She paints… words, melodies and music into an art that has been well received by her listeners in five continents. Her professional career began in 1999 after a brief stint at Berklee College of Music in Boston. It began a bit earlier than that, however, in mind and in action, when she decided that school nights (after completing her studies, of course!) were better served in the studio making music. Amanfu writes a song like she cooks a meal- without a cookbook. It is this sense of reckless abandon that has sharpened her taste, and makes her music refreshingly imaginative and undoubtedly bold.
She began her life in Ghana, West Africa, and moved to America with her family at the age of 3. Her earliest memories were of singing on the coffee table in Nashville, Tennessee, while her parents and their friends looked on with a knowing of what her future would hold for her. If it wasn’t on the coffee table, it was in taking whatever harmony was available on long drives with her musical family of five.
Amanfu has had a blessed career. She has seen her songs cut by acts in Europe and in America, and she knows what it feels like to have a song up for a Grammy nomination (“Heaven’s My Home”, performed by the Canadian band, The Duhks; cowritten with Amanfu’s dear friend, Katie Herzig). In her own rite, she’s had some fun, too. While on Polydor UK she had a top 5 charted single titled “Sugah”, and a music video full of sweet treats on MTV Europe. She finds herself these days being one half of the commercially-rising duo, Sam & Ruby, with a self-titled EP out and an LP ready for a summer release.
“I’m still surprised every time a song finds it’s way into my lap, “ she says. “Writing a song is funny; it’s like this big gift I get to have, but just for a little while. Then I give it away. Watching it ‘do it’s thing’,” she laughs, while curling her fingers into quotation marks, “is the best part. It’s the absolute best part.”
There are some things in this life which we discover… and then there are some things, like Amanfu’s music, that discover us.
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