via Ameila Day
There’s a small city about an hour south of Seattle that calls itself the “Rhubarb Pie Capital of the World.” It’s called Sumner, Washington, and it’s where Amelia Day grew up. On a recent episode of The Load Out Music Podcast, we sat down with the singer-songwriter — now based in Nashville — to trace the arc from that small-town upbringing to a career that’s rapidly gaining momentum, driven by over 313,000 monthly Spotify listeners and a new EP that bares her soul.
A Small Town, a Big Piano, and a Lot of Angst
Day’s entry into music was organic, almost inevitable. Her parents, both casual piano players, kept an upright in the family home, and a young Amelia was transfixed by the sounds they’d coax out of it. By age four or five, she was asking for lessons of her own. It wasn’t long before she was writing original compositions.
“In middle school, I started songwriting for the first time,” she told us. “I did little compositions in elementary school, but started actually songwriting the way that I do now in middle school. Lots of angst and emotions to get out.”
Despite that early passion, the idea of a professional music career felt abstract and out of reach. Stage fright was a serious obstacle, and Day admits she spent years hoping she could somehow write and record without ever having to perform live. Moving to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt University in 2020 began to change that calculus. It wasn’t through the school itself, as she’s noted Vanderbilt’s music program was almost entirely classical, with little relevance to the contemporary industry. But rather, through the city’s vibrant DIY music scene.
“I really had to kind of seek that stuff out,” Day recalled. “Just get involved with the local college music scene, meet a lot of people from Belmont, from Lipscomb, go to a ton of house shows, and just kind of get embedded in the local community on more of a DIY level. Just talk to people. As awkward as it can sometimes feel, the more you go to their shows, the more they might invite you to play an opening set, and then you meet more people and it just kind of grows slowly, but steadily.”
Farmers’ Markets, Bar Gigs, and Finding Her Footing
Day’s rise was deliberately incremental. She started at open mics and farmers’ markets, logging solo hours-long sets to sparse crowds, learning what connected with audiences and what didn’t. Every summer she’d fly back to Washington and gig as much as possible, stacking experience gig by gig until she was playing breweries, wineries, and eventually ticketed shows.
The Nashville bar circuit, she explained, was a different beast entirely, one she navigated carefully. While she has no issue playing covers, she recognized early that the city’s tourist-driven bar scene wasn’t the path to artistic growth.
“There’s just no kind of way to grow out of that directly from the bars,” said Day. “It’s a great place to gain experience and make some money off of music, but as far as actually getting your name out there, it doesn’t do too much from what I’ve seen.”
Only in the past year has music become her full-time livelihood — her only source of income — a milestone she describes with quiet pride.
Genre Is a Cage She Won’t Enter
One of the most striking things about Day’s catalog is its range. Her most-streamed track, “Skipping Down the Sidewalk,” carries a jazz-inflected warmth reminiscent of Amy Winehouse or Norah Jones — an artist Day speaks about with undisguised admiration. Her newer singles push toward folk-rock and even full-throated alternative rock. Industry advisors have pushed back, urging her to pick a lane. She has politely declined.
“I’m trying to just serve each song the best it can, even if that brings me into a different kind of space,” Day told us. “If I were to just go straight-ahead folk rock, that’s all I’m going to do. I would have to say goodbye to [other songs] completely, and I like those songs too much to not include them.”
She’s also found a clarifying philosophy about authenticity — one that pushes back against the pressure to imitate what’s commercially successful.
“If I’m trying to write a Noah Kahan song, people should just go listen to Noah Kahan,” Day mentioned with a laugh. “It’ll be better than whatever my attempt is at writing his kind of music. We each have these unique things that we bring to the table, so why not just try to lean into that as much as possible?”
Ego Trip: Anger, Grief, and Getting to the Other Side
Day’s new EP, Ego Trip, is her most personal work to date — born from a painful and unexpected breakup that cracked open something she’d rarely let surface in her songwriting: prolonged, unrelenting anger.
“I’m not a very angry person by nature,” said Day. “Usually, I’ll be mad about something for like an hour and then I’ll be chill … whatever. But for one of the first times, it was this really deeply abiding anger and frustration. I did not expect that kind of betrayal, truly trusted that person, and it was very jarring.”
That emotional rawness found its sonic match in what she was listening to at the time — the angry, cathartic female-fronted alternative rock of the 90s: Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Ani DiFranco, Sheryl Crow. She was also, for the first time, seriously exploring electric guitar. The two forces converged.
The EP moves through heartbreak’s full emotional spectrum — call-out rage, romanticized longing, raw vulnerability — mirroring the whiplash of grief itself. The lead single, “Lady Los Angeles,” deals with the sting of infidelity. The title track swings between fury and dream-sequence tenderness. Ego Trip is also its most sonically unified project, held together not by genre but by recurring instrumental textures — pedal steel and cello appear throughout, deployed in wildly different ways depending on what each track demands.
After a stretch of near-constant touring — including a month-and-a-half run through the Northeast, Midwest, and South — Day is looking forward to a rare stretch of creative stillness: time to absorb what she’s experienced and write from it. She has no label deal, by choice, and seems in no hurry to change that.
What comes through most clearly in conversation is an artist who knows exactly who she is — and is willing to bet her career on that being enough. Given where she already is at this stage, it’s a bet that looks increasingly well-placed.
So enjoy a wonderful interview with a potential rising star, Amelia Day, on the latest Load Out Music Podcast.