Call back dust-covered sun washy wood bars in towns that saw best days but hold a stronger character from the aged grandeur.-Gordon Bell, Splitting Tracks

10 MP3 Songs
Sway Americana, Sway Roots Rock

Still Life Songs


Details:
Amee Chapman has spent her life in Northern California, the daughter of prison workers. Having picked up her first guitar during the 5th grade, Amee found herself falling in to the rhythms of a musician's life easily and early. Over the course of the next 20 years, she would find herself taking up home on a fishing boat in Moss Landing, in a double wide on a pumpkin patch and on the isolated ridge of a goat farm.

With a voice that conveys both the brutal honesty of a changing California and the tender footed sweetness of its past, Amee Chapman maintains a meandering love affair with the roots of American music and with the oft times bitter realities of rural soul. Influenced by the likes of Lucinda Williams, Esther Phillips, and Jeff Tweedy, her singing, songwriting and guitar playing reflect the images of the average and eccentric: lonesome highway phone booths, sea faring whiskey rebels, city wise angeled outlaws and suicidal tattooed cowboys, all of them pent up together on a stretch of land between the past and the present.

Amee has spent the years pedaling her musical wares in front of the audiences of former Be Good Tanya, Jolie Holland as well as Michelle Malone, Caroline Aiken, Kristen Hall and Vonda Shepard. She was chosen as a finalist in the '98 Lilith Fair competition, in the '98 Sierra Songwriters Festival and as a showcase at the 2001and 2003 Nashville New Music Conferences. Currently, Amee performs up and down the West Coast, at clubs in L.A.(Tangiers, Hotel Café), San Francisco (Café Du Nord, Starry Plough, Make Out Room, Hemlock's) Sacramento (Blue Lamp, Fox and Goose) and on the Coast (Henflings, & Kuumbwa in Santa Cruz, SLO Brewing Co.).

Attracted to the aliveness of vinyl and analog, Amee chose to record her 3rd release, Still Life, which was released late October 2004, with producer and engineer Desmond Shea (Chuck Prophet, Kelley Stoltz, Court and Spark, Virgil Shaw) of San Francisco. Collaborating with co-writer Nichole Robbins, the album is a collection of stories, of people met and conversations overheard, of melancholy and tenderness. The album features backing vocals by Jolie Holland and is supported by a San Francisco All Star band of John Hofer (Mother Hips, Persephonees Bees), Marc Capelle (American Music Club, Virgil Shaw), Rob Douglas (Chuck Prophet), Tony Mattioli (Stolen Bibles) and Jeffery Luck Lucas (Galveston).