Artist:  Amanda Somerville  

Date: 15th September 2010   

MM - Hello Amanda, lovely to finally catch up with you.  Thank you for agreeing to take part in this interview with us.
AS - Thank you for taking an interest.

MM - Can I just congratulate you and Michael on the excellent Kiske / Somerville album. AS - Thank you, I'm very excited about it and very pleased with the way it turned out.   MM - How did you first become involved with this album Amanda? AS - Well I got a call from Mat Sinner and he asked if I'd be interested in doing a duet album with Michael Kiske, and of course I was really excited about it.  It's quite an honour to be featured alongside someone who is such a legendary voice within the scene.  Especially as Michael and I have worked together over the years on a couple of different projects, so I thought this was a great opportunity to finally have our voices featured directly together.  I was very excited about that.  That's how I got involved with the album, through Mat.

MM - Your voices are both very different, very different vocal styles ...
AS - Yes, but I think that adds the colours and blends very well.  I'm really happy with the end result and the way it sounds.  For me it's akin to blue and red making purple.  MM - Yes that's a nice analogy actually, I wish I'd thought of that one! (laughs).  

MM - Did you have free reign on how the album would sound or did the label give you a set agenda on how they wanted the album to sound?
AS - Mat was put in charge of the creative process and overseeing how the song-writing would go, he was the producer and he orchestrated everything.  When he sent me some demo's I asked if there was any room creatively for any creative input on the album as I'm just as much a song-writer as I am a singer.  He said if I had some material to send it his way and so I got busy and I wrote four songs for the album specifically, together with Sanders Gommans from After Forever.  We'd worked together last year on another project and that went really well so I wanted to work with him again.  We did four songs and three ended up on the album.  It was really nice as an artist to be able to have that creative freedom.  

MM - You've actually put a very personal song on to the album.
AS - Well all three are very personal to me.

MM - How important is it to you to be able to find a release when you're writing those sorts of songs?
AS - It's not always easy when you're laying open your heart, your life, your soul, just laying it all for everyone to see and interpret as they may, but for me song-writing is the highest form of communication and expression that I have.  It's a great emotional outlet for me.  I think I've saved myself a lot of therapy costs by doing it this way. (laughs). 

MM - Over more recent years you have become more well known for your work on the Metal side of the music, however, when you first started out this was not the path you originally took when you started out on your solo career.
AS - That's right, I kind of drove into it accidentally. It just snowballed from there.  

MM - Do you think when you do your next solo project you will be following this metal path or will you be going for a slightly harder edge but not quite full on metal?
AS - I think overall it will be a lot more metal compatible than 'Windows'.  Yes I keep working in this type of music and so I am definitely going to be influenced by it.  I think perhaps my next solo album is going to be very dark, because I like.  Michael keeps telling me not to go over to the dark side and all that negative stuff but it's not negative at all, I like kinda dark, sexy, creepy kind of music.  I'm finding myself attracted to a lot of that stuff right now so I guess that's what you're talking about.  

MM - When I was talking to Michael last week he said it wasn't until you got together to do the video and told him that you'd worked together before that he actually realised that you two had worked together before. 
AS - Yes it was kind of funny because we had a lot of ideas that were candid and spontaneous and so when I said that you can see it in his face where he's thinking ... huh? ... then he realises and it's like "Oh my God!, it was you! wow!" ... because it was all done by voice file transfer and he didn't realise that it was me.  It was just really funny and it was nice to actually connect with him and for him to know who I actually was (laughs). 

MM - It's great that both of you have been able to work together not only on this album but now with Avantasia as well.
AS - Yes it's great, we're both looking forward to November / December to performing together live with Avantasia.  That's going to be fun.  In January I'm going to be touring on the 'Rock Meets Classic' tour with Dan McCafferty from Nazareth.  I just love Dan, I did the 'Rock Meets Classic' tour with him last January and he was just such a doll.  I would like to focus most of time my on my solo material as most of my time at the moment is being consumed on these other things.  I'd love to get a tour going with my solo material.  Right now I've just kinda got shows peppered here and there, but I'd like to sort out a proper tour.  

MM - I think it would be really nice to see you tour with your solo material, but also to include some songs from the projects you've been involved with, simply because you've been involved with so much, it would be nice to see you put that out on the stage as your own thing.
AS - Yes I really enjoyed doing the Siren's Of Metal show in Detroit back in August, because it allowed me to do just that.  It was a real fun thing to do.  I've been involved with a lot of different music throughout my career and it makes for quite a musical journey. 

MM - Did you find it hard to pick songs that you thought the crowd would like for that show?
AS - No not necessarily, yes I did choose some of the more metal songs that I had written or co-written and it was a relatively short set with only 11 songs or something like that.  It went very well and was well received so it was a cool experience for me and fun thing to do. I would definitely like to do something like that again but perhaps on a larger scale and with a longer set.  

