Cover photo © 2025 Marilyn Stringer

What many people find so healing about the blues is the catharsis they feel when listening to the raw emotion emanating from the musician. Kansas City-born and current Nashville resident, Amanda Fish, is a perfect example of such an artist, and Blues Blast Magazine was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend some time with this Blues Blast Award and Blues Music Award winner during her East Coast Tour. Born into a musical family, including her well-known younger sister, Samantha Fish, Amanda was exposed to a variety of musical influences and learned to play several musical instruments.

“My Dad played guitar, and my mother was operatically trained. She was given a full scholarship to study voice and violin. I took piano lessons briefly to give me the basic understanding, but when my instructor passed, I didn’t want to go with anybody else. There were so many resources on the Internet at that point that you could teach yourself, so that’s what I did. I started on guitar, then I shifted next to piano. Our dad would have his buddies come over, so my sister and I would sit around the table with guitars and play along with them. Those were some of the happiest times.”

While her sister seemed to be on a straight path to musical success, Amanda’s life seemed much more turbulent. She tried various non-musical jobs, struggled with mental health issues. and was homeless for a period of time.

“I could ace tests, but I couldn’t focus on doing my homework, so my grades would tank. I ended up dropping out of high school and getting my GED. Then I worked as a dishwasher in a pizza shop, then I was a Waffle House waitress and line cook, and a pizza delivery driver. A family member had died by suicide and that messed me up for a while. I started taking an SSRI antidepressant, and my provider doubled my dose instead of gradually increasing it, which I think caused me to dissociate. You need to slowly taper off that medication, but I didn’t have the means to keep taking it and had to quit cold turkey instead and it was horrible. I had full blown hallucinations, paranoia, and physical symptoms that felt like electrical zaps, hot and cold flashes, I couldn’t hardly eat from nausea. Around that time, I was homeless too, because the medication had messed me up so badly it caused me to fully derail from life. I shaved my head during that time to halt the onslaught of opportunistic male sexual advances, and that bought me a little time and space to heal. It took me about two years to physically and financially recover from failing to get the proper treatment.  Then I got married and started working as a security guard. But our marriage didn’t work, so we divorced after two years, and I realized I didn’t want to be a security guard, as my passion was music.”

“I put together a band and started writing songs. Drummer, Kris Schnebelen, was in my first band. He sent our first album to VizzTone Records and said that I needed to go to the IBC to seal the deal. I went, but I had no money and had to sleep in a car. That trip led to me being introduced to many people in the business, and VizzTone decided to put me on the label, and we released Down in the Dirt in 2015. And, in 2016, I won the Sean Costello ‘Rising Star’ Award at the Blues Blast Music Awards.”

The VizzTone Label, home to many very talented musicians, is a partnership by Co-Founder/President, Richard “Rosy” Rosenblatt, Co-Founder/Chief of A&R, Bob Margolin, and Partner/General Manager Amy Brat.  Rosenblatt expressed how happy VizzTone was to welcome Amanda to the label.

“Amanda was introduced to the VizzTone label group in 2015 by former Trampled Under Foot drummer, Kris Schnebelen, who was a driving force in the Kansas City music scene.  He thought we’d be excited to hear Amanda, and of course, he was right.  VizzTone partner Bob Margolin, Amy Brat and I were blown away by Amanda’s distinctive, powerful voice and her deeply personal songs, all delivered straight from the heart.  Ten years later we have released three of Amanda’s albums and numerous singles. Bob and I have had the occasional pleasure of sharing the stage with her, and we are proud to claim her as a member of the VizzTone family.”

The tracks on Down in the Dirt are proof that Amanda is not afraid to tackle difficult topics. Her insight into bad relationships can be seen in “Player Blues” when she sings “he holds me close and keeps me warm some nights, if only for an hour or two…I hold his face in my hands and kiss him goodbye and send him on home to his wife”. And, in “I Don’t Need It” she describes worrying about a loved one irresponsibly driving under the influence, sleeping all day and refusing to get out of bed, noting “I don’t need that kind of bullshit in my life”. The title track fearlessly addresses the sexism that can sometimes be found in the music industry, noting, “dirty old man don’t care what I have to say.  He don’t want to hear the songs I have to play. He judges my worth by the length and the width of my skirt, I keep him down in the dirt.”

Amanda is currently married to the drummer in her band. They met when he showed up at a jam she was hosting in 2016. “Glen (James) and I got together in 2017, and I hired him as my drummer in 2018. Then we got married in 2019, and we’re now expecting our third child.”

In 2017, Amanda competed at the International Blues Challenge, in Memphis, making it to the semi-finals. That is where she met her first booking agent. She started touring at the end of 2017 and recorded her album, Free. This album earned her the highly prestigious Best Emerging Artist Award at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis. She was queued for certain success when, like many artists, her plans were shattered by the COVID pandemic.

“We had just recorded Free, which was inspired by my new adventures on the road, and we were about to have our biggest year yet when COVID hit. I had a whole year’s worth of tours planned, and almost all of the songs were already written for the next album when that happened. I recorded an album in our living room, but the quality wasn’t at the level that I wanted, so I didn’t want to release it on a label.”

