After spending years perfecting her unique sound, the soulful musician – and rising fashion-world darling — is breaking new ground with her long-awaited debut
HALF WAY THROUGH MY INTERVIEW WITH Ama Lou she tells me that my name doesn’t suit me. ‘You need something softer and more complicated than Shannon,’ she says. ‘You could keep the Sh, though, that feels right… Maybe Shay? That’s it, I’m going to call you Shay.’
It isn’t the first time our conversation has taken a slightly unconventional turn. After our time together, I’m left with a strong sense of how uniquely the 25-yearold musician sees the world. ‘There’s always a colour or a picture in my mind,’ she explains. ‘People tell me it’s a form of synaesthesia, but I’ve never looked into it. I’m a very sensitive person.’
We meet at a café in Stoke Newington, north London, a stone’s throw from where Lou grew up and still lives, although she now splits her time between London and LA. The daughter of an English make-up-artist mother and a Guyanese guitar-playing father, she comes from a household where creative endeavours were always encouraged. ‘I had a family who always had their thing,’ she says. ‘My dad is very academic, my sister was always into computers and cameras.’
When Lou was 12, her music teacher at school was struck by her voice and encouraged her to take singing lessons. She did, while also picking up her dad’s old guitar to write songs. He was so impressed he mistook one of her early experiments for a new Rihanna release. Songwriting was clearly her ‘thing’.
‘It came so easily to me, so I never stopped doing it, and my parents gave me the space to jam,’ she says. She put out DDD, her first EP, in 2018. It was a melting pot of introspective soul and sugary R&B. She released it with a 13-minute video directed by her sister, Mahalia, in which Lou fronts an LA crime ring. This first release landed her a shout-out from Drake and a supporting slot on Jorja Smith’s tour, making her a young musician to know.
In the years that followed, she has continued to release EPs featuring music that encompasses everything from the club-ready track ‘Same Old Ways’ to the beautifully raw ballad ‘Far Out’. Her most recent single, ‘Caught Me Running’, is a sultry ode to a difficult relationship and the first from her debut album I Came Home Late.
It’s about ‘a past situation’, she says of the song. ‘I use music to say things that I don’t think other people realise about themselves. Even if a person is really horrible, it’s [thinking about] that inner child. The chorus is, “You’re sad and you don’t see. Go somewhere where you can let
