Someone once said that the worst thing about an Amos the Transparent show is you never know who is going to be on stage, which instruments they are going to play and how they are going to arrange the songs. Someone else once said that the best thing about an Amos the Transparent show is that you never know who is going to be stage, which instruments they are going to play and how they are going to arrange the songs.
Amos the Transparent started as a studio project in 2006. I was sitting on a bunch of songs that I had laying around and had no plans of releasing them until my long time friend and collaborator Chris Wilson convinced me to step in the studio and lay some of them down. The result was a 13 song record entitled "Everything I've Forgotten To Forget" . It was released on Pop Culture Records/Fontana North in August 2007.
Some people really liked the record and it even made a bunch of year-end lists. "iheartmusic.net" said it was the best record released that year. One song called "After All That, It's Come To This", which was a duet featuring Amy Millan, was featured in the 2011 add campaigns of the website 'Plenty Of Fish'. The recording process was interesting because we weren’t thinking about how to play the songs in a live setting. It was really just the 2 of us with engineer/co-producer/badass awesome guy Jason Fee and a bunch of friends who would stop by. So when the time came to play our first set we formed a 7 piece band to pull it off. We enlisted the help of Steve Bragg, Mark Hyne, Cam McLellan, Kelsey McNulty and Ana Miura. With this band we started gigging regularly, played NXNE, CMW and Ottawa's Blues and Folk fests.
By 2009, we had played a handful of shows, people came and people went and we were having a good ol time. Dan Hay, James Nicol and Katie Cooke had joined the band at this point and we decided we were due to release something new. The Result was a five song EP called "My, What Big Teeth You Have…" We recorded this over two very cold weeks in various places around Ottawa. We went on to release an animated video for "Lemons" with the help of Ottawa artists “Digital Henchmen”. On the strength of this recording we hit up SXSW, Big Sound in Australia and even landed a spot on MTV's Degrassi for "Greater Than Consequence".
In 2011, after a few departures, we decided to add some cello and keys so we invited Mike Yates and Kate Sargent into the family. We released "Goodnight, My Dear… I'm Falling Apart", which was constructed as two separate EP’s, with Goodnight My Dear focusing on our lighter songs, and I’m Falling Apart showcasing the darker side of the band. We produced this record ourselves and send it to be touched up and mixed by Gus van Go and Werner F. We filmed videos for "Sure As The Weather" and "Says The Spark" and both songs did reasonably well during my parents dinner parties. SiriusXM made us the featured artists for the month of March and put our ugly mugs on the big screen during the pre show of every showing of every movie in Famous Players theatre across Canada. That was awfully sweet of them seeing as a few years earlier they nominated us as "artist of the year" at the Verge awards. We were also musical guests on CBC's Q with Jian Ghomeshi, during which time he called us "kinda like the Canadian Wilco". That kinda made my day, too.
The current lineup of lovers is myself, Chris Wilson, Dan Hay, James Nicol and Mike Yates. We've been writing a new record which we plan on recording this fall.
Thank you for reading about our band for whatever reason it is that brought you here.
Take care of each other,
Jonathan