“It’s kind of like driving a couch,” she says behind the wheel of what once was her grandma’s créme ‘98 Cadillac Deville. Now it’s a “caddie,” and I’m in the passenger seat getting the Newburyport tour from a seasoned local, who’s knocking back shadies on an overcast Wednesday. The tape deck is broken.
As she distinguishes notable burger joints from mediocre ones, I’d like to say Amelia Gormley is a different person from her onstage self. That when shredding bass in two different bands, she takes new shape in each. But then I’d be lying, “journalism” would go out the window, and this piece wouldn’t be about her. A dual personality makes for an interesting story, but a whole person speaks a better one, given time, attention, and a few train tickets.
But riding in her car is where I ended things. The start, goes something like this.
The New Highway Hymnal is a psychedelic rock band that started in 2009 by friends who, as put by singer/guitarist Hadden Stemp, “wanted something new.” They’re a composite with a history of lineup changes, but Amelia has been on bass since beat one. She and Stemp met in the awkward days of high school on Boston’s north shore. He pegged Amelia as shy back in those days, and, quite frankly, I forgot to return the question her way. It was a situation of friends in bands among other friends’ bands, the sort of “I know that you know that you’ve got some semblance of rhythm” that paves way for afterschool jamming and recreational pot smoking. Now, they’re a three piece with a discography and a local presence to match.
Back in April, hours before Hymnal’s record release show for their sophomore LP Reverb Room, a short, uncomfortable phone call tells me this much: Amelia’s excited. She’s wearing socks. Her car is almost packed for the commute into Cambridge, and her general feelings go as follows:
“It’s probably going to be one of our last shows for a while,” she says over speakerphone. “It’s definitely bittersweet going into it."
Going into it, the sold-out Middle East is as crowded as this sentence is redundant. I pick a wall to avoid the flow of shifters and half-drunks while watching the one present grey-haired man perform iPhone photography through most of the three openers: Andy California, The Televibes, and Vundabar. Aside from a mid-bill McDonald’s break, I patiently wait to hear Hymnal for my first time. When they step onstage, I lean against a projector topped with purple dye and a transparent plate only to be shooed away once the reverb kicks in. A sweaty, bearded expert takes the post. Gladly, I back away as he maneuvers the dish spastically to create a microscope-inspired light show over the bassist. It looks great even with her back turned.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” says Amelia. After half a set’s worth of groove, she approaches a fan-provided pile of PBR cans placed conveniently next to her mic. One sip, and it’s back to work. She’s already laying down another bass line.
The set feels seamless. There’s expected fuzz and echoes, but with the three stationary band members spreading sound through the seemingly packed Middle East Up, I pick up on their secret. Hymnal excels in this genre. They do it right, especially in the live setting, because there’s just enough discipline to cut through the noise. The bass is to blame for this, regimented and badass, played by the regimented badass herself. I label her this way, as her fingers pull the psychedelia in range where my ears can relate—while her stance and smirk remain unassuming. In a later interview, Stemp states "Without bass, it would mostly be noise," and that its steady rhythm is key in the live setting.
If Amelia knows she’s good, perhaps she credits most of her work to the instrument itself. She steps back for the rest of the set, allowing audio to take priority over the visual. Plus, the pairing of a feather tattooed on her forearm with another tied to her bass's neck does well to replace any stage antics.
This eventually snowballs into a throwing of instruments, select drum pieces and beer before the band goes in for a group hug at the end. I look around in the process to see how the rest of the crowd is taking to Hymnal. The final sounds are chaotic, like the band is dumping every piece of itself onstage for the time being, and yet I know there’s even more to them, more to Amelia too.
Thrashing fans outnumber us wide-eyed wall-leaners, but not by much. The situation calls for anchoring myself to something, and, as a person who consistently remains grounded at shows, I feel shaken as my feet lift.
In a later interview, Amelia tells me that hearing The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” was her first experience with psychedelic rock. I’ve since come to think that this show was mine.
Amelia Gormley: I saw “School of Rock” right when it came out.
Allston Pudding: You wanted to be that brunette girl whose name I can never remember?
AG: Yes! I remember thinking she was so cool and saying to myself, “I have to be her.” I think that was the main reason. Also I was in middle school. All the boys were picking up guitar and starting bands, but none of them had bass players.
Sitting outside of Salem’s Gulu Gulu Café, we’re laughing about being 13. It’s overcast and weather fitting for her jean jacket of band pins. She’s quick to admit the wardrobe she kept back then: Beatles T-shirts for peers to poke fun at mostly with the catchphrase “who are they?” The obsession, which started with John, became more Paul-centric when she found the “bass boost” button on her old Walkman and was hit with an “oh, so that’s what it sounds like.” For the record, Amelia is 24. She just must have been retro enough to catch the cassette’s comeback before the rest of us.
She started off with lessons and moved on to playing with others through after-class jam sessions held by her teachers. She was the space’s token bass player and liked things that way. By speaking from her middle-school perspective, she gives me a sense of why.
“I’m just gonna be the coolest girl in school, and all the other girls are gonna be wicked jealous of me because all the boys are paying attention to me and–“ the laughter takes over. I get the picture and join her.
In her words, “I guess it kinda worked out.” Aside from Hymnal, Amelia plays bass and sings backup in Cold Engines, a rock collective of herself, a few former members The Brew, and a hand-percussionist named Geoff, whose reggae band Soul Rebel Project has gained its share of iTunes fame in recent years. Active since their debut 2014 album Day Drinker, Cold Engines combines the alternative instruments she loves with the rustic feel of northeastern towns she knows. Though only in Boston on occasion, the group has already booked gigs nearly every weekend this summer in and around Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
When discussing both projects, Amelia claims Hymnal as “her art,” but that’s not to say she’s skipping out on contributing to someone else’s. Cold Engines was prompted through a talk with guitarist/vocalist/old friend, Dave Drouin. He asked. She agreed. And unlike Hymnal, she's not cycling every last dollar back into this band. With a different setup comes a different sound. The added benefit of expanding her bass-playing horizons while hanging out with “a bunch of goofballs” doesn’t hurt either.
