GREATEST: Ama Lou

I have to say The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. 

Pimp cowboy. Actually, Detroit pimp cowboy mixed with an old Guyanese woman—it would have to be the head of the family because of the amount of gold I wear. 

My favorites are these Quartersnacks x Nike SB Blazers. I have a navy pair and a white pair, and they both have these double-colored laces. I got them last year on tour when I was at this skate shop in Seattle. 

I’m such a control freak. Stop exposing me! 

I have a friend who is one of the best skaters I’ve ever met— he does the craziest stunts and will jump off a roof with his skateboard, but he told me he would never want to get up in front of people to talk and sing. He said to me, ‘Nah, I would never go on stage and perform.’ That’s so weird to me. I love performing. To be a performer, you have to love it—it has to be innately in you. 

When I was a kid, every night me and my sister used to put on this show at the end of my mom’s bed. We’d make up a song or do some sort of dancing every single night. Then, when I was 12, my parents started taking me to open mics and I did around three a week. It’s so funny because my mom would talk to the bouncer, and because I was so tall, they thought I was 18. But from a very young age, I knew I had to put my hours in. My parents taught us that you make your own destiny—they didn’t set a lot of boundaries for us. They taught us that we were in charge of our own lives and our own consequences. I knew I had to practice performing, I knew I enjoyed it and I knew I needed to perform the songs that I had written. Even when my parents couldn’t come, I would drag my guitar around London, get on the bus and go perform. 

My parents never did this thing where they pushed me to do anything. They said you have to pick what you do and you have to work super hard at it—that’s your responsibility. People used to tell my mom to manage me and she’d say, ‘No, that’s got nothing to do with me. That’s her life, not mine. I’m not going to have anything to do with my kid’s career apart from support her in what she wants to do.’ 

You know what, I can’t! Every time I come offstage I’m like, ‘That was shit! This happened and that, and I didn’t hit that!’ And people will always say, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because I blackout—that’s how I know I’m really performing. I’ve had performances where I’m completely conscious the whole time and it’s terrifying. Because you’re really conscious of every word and your every flow. 

I feel like the work and practice I put into rehearsing and the intention behind it gives me inherent skills. When it comes to the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, the conscious mind is super selfish and self-serving, so even if my mind thinks it’s shitty, I’ve done all of the practice, so it’s never even nearly as bad as I thought it was or not at all. My skills catch me because I’ve put in the work, even if my conscious mind is somewhere trying to be demeaning to my performance or my effort. 

Also, I ask my closest peers—I don’t have a ‘yes’ team around me. I test people to see if they are yes people because I need the truth at all times. When I’m on tour, I watch videos because it’s like a case study—you can’t avoid anything. It’ll only make you better because most people are there to love and support you, so you want to study yourself and always be better. 

Everyone on my team knows “Drama.” So we call it “Ama Lou” and “Drama Lou.” So when I’m being sassy, they all say, ‘Drama’s here!’ It’s kind of like a Beyoncé-Sasha Fierce thing. 

Sometimes I think of a visual and get sonic ideas from colors and textures around me, then I put it into song. On DDD, for example, I wrote the whole film on a voice note to my sister, and she constructed how to make it happen because she’s a DP. Then, I went back to DDD and created the production as a score to the film. That’s why it works so well together when you watch it—because there are so many elements throughout DDD that never come up again and aren’t repetitive. It all glued together perfectly. 

I get told off so much because I’m not very active on social media. I find a lot of shit really corny—I’m not a fake person at all. It’s hard for me to be something other than what I feel. Even [when] promoting shows, the fact that I have to keep telling people about them, I know you have to do it, but I just don’t want to. Also, I’m super private. I’m always constantly trying to balance letting people know who I am but not overstepping the line where I feel uncomfortable. I already have this feeling about where my life is going and people already find out so much information about you because they dig for it. So I don’t need to reveal everything, because the less I reveal online, the better. There are going to be people intentionally going for information about my personal life anyways. 

My most pungent memory is the first song I ever wrote. I was 11 years old and that’s where I personally connected with my journey of music. My dad plays guitar, so I had a guitar and I was strumming these chords. All of a sudden out of nowhere, this melody came to me. I used to listen to a lot of Hannah Montana and Rihanna, so my dad thought it was one of their new songs. When he asked me about it, I said, ‘No, I just made this up.’ He couldn’t believe it and went running for a piece of paper so I could write it down. I wrote this song called “You Ran Away”—it’s still a banger! 

So it became a thing: I’d come home from school and learn a few new chords and make up another song. At the time, I’d just started secondary school, and I’m dyslexic, so I was having trouble in English. It was great because I’d come home and it was this thing that was effortless for me—songs and melodies and writing. That was my first ever memory, and it just kind of blew up from there and never stopped.