For British singer Ama Lou, this strange period of on-again, off-again revolving Pandemic isolation has led to a dogmatic work schedule and what she describes as prolific musical output. “I wake up early every day, go to the back room in my home, study boards on the wall where I’ve pinned ideas for songs, and listen to music and audiobooks,” the 22-year-old songwriter explained in a recent interview.
But it all started for the Brit Soul Ptodigy when she was just an 11-year-old girl sat at a kitchen table in north London playing guitar with her father. It was 2009. The Miley Cyrus starring Hannah Montana movie had just come out that April and Ama was obsessed with it. Well, that and Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad. And Destiny’s Child. She was learning how to play their songs, singing and strumming along, so when she sang the heartfelt ballad called “You Ran Away” her dad asked: ‘Oh, that’s the new Rihanna song, right?’.
“I was like: ‘No, I just made it up’,” stated Ama, laughing, while mocking her dad’s stunned disbelief. “He was like: ‘What do you mean you just made it up? You’ve just been singing it for a minute!’ I was like: ‘I don’t know, I just made it up! It just came from somewhere!’ He ran and grabbed me a piece of paper and he was like: ‘Write it down, write it down.’ So I did that and then just, honestly, never stopped.”
Lou describes it as a life-changing moment. And lthough she wouldn’t be diagnosed for another five years, Ama was growing up with dyslexia and it was beginning to cause her trouble at school. Reading didn’t come easily, but songwriting was something else. “I felt like: ‘Oh my god, this is so natural,” she says. “I didn’t have to try at all, so I gravitated to it. I would run home every day to write songs in the kitchen.”
Lou has stated she is a classically trained singer, and has expert control of her voice. “I use it as a muscle,” she explains. She previously supported her diaphragm by running 20 miles a week, but during the pandemic, she’s taken to bouncing on a mini trampoline to break a sweat. She’s also rekindled her childhood love of riding—trekking to the Santa Monica mountains twice a week to exercise horses for a friend.
A couple of months earlier, during her first trip to Los Angeles in April 2017, she’d been introduced to Che Pope. A legendary producer who’s worked on everything from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to Kanye’s “Bound 2”, he and Ama immediately saw something in each other.
At the time Pope was the president of Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music and he simply didn’t have the time to produce her himself. However, in something of a recurring theme in Ama’s life, what could have been a setback for someone else turned, in her hands, into an opportunity to develop. “I had written these songs, the three DDD songs, and I took them to him and was like: ‘Yo, I need you to help me make these’,” she says. “He was too busy to sit down with me, but he gave me the resources to create my sound myself. He never told me I couldn’t do it. He’d go: ‘Here’s a session musician. I’ve got a meeting, I’ll see you in four hours!’”
He’s been my mentor and a big player in my game. He’s a good dude.”
