Amelia Shadbolt

Interview 2012.

What’s your deal? What’s my deal. Ha. I play ukulele, and write songs… yea. And some other stuff, but mainly ukulele because it’s more fun. 

Yea it looks pretty fun. What other stuff? I play the guitar, and keyboards, or keyboard like things. Oooo...

Yum, thank you. This looks exciting, I should let other people order my drinks more often.

Yea, it might taste like alcohol but I’m not very good at tasting alcohol so sorry if it’s yuck. No no, it totally works.

Ah that’s good, it’s just whiskey. This is how you get the scoops, ginger ale and whiskey.

Usually it’s better when they put in some lime, somehow the citrus eliminates any potential yuckness. Ha yea that works with sangria as well. Limes are the magic ingredient. Not too many limes though, I’ve made some very bad batches. Actually apples, apples were the worst, apples fucked everything up. Yea, if you’re making sangria.

I’ll remember that. I don’t usually go far off my beer whiskey combo though. Soguitar, ukulele… Oh I’ve just started playing the djembe, like the African drum, which is really fun.

True, you’re quite in the loop with MUG and MAD and all that? Jennifer Moss, the magic woman who makes music happen. 

She’s a ninja huh. She is a total musical ninja, that’s how I would describe her. Like I just helped her out on Saturday, she did a vocal workshop, which was cool.

Right, she does the community choir too yea? Yep. Everything. 

So you’re in all those groups? I am now yea. I only just started the drumming one. But yea. She’s a very cool lady to hang out with.

So where are you taking this ukulele song writing extravaganza? Um, I don’t know. I just keep writing songs and trying to get better at writing songs. And then I don’t know, that’s it really, until I get better at it. Then one day maybe make like a fully fleshed out album, that would be cool.

Why don’t you do that now? Seems like you’ve got lots of material. Yea I have lots of songs but I’m sort of not… you’re never happy with your own songs I don’t think. Like there’s always something that you think you could do better, but I just don’t think I feel like I have the cohesive group of songs that I want. But then I might never feel that, I might just have to start and see what happens.

I’ve never felt that, however that may be because they’re not good yet. No I like them, I’ve been listening to your little memos. True story.

Haha oh poor me. Haha yea I love the title by the way. I was like damn memos is taken now. I cant use that.

You can have it. We’ll make it a Palmerston North series, like the Poor Me Memos then I don’t know. Then we could get other local sad female singer songwriters to do there own whatever memos.

I only called it that to be honest because that’s what my iPhone calls voice memos, like the one we’re making right now, so it wasn’t me being clever, it was me being lazy. Nah sounds good I like it.

Thanks man. Outside of music shit do you have anything else going on? I don’t think so. Not really. That seems to be all I do. Music. I try and write, I try and… I’m probably going to do this more because I’m going to university this year, I try and keep the writing ball rolling with poems and short stories and stuff. But it takes a lot of discipline I find, but writing a song, you can do it in fits and starts and you can sometimes write a whole song in one go, where as if you do something any bigger than a poem, to me you actually have to sit down, and think about it, give it some serious thought. Where as writing songs is a lot more fun and spontaneous. 

So is writing what you’re doing at university? Kind of, I’m doing communications. I’m not really sure what it is, but the major I’m potentially going to have is expressive arts. Which I thought sounded fun, it sounds really flaky and really me. So I was like sweet, expressive arts. That sounds totally not useful and like it wont get me a job anywhere, therefore I will love it. So. I wish I loved engineering but I don’t. 

Engineering? Yea something like that, where you know, you do the degree then get a job. Plus there’s heaps of scholarships for chicks wanting to be engineers. Where as chicks wanting to go do a BA, or a comms degree, its like ‘no you’re not special, you don’t get money’.

You are special. Yea we’re all special, individual snow flakes but…. There’s only so much money to go around so…

So, technical stuff, what type of ukulele do you play? Are the people who are super wanky about it like they are with guitars? Oh yea, absolutely. The thing is a lot of people start with like a forty-dollar ukulele, and I have one of those, they’re perfectly fine to be honest. There’s really nothing wrong with it. You do have to replace the strings, like you know when people buy guitars they say ‘oh get the factory strings off it, get some decent ones on there’, that’s like super true for ukuleles, because they sound like shit if you don’t have decent strings. Which usually costs as much as the ukulele. 

True, forty bucks. Yea, like they’re coming down now. It’s real mean, because so many people play them you can get really decent ones, so I’ve got three, I’ve got my forty dollar one which is like covered in nail polish and super sentimental, love it, but don’t really use it for anything except parties because it doesn’t matter if it gets beat up. And then the next one I got, it’s a Lanikai, and its, there’s three different sizes, the first ones your soprano, that’s the basic, and then I’ve got the tenor size, which is the biggest you can get without changing the tuning. And that one is electrified, so I use that for gigs, it’s my workhorse. Yea, and my favourite one is, it’s a resonator ukulele, its concert size so it’s in-between, and its got a metal cone in it, so it sounds a little bit like a banjo, like just a little bit. Yea.

