OurStage

The showpiece of this collection is Amy Kuney's dusky alto, which offers self-assured pop songs that are too smart to ever get overblown. Topping things off are the clever turns in songs like "Rocket Surgery" and "Love Is Trippy," when the Tulsa songwriter's coy charm helps sweeten the sarcastic barbs. - Nate Cavalieri

Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter Amy Kuney has more on her mind than singing about fashion, crushes or what's hot or not: her family moved to Honduras to do missionary work when Amy was 13, and at age 17, she and a group of friends were kidnapped by rebels while in Guatemala. No wonder audiences are responding to the passion behind her amazing lyrics.

Remember Amy Kuney? She's the one who does all those fab covers on youtube.com -- a cut above the average gamine songwriter -- and writes some pretty sweet originals to boot. Soundboard featured her take on Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" a while ago. Well, turns out we're not the only ones trolling for her vids. Got this note from her the other day: 'Hello Ann, It's Amy Kuney again... Guess what? Damien Rice saw my cover of his song "Blower's Daughter" on youtube, and has invited me to fly to Iceland to open shows for him! Needless to say...I am pulling my life savings and buying a round trip to Iceland. He has been an inspiration to me since I was 12 and I am still pinching myself. I can't believe it. We leave Sunday. I'm opening some shows, and then I am singing "Coldwater" with him as a duet. I can die happy now... haha' Don't die, Amy

Kate Voegele - My Myspace Faves: "I stumbled into an L.A. lounge she was playing at. She totally worked it! She's like Fiona Apple and Sarah McLachlan. An amazing lyricist." - Kate Voegele

NEW SONGBIRD ALERT: Amy Kuney's "Bird's Eye View" coming to town... Thanks to Sophie 103.7's constant rotation of Ingrid Michaelson, I've been enjoying the dog days of summer best with less hip hop and funk and more folk and soul. On that note, I have to recommend you Street readers check out on-the-rise singer/songwriter Amy Kuney when she comes to Lestats tomorrow night. Kuney, who just released her CD "Bird's Eye View" yesterday, mixes the lyrical honesty best reminiscent of Fiona Apple with a truly unique and beautiful voice. You may recognize her music from the season finale of "One Tree Hill" but apparently she also spent some time as one of the folk singers featured on the quirky dramedy "Gilmore Girls" a few years back. Some of my personal favorites from her CD include "Simple Things," "Thank You for Last Night," and especially "Rocket Surgery." - Kate Stanhope

Amy Kuney’s debut full-length LP, “Bird’s Eye View” was released Tuesday, August 12. With it’s release, audiences finally have the chance to become acquainted with this brilliant 23 year old whose life experiences could put those of people twice her age to shame. Amy moved from her comfortable teenage life in the states to the rugged poverty stricken Honduras when her parents felt called to be missionaries in the country. While in Honduras, Amy found great comfort in exploring her music and, eventually, finding her voice. A voice that is as unique as the experiences leading her to its discovery. Prior to the release of “Bird’s Eye View,” Amy Kuney has seen some great musical accomplishments. Her music was spotlighted on the season finale of One Tree Hill last year giving many of the shows viewers a small glimpse into the genesis of this musical genius. Her cover songs of pop hits like Coldplay’s, “Viva La Vida” and Damien Rice’s, “The Blower’s Daughter” have been supremely popular on YouTube and showcase her ability to handle even some of the toughest mainstream songs and make them, so beautifully, her own. Her cover of Damien Rice’s, “The Blower’s Daughter” gave her the amazing opportunity to play with the song’s original creator in Iceland recently: he loved her version of his song so much that he invited her out to lush continent. While the successes of her musical career before her debut album was even released are something many artists never accomplish, “Bird’s Eye View” pushes her career into a whole other level and into the small realm of brilliant young singers whose talent deserves the attention of all who appreciate great music. Each song on the album offers the listener a fresh and creative perspective on such common themes as new-found love, breakups and what it is to be human in this tumultuous world in which we are all currently living. Lyrically, Amy does not use the formula many popular artists seem to be constantly regurgitating. There is a simplicity to her individual lyrics and a simultaneous complexity to her songs as a whole: a difficult combination to create and one that is surprisingly accomplished on all ten tracks of the album. Amy’s music matches her lyrics so well and it seems she is very aware of when the music should take center stage or if the listener needs to focus more on the lyric, something many artists fail to do. “Bird’s Eye View” should be added to the library of anyone who appreciates great talent. So many female singer/songwriters are being seemingly mass produced while lacking any real musical ability to justify their success. Amy is not, by any means, one of those many. Here is raw and genuine talent that deserves nothing but the greatest and will, without a doubt, reach great heights. If you are weary of taking the word of LA.CityZine before purchasing the whole album, check out the tracks, Appreciate Your Hands, Thank You for Last Night and Love is Trippy from “Bird’s Eyes View” for further proof of this endearing, layered and all around beautiful talent. - Brian McConnell

With a husky voice and baroque-pop style, Amy Kuney will appeal to fans of Aimee Mann and Shawn Colvin too. The winsome “Simple Things” is a greet-the-day morning song, while “Angel Tangled in the Telephone Lines” has a bittersweet air of regret, and “Love is Trippy” is a Beatles-influenced ditty, though her vocal delivery remains irony-dipped. The folky strum of “Time Machine” is very campfire/coffeehouse, and the closing title song is a forlorn acoustic waltz. -Darryl Morden