MM - Do you ever find that people tend to expect certain different things from a female fronted metal act than they perhaps would if it were a male fronted act?
AS - Well you know it is true, sex does sell.  You know what, you don't see too many "ugly" girls in the scene, so it definitely does make a difference.  You only have to look at the album covers to recognise that it does make a difference.  

MM - Returning back to the Kiske / Somerville album now, it has been hailed by many, myself included, as the Melodic / Hard Rock album of the year.  I think your two vocals gel really well together and it's not your standard male and female vocal mix.  Quite often you have a male growling vocal and then a female operatic vocal in these types of releases, so it's good to hear two really good voices just come together to produce what is for me, the album of the year.  AS - Oh thanks for much Barry, I'm really pleased you feel that way.  I am so excited at the reactions we've had so far from everyone and people are writing to me telling me that they can't wait for another album to be released.  That's very gratifying after we've really put our heart and soul into the release.  It's nice to know that people really like it and appreciate it.

I am familiar with the beauty and the beast male/female vocals that goes on but I don't think there was anything like a simple male/female duet released on the scene until this album came along.

MM - You've been really busy with different bands and projects, we've seen your name pop up with Edguy, Kamelot, Avantasia and a whole host of other things, but is there anything else you've been involved with that we should keep an eye out for?
AS - There's a lot in the pipeline at the moment and some things that I can't mention at this moment in time but that I'm really excited about.  However, what I can say is the Avantasia tour is coming up and both Michael and I will be there performing, also I have the 'Rock Meets Classic' tour coming up in January.  In the meantime I am also working on my next solo album and there are a couple of bands that I will be working with.  It's hard but I can't tell you about those just yet.

MM - You've also got the CD release party next week on the 24th September? 
AS - Yeh, people can come along and we'll have the album playing for everyone to hear and for us to meet and chat with everyone. 

MM - You and Michael are both based in Germany so do you foresee a time when you will both be able to take this album out and tour with it?
AS -  We would really love to do that and I think it would be a lot of fun to do as we have a real chemistry together, we just click, and we'd love to do the songs together.  Unfortunately for the business side of things we have to wait and see how the album sells.  If it sells well then we will definitely be looking into the possibility of taking it out on tour.  It's up to the fans I suppose, if they like it and they buy it rather than download it from some illegal site then the chances are we will be able to tour and they will be able to see us perform.  People don't realise that this is what it comes down to, we need people to support us by not downloading it and to actually buy the release, that then allows us to come out and perform live for them on tour.  

MM - Music has become a disposable commodity to the younger music listeners today.  When I was younger music was like a treasured possession where you would save up and buy an album on vinyl and take it home and spend hours looking at the artwork and reading the lyrics and all the other information on the sleeves and covers.  Your friends would come around and you'd all sit around listening to it together while you played it in your bedroom.  It was a culture thing, there doesn't seem to be the same culture surrounding music as there used to be. 
AS - Yes and I've noticed a lot of people seem to like a band on a song - to - song basis.  They will like one song and will only download that one song by that band on their iPod and they will forget about the rest.  I guess everybody's different, we all have different tastes and if you don't adapt with these people then you will loose out on a lot of people as not everyone is an album buyer now.  Even if they only download one song then hey that's OK, sure it's not the way I would pick to listen to an album as there will always be some songs you like more than others, but eventually when you hear them over and over they grow on you and you learn to love them all.  That's the magic of an album for me, but I get that it's each to their own and as long as they buy it from iTunes or rhapsody or whatever, then that's alright.  I don't want to exclude anybody because of their taste.  

MM - What does the future hold for you then?
] AS - Well I still like doing project work and studio work, guest appearances with other bands ... and I'm going to keep on trucking with my solo music as this is what I love to do.

MM - Has anything been mentioned about the second Kiske / Somerville album yet?
AS - Yes we have talked about this already and we would love to do a second Kiske / Somerville album, and perhaps do it a little bit differently.  Maybe record our vocals together in the studio at the same time and sit down together and write the songs together.  It's the same as touring though, it's all down to how this album performs as to how we go ahead from here.

MM - I think by and large the Melodic Rock / Hard Rock scene do support the artists by buying the music rather than illegally downloading it.  We recognise it is an underground scene now and so we tend to try and help keep it alive by supporting the artists. 

MM - It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you today and thank you for taking the time out to chat with us today.
AS - Thank you Barry, I've really enjoyed talking to you today and rock on!

MM - We'd like to thank Amanda for taking the time out of her very busy schedule to chat with us tonight and wish her all the best with the new album and her forthcoming projects.      

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