Marshall stops her wailing, starts over and finds a
happy medium
By Norman Provencher, The Ottawa Citizen, November 25th 1995
She's in full rock-star mode, head-to-toe black leather, purple-nailed fingers ineffectually pawing at bushy hair
which obviously has a mind of its own, and Amanda Marshall's drawing severely worried glances from the matrons heading to tea at the Chateau Laurier.
Marshall -- rocketing through town doing the radio/record store thing to promote her
we-thought-it-would-never-come self-titled debut album -- is used to standing out in a crowd, and hardly notices the looks. She's busy describing how the album was possible only because she was first able to kiss off every singer's dream -- a multi-million dollar recording contract on a major label.
"I was only 19 years old (when she signed the deal with U.S.-based Sony Music) and I knew the situation wasn't
right,'' she says, full of certainty now she's reached all of 23 years.
"I decided I could take some time to figure things out. I mean, you look at it (and she starts laughing) and I said to myself, `If this is the only thing you're going to achieve in life, it's a pretty sad story.' ''
A strange attitude, you might be saying to yourself, for someone neck deep in a world filled with paranoia,
backstabbing and grab-it-while-you-can. Well, yeah, Marshall's kind of a refreshingly strange person.
Popular music is a world of buzz and rumor, and nobody's whacked the old buzzmeter harder in recent years than Amanda Marshall.
Briefly, for those of you just coming in, the Amanda Marshall saga begins in the late '80s when Marshall, then a
high school student, was "discovered'' by guitarist Jeff Healey on an open stage night at a Toronto tavern. She was the prototypical blues-rock powerhouse singer, a wailer with a frantic stage routine who specialized in covers of unlikely songs. For example, there's a cult in Toronto that worships her hair-raising treatment of Eleanor Rigby.
It was only a matter of time before some wag described her as the long-lost love child of Janis Joplin and Joe
Cocker. Imagine trying to live up to that. Marshall -- who's actually the only love child of Doug and Gencie
Marshall -- decided she didn't even want to try.
"It might sound arrogant, but I just didn't feel right about the stuff I was doing and I knew I should be doing
something else, even if I didn't know exactly what it was,'' she says. "Maybe it's because I'm an only child and my mom and dad always, always told me I could do anything, be anything. I just have a lot of confidence in my ability.''
So she and her old label agreed to call it a day and she set out to figure out where she was going.
"I'd reached the point where I could pretty well work as much as I wanted . . . doing the same bunch of covers. It
was a comfort level that wasn't leading anywhere (and) I just wanted to get away from the gig-to-gig frenzy.''
The first step was to get away from all the buzz and find some place where no one knew her. You can't get more
anonymous than New York, she figured.
"Everything sounds corny, I guess, but I really wanted to get on my own two feet, on my own, away from where
everybody knew me.''
The process of discovery was a bit confusing. She wasn't into the pop diva scene ("I'm way too opinionated to put up with that. Sorry.''), nor was she much impressed with whatever the alternative scene offered.
The new album -- which is on the top-priority shelf for her "new'' label Sony Music Canada -- shows she was able to set up camp on the ground between those two poles. The material ranges from the wailing of the first single, Let It Rain, to the poignant woman-saves-herself song Birmingham, to Marshall's own song Sitting on Top of the World. It's one of those grow-on-you albums, especially for people who remember the old Amanda, roaring along, barely in control. The power's still there, she just pays more attention to phrasing and nuance.
"I'm young and this is my first record and I'm going to have to keep growing. But I think I'm confident enough to
be able to recognize what's good for me.''
As for fame and fortune and rock-starness, Marshall's already recognized one benefit.
"One of the good things is that I'm not a buzz anymore. I'm a real person.''