Amy Kuney follows her strong debut ep with a full-length that really satisfies. She's a terrific singer and songwriter and this round of songs is insightful. "Simple Things" celebrates life without seeming trite; Kuney's vocals are soulful and sincere. "Angel tangled in the telephone wire" is a lovely song, with a shade of Fiona Apple's expressiveness in the delivery and a complex arrangement. "Love is trippy" is richly orchestrated without being smothered by it all, and the Beatles influence works well. Kuney's matured nicely as an artist and lives up to her early promise. She should be able to make many albums like this. (stjarnell@yahoo.com)

WRITTEN BY CHRIS J. MAGYAR TUESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2008 The singer-songwriter from Oklahoma and Honduras on her unusual life Music is a series of bits and pixels these days. One day, while trolling a site called The Sixty One —which treats new songs by indie musicians like stocks for music lovers to invest in—a tune called “Simple Things” caught my ear. Featuring YAFSS (yet another female singer-songwriter), the song immediately grabbed me with the singer’s perfectly controlled alto laced with that sly Midwestern accent first mastered and popularized by Judy Garland. By the time the line “the sky is tired of being scraped” hit and the hook unfolded like a sunrise tinged with a hint of orange irony, I was already surfing the artist’s MySpace and clicking through to several YouTube videos of her covering Coldplay and Damien Rice . By the accident of a glance, I saw an upcoming tour stop in Santa Cruz … for free? This process of serendipitous discovery is more orchestrated than it seems—labels place the songs on social networking sites and instruct their young acts to video themselves performing cover songs in order to foster just that sense of proprietary “I’m the one who found this musician” feeling—but what’s remarkable about the story of Amy Kuney , this particular find, is that her life story is as convoluted and sideways as the modern marketing methods that are putting her into the spotlight. “I started out as a classical piano player for church and all that, and that’s what I always thought I would do,” she says of her early childhood. By the time she was an adolescent, her father had left his day job and took the family to Honduras, stranding young Kuney in a country without much to do or anyone to talk to outside her family. Young, alone and upset enough at her circumstances that she initially refused to learn Spanish, she turned to writing songs just to pass the time, then found herself in a church salsa band. “I was always in the back,” she says. “It was an all-boy band and they wanted to be the lead singers. I asked the lead singer at one point that, if I learned guitar, if I could be out front. But by the time I learned guitar, I said, ‘Screw them, I’ll go on my own.’ ” By college age she was back in California (she now lives in Santa Monica) putting together a few songs. She caught a lucky break early and wound up on stage in the background of a "Gilmore Girls" episode, but things started really rolling this year, after college. “I’m always a workaholic and I like things to go fast, but especially during the summer things went fast,” she says. “Getting a song on the season finale of 'One Tree Hill' helped a lot. Kate Voegele mentioned me in People magazine and I started touring with her. I started covering songs on YouTube, which was my label’s idea, and I enjoyed that. I am a huge fan of Damien Rice and I covered one of his songs—‘The Blower’s Daughter’—and one of his fans sent it to him. He liked it, I guess, and wrote a few days later and asked me to come to Iceland. I agreed pretty fast. We left four or five days later.” The whirlwind tour of Iceland happened just before that country’s infamous bankruptcy, which made for a strange experience. “The economy was pretty crazy over there. The dollar over there had no worth, so we were trying to figure out how we’d survive. We were there right before [the economic collapse] happened. I made some money there selling CDs and by the time I switched it over to dollars it had lost a third of its value. I kind of have a fanbase there now, and they want me to come back because at this point I could live like a queen.” From Honduras to Iceland, Kuney has evolved into a pop ballad machine, in the mold of such lightning-fast stars as Regina Spektor and Ingrid Michaelson , with twisty and clever lyrics (“Rocket Surgery” shows them off best). But her success is due to more than accident. She says most of her free time is spent responding personally to every e-mail her fans send her, which has led to making friends all over the place. This Halloween, she and some of those friends in Texas went trick-or-treating. “I went for the first time in my life,” she admits. “My parents are Southern Baptist missionaries so I was never allowed to go trick-tor-treating, and the last couple years I was in college I thought, ‘I’m getting up there, so I won’t be able to pull it off much longer.’ So I did it with some friends in a little neighborhood in Houston. The kids are so young, and there was hardly anyone after 9 p.m. I’m used to going out late, so I must have seemed kind of creepy.” She has also solicited reading material from her fans, and is currently reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, though her next fan recommendation is the teen vampire romance novel “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer. “I like to communicate with the younger kids,” she says, then laughs. “I feel like an old person talking.” Courting that younger fanbase—she played mostly jazz clubs and sit-down venues to older crowds in her earlier career—has also meant embracing the digital, so she and her label decided to release her latest album, Bird’s Eye View, in an eco-friendly mini-package. “I wouldn’t call myself a tree hugger or anything,” she says, “but I noticed that when I buy a CD, I take the disk out, stick it in my computer, and throw the package away. I wondered where all the plastic and cardboard go.” She says the CDs are only peddled to the older fans anymore anyway. “Today I played at a high school in the morning, and I just gave out a card about how to get to it on iTunes.” And the digital whirlwind of music begins anew. But the miracle of this new system is how it’s bringing fans closer to musicians like Kuney, who answer every e-mail, and have an interesting and personal story to tell. Perhaps this is what the future of music is—everything but the fake, fancy package.