In the song “Gypsy,” from her new CD Time, Amanda Kate suggests she could be at home anywhere:
Can’t seem to land anywhere that I can call my home
Cuz I get the itch the move no matter where I go
Most of the time though, she feels right at home in Orange County in Southern California. She moved from California to New Mexico shortly after she was born, then moved back in high school. She married a native Californian, and they are raising their daughter there. The California she calls home isn’t the Hollywood version, though. She lives in an equestrian neighborhood where everyone has horses either in stables or their backyards.
She says, “My whole life consists of writing music, performing, riding horses, and then being a mom. Now my little one is almost three, so it feels like God gave me a little girl so I could have a riding partner for the rest of my life.”
It’s no surprise then that her favorite single on the Time album is “Healing When I Ride.” She says, “I never get sick of singing it and we’ve played it a lot. The keys feels good to sing; it just comes out. I connect with the lyrics of that song. They feel authentic for me. I love sharing the story of why I wrote it, and I think that comes across. When you’re singing something you believe in, people can tell.”
The video is particularly special to Amanda since it features some shots of the singer-songwriter riding horses with her mother Kathy Gipson, the song’s co-writer, whose battle with cancer ended in March.
Amanda considers her mother’s example and encouragement central to her career. One of Dean Martin’s original Golddiggers, Gipson started out performing with Martin and Bob Hope.
“Music had always been such a big part of our life together. She’s been a singer-songwriter my whole life,” says Amanda Kate. “When I started performing professionally at sixteen, she wrote music for me and instilled the idea that this was going to be my career.”
The two had been traveling and playing music together, and when her mother got sick, Amanda Kate says, “it made me realize this time with her wasn’t going to be as long as I had hoped. I wanted to have a compilation, essentially a body of work that we had done together.” She called the album Time because it represents a time capsule of their time together, and Gipson co-wrote the songs on the project.
Because of the personal nature of the material, the CD was made without a commercial goal. “I just meant it to be for me,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking it was going to go anywhere. I just wanted to have something special with her. Then as we started producing it and getting it ready, people wanted to hear more of it, and they wanted me to perform live.”
She says that as she started performing the songs in shows all over California, Texas, and then Nashville, “it took off and I feel like it was such a blessing that God just opened all these doors.” She believes that when people listen to the music on the CD in context, they’ll hear that personal note. The songs, she says, are deeper than most of the fun, upbeat songs today.
“A lot of these songs are deeper than most albums you hear these days; there are a lot of fun upbeat songs. On this album there are a lot of deep, very personal songs, and that was why. There a lot of stories and songs that meant a lot to me and to my mom.”
The singer-songwriter also credits her mother’s influence with a shift in her own professional goals.
“My mom used to tell me music needs to be about one soul at a time,” she says, noting that while she used to dream about fame and having her name in lights, but now she’s more interested in the integrity of the song and its ability to touch people.
It’s easy, she points out, to get caught up in how many followers or streams one has. Now, she says, success looks so different.
“She always wanted me to remember that when you write a song and put your music out there, if one person touches it and maybe that one person is me—maybe I wrote it just for me—that always needs to be enough,” Amanda says. “If you’re always chasing fame and this dream, you’re always going to be let down. I hope that I always can hold on to that and that my heart stays humble and content with whatever is happening in my life.”
The official video for “Healing When I Ride” is a meaningful entry in this musical time capsule. She had hoped to release the video while her mother was still living, but the pandemic coincided with her mother’s last days, so the time didn’t feel right.
She says she prefers recording in the studio to shooting a video—wearing her hair in a pony tail with jeans and t-shirt instead of hair and makeup artists and wardrobe—but she says, “it was really fun. Some good friends out of Denver came out to California and shot it with me.” She says she had a vision for how she wanted it to look and the story she wanted to tell.
“They let me run with it. I had an incredible director who was artistically figuring out the shots.” Even the horses, she says, were cooperative that day. Since her mother had just finished a chemo treatment, they seemed to sense they needed to be calm.
“It’s going to go down as the most special video or project that I’ve ever been involved with,” says Amanda Kate, “because every little thing about that day with my mom is just so vivid in my mind.”
“Since we’ve released it,” she says, “It’s really taken off, and it’s probably been my most successful single and video. I’m happy that I had to wait and that I was able to release it when I did. I’ve gotten messages from people from all over the world—rodeo people from Texas, Wyoming, and even Brazil—sending me either pictures of themselves with their ‘healing horse’ or ‘heart horse.’ It’s been so incredible to stay connected with people all over the world at this time, even though I’m not able to play live.”
