Ami

Amis voice is something special. Because it sounds like so many different voices: rough and soft, strong and fragile. Untrained, but perfect.

Ami Warning has just turned 18. If you meet her, the first thing you see is a young girl experiencing the world. A new grown-up, full of ideas and expectations. If you listen to her songs, you can feel that strong depth some people never reach in their whole life. Ami writes about her feelings. Her inspiration comes from her experiences, from snapshots and flashes of thought. This, for itself, is not unusual. But her performance is.

 This young woman is communicating because she has to. Because all those words and thoughts have to be expressed. You can feel this urge: Amis music is mandatory. You cannot withdraw from it.

And you can feel that there are many things in this 18-year-old’s intellectual world that have touched each of us, more or less intensive.

It is not important to feel the same thing that she does, Ami says. But it is important to feel something. And it is, in fact, impossible not to do so.

Ami Warning has grown up in a musical family. But her first real passion was writing. She started at age 14: poems. Short stories. She wanted to articulate what was going on in her thoughts. To put her world into words.

Music was at her side, every day. Her father, Wally, well-known in Germanys Roots-Reggae-Scene, always had his daughter with him. In her mother’s belly at his concerts, next to the stage as a toddler or sleeping backstage. Finally as a bass player and singer in his band. Ami never had that one special moment, standing on the stage for the first time and deciding to never let go again. That moment was always around her. The stage was her childhood’s living room. Making music? A natural thing.

Some bass lessons followed, and then: the guitar. Her father taught her some chords and showed her the right handling. She started picking out songs and sounds from youtube-videos, playing everything she liked. She composed melodies for the lyrics she already had and started experimenting with new tones. Back and forth: those few notes she kept on repeating were joined by new words. Sometimes in English, sometimes in German – depending on where she could express her feelings the best way.

Sometimes she sings her father’s old songs. With that voice, strong, but fragile, and the intensity of her appearance, she makes them so much her own that everybody seems to forget what they sounded before. Still, and more and more: her songs. Which amaze. How can such a young human being articulate what is going on in each of us – with such intensity?

Ami does not have a concept. She works spontaneously. Her songs, her lyrics, her melodies find her and do not follow any scheme. A genre? Not necessary. Her little band – guitar, bass, drums, sometimes a saxophone – does not urge her to decide. Ami just sounds like herself.