Allison Sounds writes and sings beautiful songs with a mending heart. She draws from nature and her own emptions to make connections with other people. You can hear her play her new album, I Was Born in Color, at the release show May 21 at The Midway Saloon.
Please tell me about you and your history with music?
I grew up in a musical family and started learning guitar at ten years old. I liked to write and sometimes wrote melodies and songs as a child. My first guitar teacher was a bluegrass guitar player – his affinity and pure talent convinced me that the acoustic guitar was my instrument. Having a basis in basic theory helped me learn how to not just play chords but create them. I also learned fingerstyle guitar. After a few years of practice, I started performing the songs I wrote. I started playing at farmer’s markets in my hometown, and played in bands in high school. I started playing little gigs and open mics at coffee shops and bookstores. I attended a small college in Indiana where I continued to write songs, collaborate with other musicians while studying for my Bachelor’s degree. I would sometimes find lyrics during college lectures, write them down, and make up melodies and guitar riffs usually late at night after I stopped studying. I had a lot of opportunities in college to grow as a musician and songwriter. I met one of my collaborators at an open mic and we recorded my first album “When the Sea Spoke” in a living room. I released that in 2016. After I graduated/released the album, I moved to Arizona, where I worked and played music. Living out west gave me a lot of new inspiration musically. I spent a lot of time outdoors and the desert just kind of talks to you. I still draw inspiration in my writing from that time. A few years later, I sort of recalibrated and took a hiatus from music. I went through a time where I wondered if Music was really my path. I started working as a caregiver and volunteering as a medical assistant at a free clinic for the uninsured. I lived in a really rural area in Wisconsin where I gardened and started writing songs again. I was feeling really connected to music again and I thought, if I wanted to pursue music I should move to a city. I have always liked the Twin Cities and one of my friends/bandmates in high school moved there to pursue music after high school. So I decided I’d move to Minneapolis and start by teaching basic piano lessons and voice lessons. I took the steps to move and everything fell into place. It hasn’t been an easy road, but I would say positive things continue to happen. Getting back into performing music took a little bit of an effort on my end. I was initially very reserved at performing live. However, to my surprise, I was so embraced by the music scene in Minneapolis/St. Paul, that I felt so motivated to keep writing and performing. People want to help you out. People show up. I started workshopping my originals, and found that playing them with a band really added a new layer to them. Then, I asked musicians I admired to make an EP with me called “Allison & the Northwoods” in 2023. We played a gig together and decided to record some of the strongest songs as an ensemble. Then, I started working on my most recent album “I Was Born in Color” which was a sort of culmination of what I’ve been envisioning musically which was the combination of folk and jazz. I worked with Mike Dubois, who is a jazz drummer. We started practicing together for months and the synergy between the acoustic guitar with the expressive rhythms gave the songs on the album a really blended, energized feel. The album included a collaboration with a lot of musicians in the Twin Cities who we knew. We spent about a year and a half on the project. It was so gradual, yet everything fell into place. I didn’t know how we were going to complete an album – yet, as we kept going, the people, the producer, the funding – they all showed up. I feel like it’s important when you have a creative project to focus on the work and take the
first steps even if it doesn’t make logical sense. The next steps are always revealed.
Your website mentions creating healing spaces through harmonics, alternative tunings, vivid lyrics, rhythms and expressive vocal tones. Can you tell me more about that?
Yes! Music has the capacity to create beautiful spaces that are conducive for different energetic states. I utilize different techniques to create a healing and uplifting environment with music. I’ve found that alternate tunings on the acoustic guitar provide more of a resonant frequency that can fill a room. It also seems to have an effect on the body. I believe music is transformative. It is a manifestation of energy and emotion. We cannot see energy or emotion, yet it is felt. I feel like we haven’t yet tapped the capacity music has to transform, influence, heal and to create space. I believe music can be the vessel to an inner understanding, which can promote peace and harmony. I see this a lot in collaborations. Music has a calming effect when used intentionally. It gives us focused attention on emotion to transmute it. At first, I thought using music to create spaces of healing was an out there idea and I kept it to myself. However, I still experimented with tunings that were more resonant – that would fill a room better; different ways to use my voice that were more authentic; guitar techniques that were sonically relaxing and pleasing to the senses and I started seeing results in audiences. I also used music as a way to channel emotion and calm myself. I see songwriting as a practice. I often take raw material, like an emotional state and turn it into something palpable and resolved almost. And the strangest thing about this is that I very seldom reveal what these songs are really about – yet they resonate with people who tell me they are going through the same thing or have gone through the same thing the song is about. It seems like every emotional state has an energy to it. Expanding from my own observations individually, I started off playing background music at coffee shops, restaurants and even bars – and I would notice that certain kinds of music would affect the environment and energy of the place. When I play, I empty myself for the music, the flow, the energy of it is something else. I feel it and I’m open to it and don’t try to understand it – I just get in flow. Everything else can wait. I can’t think about any negative thoughts or listen to any self-conscious mosquito voices. I started using music as a meditation while practicing and writing, and noticed certain techniques allowed me to access different emotions or states. So I wondered if those states could be fostered through the music. That has been my project for the last few years. I have been really amazed and also unsurprised that most musicians get this and live this recognition of music’s transformative power, as well. One of my favorite songwriters in the Twin Cities says he’s a lightning rod for a song. He says he’s like a vessel for them. In this way, there is a sort of transcendent quality to writing songs. You have to make space for them somehow for them to take you somewhere else and eventually share that with others so they can
travel with you.
Your new album I Was Born in Color has a number of songs rooted in nature (Mojave, the daffodils in Gypsies, Roses, Gardener). Was this intentional or is nature a big inspiration for you?
Nature is a big inspiration! There’s so much material and so much to observe always. There is too much to hear in nature. Maybe I didn’t go out and decide that those songs would be about nature; however, it seems to inform a lot of what I write about. I feel like writing is often the act of making the subconscious conscious. I spend time in nature, I love to observe seasons and what happens with changes. Writing this, we are entering spring, and it feels so victorious especially in the north after winter. Nature can be so gentle and then it can also remind us how remarkably small we are in comparison to its power. It’s unpredictable and yet so very measured and rhythmic. I like finding scenes and describing them. Sometimes I see something in nature and it will leave an imprint. When I’m working on melody, I’ll see an image that I saw maybe years ago and describe it. I also really like to personify nature, and utilize natural images for metaphors. It provides backing for the emotional plane as well. Anything that helps fill the lyrical space I like to explore. Music and nature are both places to retreat, and so maybe that’s why they seem to relate together.
I love the staccato jazz sound in Infinite. It blends so well with the folk, singer- songwriter sound. When you write songs, do you start with the sound or the lyrics?
I start with the sound! Infinite was my first attempt in combining folk with jazz. I feel like the two genres are much more similar than they seem. When writing, I generally start with the guitar riff and go with a vocal melody from there. Generally, the lyrics take the longest. Sometimes it’s done in five minutes, other times I spend months on a song, fine tuning it. I find an image or a concept from the music I work with and then I try to get inside the image and describe as much as I can. I work a lot with memory, too.
Please tell me about the release show planned for I Was Born in Color.
We are debuting our new album: “I was Born in Color” at the Midway Saloon in St. Paul on Wednesday May 21st at 8:30pm!
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