Amanda Kate looks forward to playing live again with the Country Club Band, for which she is lead singer. Arnie Newman, the band’s guitar player, played on and co-produced the CD. He is her “mentor, producer, manager,” she says. Judd and Claire, a husband, and wife team that sometimes perform with her, sang background vocals on the album, recorded in Nashville. She was pleased to have had “the best of the best” studio musicians playing on the CD, but she looks forward to performing songs from the album live with the Country Club Band.
After playing 150 shows last years, and 175 shows the years before, she says it’s hard not to be able to do that. “I love to be on stage, I love to perform, and I also just got the most beautiful custom fringe diamond denim jacket. It’s the most beautiful thing. If Dolly Parton could see this, she would love it,” she says. “ I love getting ready, putting my stage self together and putting on a show. The minute that some of our local venues open and they’re willing to have us out, I’ll be there.”
“When I play live, I love meeting fans, being in front of people and getting to hear their stories and take pictures with them. It’s been challenging not being able to do that.” She still considers technology a blessing, especially during the publicity team with making connections with the different markets, executing that side of the business perfectly.
She also looks forward to getting back to Nashville more often. She likes to get there several times a year for meetings, writing, and staying connected with the Music City music scene.
During the quarantine, she’s getting together with the band to practice and to live stream. They also plan to record shows for YouTube. They are distancing when they meet in a warehouse in a friend’s back yard, but it looks different, she says, with half the band wearing masks and her singing, sometimes in another room.
She is spending time songwriting, too, including some Skype writing, which she says has worked surprisingly well. She started writing songs seriously when she was sixteen.
“My mom was an incredible songwriter, so I was a bit spoiled Most of my life, she wrote a lot of the songs for me but when was 16 or 17, I realized that I had different things that I wanted to say,” Amanda says. While her mother was always supportive, calling every song she wrote a hit, she admits that it’s harder work for her than for some songwriters she knows.
“I know so many incredible songwriters and songs just flow through them as if they’re sent from above and they’re the messenger. It just comes out. I have to work at it a little more, depending on the inspirations,” she says. Lately though, because of her heightened emotions after losing her mother, she finds songs have been coming faster and at different times.
She also enjoys co-writing, usually handing off playing guitar to her writing partner. Sometimes when she has a title, they can go with the vibe. Other times, when she is stuck, her writing partners can help when she gets stuck. Such was the case when she was writing a song for her upcoming album for her daughter called “Little Girl.”
“I already had most of it written, but I was just stuck. It wasn’t finished, so I went to a really good friend of mine Eli Rhodes and his wife Amy. I played it for them and they said, ‘We’ve got it. We know how to help you finish it.’ And they did. Gosh, they finished a bridge and that last verse in minutes,” says Amanda.
While she considers herself more a performing artist than songwriter, she set a goal to do more songwriting in 2020, and she wants to co-write more with Nashville songwriters.
As she begins looking toward her next album release, she wants to write more upbeat songs. She released Timeas an album, which, she says, “is unheard of in this day and age. Everybody does singles but for that album, I couldn’t release only the singles. I wanted people to be able to listen to it from top to bottom.”
She says loves listening to albums in order and hearing the stories behind them, citing Miranda Lambert’s last few albums. “In this market, you’ve got to go with what the industry is doing, and they’re all doing singles, so I’m going to jump on the bandwagon. If I was Blake Shelton, maybe I would release an album, but since I’m not, I need to release singles now and gain followers and fans—and see what happens.”
She’s spending some time now listening to other artists, old favorites and new discoveries. She recognizes the artists who have influenced her and seems comfortable in the niche she’s carved out for herself. She says she been asked if she considered herself indie country or Americana, but she says she simply considers her sound “country country.”
“No matter what recording I ever do, I say it has to have a pedal steel and it has to have a fiddle, and if its dripping with both of those, it’s country. I definitely feel I’m a traditional country artist, and I love that sound.” And she believes there is still a market for that traditional sound. She’s hearing from more young people, in fact, who are loving that sound. She hopes her little girl will part of the next generation that grows up still listening to that traditional sound.” Amanda Kate has started her daughter off right, recording “Gypsy” in the studio with her little girl on her hip.