So it’s twangy? Yea it’s a bit twangy. Its made by this guy Gevin Balwaith, they’re called captain ukuleles, he lives up in Hamilton and makes ukuleles, and they’re amazing. 

The man. Yea totally, the only bummer is it’s not electrified so I don’t get to use it for anything. But it’s the prettiest. So yea I’ve got three, but I keep wanting another one, a Tahitian one, they’re really cool. They’re like eight string, and it’s doubled so they sound crazy.

Do you have any shows coming up? I’m not sure, I’m playing at Zest on March third.

Nice plug. Yea, which I’m really looking forward to. It looks so cool. I didn’t even know how big it was going to be and then I saw that Blink’s doing a workshop in the library and other cool stuff. But yea by myself I don’t really do gigs, it’s just with my band. I would do gigs by myself but I don’t know. I’m really bad at going out and making stuff happen, so I wait for other people to ask me. 

That’s kind of how it goes in Palmy though. So your band is Ukephoria right? Ukephoria, and we are a good times band. So, if anyone needs music for like a wedding, or a baptism, birthday party, we are fun. Yea. It’s quite cool because it’s just covers, so it’s really nice because you can enjoy the performance a bit more because your own ego isn’t in the way. That’s what I find about it any way, it’s like, get up and have a good time and it’s with other people, where as when you’re by yourself singing your own songs I tend to get a little more..

It’s a little exposing, singing your own songs, especially if they’re like my Poor Me Memos, just having a good old whinge about everything. Yea.

What do you write about? Um, well oddly enough I seem to write love songs, even though I’m like a cat lady in training. They seem to be love songs, it’s almost the way that we’re bought up, listening to like pop music, like you listen to the radio and every song is about love, so any problem in your life, anything you want to write a song about, you end up telling the story through the lens of a romantic relationship, even if that’s not what it’s about. You just reach for those metaphors instantly, even though that’s not really what you’re talking about. I find that songs make way more sense in hindsight. You sit down, you write them and they just sort of come out, you’re not really sure what’s happening, and then you look at it later and you go ‘oh, that’s what I meant’. I don’t know, stuff comes out subconsciously. 

So you’re a lyrics and music at the same time person? Yea, pretty much. Because I find if I sit down and just write lyrics, then I cant fit them into the music later, because I’m not… it’s like I can bend words to fit around a tune, but I can’t bend a tune to fit around words. So generally it’s better if they come at the same time, but if not I just I don’t know, I end up having all these documents in my computer of lyrics that I’m waitingfor music to come along for and it just doesn’t happen, I don’t know, it’s like a one way valve.

No doubt they’ll come together one day. For sure. I was real stoked because last night I finally nailed this song that I’ve had for like over a year that I haven’t been able to… like I had the chorus, and it’s a really strong chorus I loved it but I could never find the verse and I found it last night and I was like ‘yes! It does happen!’. 

Where can people listen to you? They can listen to me on band camp. That’s ameliaandtheotherstuff.bandcamp.com

Bandcamp's awesome aye. It is. I’m really excited about how incredibly easy music is to make and record and to share. Its quite cool. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what genre you are, you can just do whatever you like and you don’t have to worry about it. And if people want it they’ll find it, and if they don’t, then you uploaded something on the internet you know, it’s fine, no one dies. 

No, more cats were produced during the upload. Exactly! It’s all about the cats. And I have a sound cloud but that’s mainly bad covers and stuff. I think it’s soundcloud.com/melinoma I think. 

Do you have a blog with your writing on it? I do have a wordpress that’s got poems on it. I think it’s melinoma which is melinoma.wordpress.com yea, it was one of… I’ve always been tossing around stage names and stuff because I don’t like using my own name, but I don’t know, nothing really fits. I guess that’s where Amelia and The Other Stuff came from, even though I don’t really like that anymore.

I like it. Someone said to me that it sounds like I’m being kind of sarcastic and making fun of like Florence and The Machine and all those ones, and I wasn’t doing that. I kind of used it to refer to the fact that all my ukuleles have names, and semi personalities but… I maybe should stop doing that because sometimes you get a really awkward conversation. When you start talking about your ukulele like it’s a person.

I’ve been there; I named my first guitar Wes Borland, after the Limp Bizkit guitarist. Oh my god, that’s… wow. The Limp Bizkit guitarist. Wow. That’s um… yea that would lead to awkward conversations.

Yep. So do you have anything else to say? Not really, um… not really. There’s got to be something, but I don’t know.

Well that’s it! How painless.