when she was 17. She made her first record, "Amanda Marshall", when she was 19. Then came "Tuesday's Child", three years later. Now Amanda has made her third album, "Everybody's Got A Story". This record is about society, but also about Amanda's life. Each song tells a small part of her story. Spot on spoke to the 27-year-old pop star from Toronto in an exclusive interview.
You're from Toronto. What's it like there?
It’s a great city for art, music and dance. There’s a real artistic community ... I always say that ... Toronto's sort of like New York run by the Swiss ... It’s very clean but it’s very cosmopolitan and very big and very busy. But it’s very well run and very ordered and very clean and very safe.
Did you study music?
I started studying when I was four at the Royal conservatory in Toronto. But I left when I was 16. It was classical training, and I wanted to play what was on the radio. I'd be a better musician if I had stayed. But singing was never a problem. It was natural, like breathing.
Your mother's black and your father's white. How did they deal with that?
My parents always were very careful to instill in me that the thing that made me different made me beautiful or made me ... exotic. .... All my friends, when I was a kid, had ... beautiful straight ... perfect straight hair, and I had this ... weird curly ... huge hair. And I loved it because my parents told me, that's cool... You know, your hair is cool, and that makes you cool. So I thought, I’m cool.
Is racism a problem in Canada?
Canadians have managed to create a really diverse and integrated society with a lot of different people from a lot of different countries who all live together peacefully ... There's racism wherever you go ... But I have to say that Canada is really ... a very well integrated society.
Do you write about this on your new album?
"Double Agent" is a song that is probably the most directly autobiographical ... It’s a song about me and the fact that ... I'm the product of an interracial marriage ... People think I’m white because I look very white. I’m blond, have blue eyes and light skin. ... If I didn’t talk about it no one would ever really ask about it probably ... The things that make us unique and the things that make us individuals are not ... on the outside, they're not ... things that you can see.
Interview: Angie Black