The Songwriter

The music lives inside of me. And when I'm lucky, it comes out.

I wrote my first songs because music was the thing I always knew I wanted to do. It appeared in my dreams. It kept me awake at night. It was the fire in my chest. Years later, I released my first record, 45 South, under my former name, Amy Hughes. Those songs were full of beach towns, long roads, gritty declarations, and the people who still haunt us long after we've left. Then the songs stopped. For nearly twenty years, I couldn't write. I thought that part of me was gone. Then something happened. I'm still not entirely sure what. The words that had been trapped inside me for years suddenly came pouring out. I stayed up far too late, night after night, trying to get them all on paper before they disappeared again. Eventually, the story of The Thirteenth Song was told. Then came Size of the Sky. At the center of it all is a black 1931 Gibson L-00 that belonged to my grandmother. More than once, when I thought music had drifted too far away, that guitar found a way of reminding me that songwriting isn't something I do. It's something I am. If you find something here that heals you, then the songs have done their job.