“But I had to release something—I had that three-year-itch to put something out there. So, I self-released Trailer Park Demos (called that because we were living in a trailer park at the time). Our first child, Henry, was born around that time, and since touring was off the table due to the pandemic, I started taking classes to get my certification as a nursing assistant. After completing that, I started working in a nursing home. There, I discovered how important it was for them, especially those with dementia, to have music that they connect with. Sometimes they would be practically non-verbal, and I would start singing an old hymn and they would sing the next line of the song.”

“That’s the miracle of music. It sits in the brain differently than language or anything else. We had one resident who had suffered third-degree burns and was very combative due to the pain. I would pull out my guitar and start singing, and this resident would instantly calm down and go from combative to sweet and cooperative. This was a very religious person, so I would play every hymn I knew. It was so helpful and so healing. I really felt, in that moment, that God was showing me that this is my medicine. God was telling me that what I was doing with my life is a medicine and music is supposed to be a balm to the soul. It reconfirmed my purpose in life. I started reading the Bible and connected particularly to the part of the Bible where King Saul called David to play his harp, and it was the only thing that helped him. Sometimes we think of the body and the mind as separate things, but we need a holistic approach. You can’t just treat someone with medications—they need something to address their soul.”

As venues started opening up again nationwide post-pandemic, Amanda and Glen celebrated the birth of their second child, Franklin. While his birth brought tremendous joy, it also added some stressors and altered their plans.

“We now had two kids who needed us to keep a roof over their head, and there wasn’t quite enough work on the road to take the leap back into full-time touring. Glen had to hold a 40-hour a week job, and I had to get a job too. It took quite a while to recover financially enough to be able to back out on the road. In 2023, I wrote another album and went into the studio, and we released Kingdom in 2024. Now we’re touring again, but we have to handle it much differently as our children are with us. We have to stop more often. I used to just ignore my needs and eat whenever I got to the venue, but now I have to stop somewhere at mealtimes to feed the kids. We have to get the kids out of the car to play, so we plan playground stops along our travel routes between shows.

“Also, we can’t share a room with the guitar player anymore to lower costs. Gas costs more, as does hotels and food, so it seems like it is just getting harder and harder to make money. It’s rare that we can find someone to travel with us to watch the children, so I switched from bass and focused on improving my ability to play acoustic guitar, and most of the time I’m touring solo. If the venue wants a band, I will pick up local musicians to play with me. That can be great because the venue gets to pick their favorite local musicians and then you are jamming with the local favorites.”

Amanda has never been tied to one genre of music, and the songs on each album are fairly diverse. The themes and writing style also are evolving from one album to the next.

“The themes of my songs change as I change and grow up. Take the song, “Down in the Dirt”. That “dirty old man” line was written about a specific person. He owned the venue that gave me one of my first steady gigs. One night at a jam he was drunk and stuck his tongue in my ear in front of everyone, and I had given him no sign that type of behavior would be acceptable. And he was married. I realized that guy was never going to truly see me as an artist or respect me. He was just seeing me as a sex object. It did color my perception of men for a while. But since then, I’ve grown older, and I understand that it is not most men. I’m less bitter. I used to be bitter about the music industry. Now I realize that they are just trying to stay in business. When you balance art with sales, it can get pretty cynical. Someone can be an amazing musician, but they can’t push tickets. But you can’t take it personally—it’s just business.”

“Even my writing style has changed over the years. I used to be more verbose. I used to require college-ruled notebooks to write my songs because it had more lines. Now I feel if I can’t distill it down to a wide-ruled notebook, it is too many words, and I am forcing people to think too much about it. I look for a purer way of saying what I am trying to say and don’t over-complicate things.”

Kingdom is gaining critical acclaim, and Amanda continues her trend of writing meaningful lyrics with no “throwaway” songs. One track in particular (“Mockingbird”), is receiving significant attention from the SiriusXM channel ‘BB King’s Bluesville’. “Mockingbird” came in at #1 on the Bluesville “Rack of Blues Countdown” for two consecutive weeks and warns of the harm caused by misinformation: “Blood money can buy, a politician can lie…big Pharma is in bed with bankers, brokers, the Fed.” And Amanda tells it like it is with “Broke Ass Blues”, noting “I’ve got twenty-five cents ‘til Friday…we’ll be outdoors if we can’t pay the rent. The phone is off, I can’t call the bank, and you can’t ride to pantries on an empty tank.”

Despite the fact that she is expecting her third child soon, Amanda is looking forward to playing upcoming shows. “I’m excited to do the Lamoni Live Festival on Memorial Day weekend. Then I’m taking most of September off to have this baby, before I do FortFest at the end of September. I know next May I will be at the Crawdad Festival in Madrid, New Mexico and I’m working on other shows. I would love to someday do a Route 66 tour.”

Whatever upcoming projects emerge for Amanda Fish, you can be sure that they will include intelligent and thoughtful lyrics, and the unfiltered emotion of that beautiful and powerful voice. You can find out more about where Amanda will be touring at www.amandafishband.com