From that Cambridge Friday night to a Wednesday afternoon at The Tannery, Newburyport’s labyrinth-like shopping plaza, I feel what Amelia calls “different but good vibes.” My half-ancient camera even detects them in the lighting. It’s yellow.
After rounding enough corners, I shyly reach the studio where Cold Engines rehearses. I’m warmly welcomed in mid-song and pick a stool inches away from the kit's cymbals. The room is mostly steel drums and music stands pushed together. There’s just enough room for four band members and one stranger with a notebook.
They introduce themselves, all smiles. Dave apologizes for the volume. I shrug. Amelia laughs, and one song later, they’re done for the day. Granted, a single listen to “Never Heard of the Blues” is powerhouse enough to convey the group’s soulful, fun style and how Amelia’s complicated bass-work fits into that. Sitting on an orange amp she whips out the skill to guide a more structured song: verse to chorus to bridge and back. She’s still wearing the same smirk, just doing more technical work. Later that day, I ask her if playing in Cold Engines feels “back to school.” She responds with a yes and a comforting “I like it that way too.”
“I feel for the most part that my bass-playing is something that I’m 99 percent I can feel confident about. Going to Berklee and getting the degree was a big factor in that.”
We grab coffee next door to the studio, and the only other customer present is a weathered old man in the shop’s corner. Otherwise, there’s no one here to deem school an “uncool” topic of conversation.
“I remember people saying that it would ruin music for me,” she says, sipping her coffee and mentioning the surprise of her first music teacher who told her “only real musicians get into Berklee.” Described as “actually a huge douchebag,” this is the same person who once told her she’d wake up one day hating The Beatles.
To the teacher's chagrin, she emailed him the good news and went on to major in performance with a principal in electric bass. She also has yet to wake up with sudden hate for the band whose records she and a childhood friend often choreographed dances to. Later, she calls this practice “weird shit.”
“I feel like Berklee musicians get a bad wrap, especially from musicians who don’t believe in schooling. I can understand that, but, at the same time, I worked really fucking hard when I was there and I learned a lot.”
The hard work stretched beyond classes. She moved back home after freshman year due to difficulties with her living situation in Allston. These, compounded with money and her distaste for ‘BU bros’ on Friday nights led her to become a commuter rail regular for the rest of her time at Berklee. 9 a.m. classes demanded 6 a.m. wake-ups bridged by an hour’s train ride between Newbury and Boston. All of which, Amelia didn’t completely dislike. She remembers these mornings being a time for drinking coffee, listening to music and catching up on procrastinated ear training.
But, the time commitment of living at home did tear away networking opportunities, especially at a school she described as “bubbled.”
“That was the thing about Berklee. I had a really great experience there, but I just did not fit in musically with the other kids. I was doing Hymnal the whole time, so I was just trying to keep my head down when I was at school, focus on doing my work and then have my band be separate.”
From there, post-grad began with a car-less, jobless six months of “what do I do now.” Even with Hymnal as her go-to project, developments were slow moving and the expected tours weren’t coming. While waiting for an upswing, she had time to herself, enough time to detect an ongoing problem that had started in those previously mentioned middle school years.
That January, Amelia sought treatment for her eating disorder. I’ll let her tell you the rest.
AG: Food was my best friend and my worst enemy.
I went through two rounds of intensive outpatient therapy. It was a group of other girls, and we’d meet for about three hours. We’d have a group discussion, have a group meal, and have another group discussion afterwards. That was five days a week. I did probably five or six months of that.
I had to put everything on hold, but I really learned that a lot of these feelings I was having weren’t exclusive to me. Some of these other girls were going through the exact same thought processes as I was.
Once I got out of that program, I was kind of on my own for a little while and had to practice doing it in real life. It very very slowly got easier and took patience, which I don’t have a lot of.
I feel like there are a lot of misconceptions about what eating disorders actually are. For someone who doesn’t know much about them, the first thought might be “why can’t you just eat?” or “why can’t you just not care what other people think about you?” If it were that easy, I would have done that a long time ago. I always understood that they were very complex things, but I just never realized how complex mine was until I got into treatment and started pulling apart the pieces.
They’re very common. One in four women in this country has one, and that’s crazy. The media with its images of photo-shopped woman and skinny models, that all has a factor in it, but it’s more than that because even at my thinnest it still wasn’t enough.
It’s been kind of disorienting at times to look at who I was just two years ago compared to where I’m at now. It’s like night and day.
We talk a bit longer but basically end here, still smirking, preparing our excess coffee to-go. I gather a couple more facts before packing up: favorite album, favorite day of the week, favorite time of the day.
The Beatles’ Revolver, Friday, and a tie between early morning and late night.
Combine these with the convincing laugh, the septum piercing, the Walkman, the orange amp, the sold-out Middle East, the untouched PBR pile, the degree, the fact that she says she could never be a nurse because she likes “rocking out and smoking weed too much,” the fact that she answered when I asked in our first phone call “are you wearing socks?”, the music I heard, the experiences she shared, the reverb, and the easiness I felt while talking with her. That’s what I found out about Amelia. Leaving the shop, I run through these facts in my head. An incomplete list...But I think it's enough to constitute my angle: getting to know a person just because.
Then, she drives me to the train station in her ’98 Cadillac Deville.
It’s called a “caddie.”
It drives like a couch.
And the tape deck is broken.
