Half way through my interview with Ama Lou she tells me that my name doesn’t suit me. ‘You need something softer and more complicated than Shannon,’ she says. ‘You could keep the Sh though, that feels right... Maybe Shay? That’s it, I’m going to call you Shay.’
It isn’t the first time our conversation has taken a slightly unconventional turn. After the hour we spend together, I am left with a strong sense how uniquely the 25-year-old musician sees the world. Not only does she question everything, she visualises sounds as well as hearing them. ‘There’s always a colour or a picture in my mind,’ she explains. ‘People tell me it’s a form of synaesthesia but I’ve never looked into it. I’m a very sensitive person.’
We meet in a cafe in Stoke Newington, north London, a stone's throw away from where Lou grew up and still lives, although she splits her time between London and LA. The daughter of an English make-up artist mother and a Guyanese guitar-playing father, she comes from a household where creative endeavours were always encouraged. ‘I had a family that always had their thing’ she says. ‘My dad is very academic, my sister was always into computers and cameras.’
When she was 12, her music teacher at school was struck by Lou’s voice and encouraged her to take singing lessons. She did, while also picking up her dad’s old guitar to write songs. He was so impressed he mistook one of her early experiments for a new Rihanna release. Songwriting was clearly her 'thing'.
‘It came so easy to me, so I never stopped doing it and my parents gave me the space to jam,’ she says. She put out DDD, her first EP, in 2018. It was a melting pot of introspective soul and sugary R&B. She released it with a 13-minute video directed by her sister, Mahalia, in which Lou fronts an LA crime ring. A musician’s musician, this first release landed her a shout-out from Drake and a support slot on Jorja Smith’s tour.
In the years that followed, she has continued to release EPs featuring music that encompasses everything from the club-ready track 'Same Old Ways' to the beautifully raw ballad 'Far Out'. Her most recent single, 'Caught Me Running', is a sultry ode to a difficult relationship and the first from her debut album, I Came Home Late.
It’s about ‘a past situation’, she says of the song. ‘I use music to say things that I don't think other people realise about themselves. Even if a person is really horrible. It's [thinking about] that inner child. The chorus is, "You're sad and you don't see. Go somewhere where you can let it out."’ I ask if the ‘past situation’ has heard it? ‘No,’ she says, resolutely. ‘It’s not for them anymore.’
Her album has been in the works for several years. While it’s ambitious in the genres it spans, at its heart it feels like a return to Ama Lou, the songwriter. She agrees: ‘I think before, I’ve been playing and experimenting. I wanted to do this thing or write over that beat. Now I’ve stepped fully-formed into Ama Lou,’ she says.
When she thinks about the album, she imagines it as a universe: each song is its own standalone planet, while being intricately connected to the galaxy. In 'Patience', she channels the grunge bands that soundtracked her teenage years to vent her anger. The same sense of frustration takes a different, softer form in the title track .
Singer and songwriter aren’t the only strings to Lou’s bow. A glance at any of her music videos reveals her deep and eclectic love of fashion. ‘I usually buy secondhand,' she says. 'There are so many clothes on this earth and it diminishes the likeliness that someone else will have it. It means more to me, because I know that it's survived this much time.’
She has perfected ‘the hunt’: her search for archival designer pieces. ‘I think a lot about the history that’s attached to clothes. I wonder about what Miuccia Prada was thinking about in 2001. You know what I mean? Then I see her at the Miu Miu show and I’m like, "Miuccia I love you!"’
For her latest video, she turned her hand to designing, buying white cashmere and commissioning an LA tailor to turn it into a three piece suit. ‘He makes a lot of old actors' suits - he had all these pictures of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on the walls!’ she says. And when I watch the 'Caught Me Running' video it is like being on a different planet for a moment: a world full of white suits, Dalmations and doll houses. After spending time with Lou, I’m not sure I want to come back down to Earth.
'I Came Home Late' is out Sep 1.
This article originally appeared in the October issue of ELLE.
