Amos Lee’s Interest in Humanity and Language is Evident on ‘Transmissions’—”When You Get the Right Words and Say the Right Thing, There’s No Better Feeling”

Amos Lee can’t quite think of the word. It’s something like obsessed. Maybe all-encompassing. It’s funny—for someone so verbal and acutely capable of communication, he has trouble locating the exact term for how he felt when he discovered the power of songwriting. 

As a teenager, he found himself listening to artists like the Beastie Boys and KRS-One. But it was a bit later in college, hanging out with “stoner kids” and playing guitar, when he realized the power he had in his hands the whole time. He learned a few chords, and he was subsumed. He began writing books and books and books of songs without any real end game, he says. He didn’t think it would be his job, let alone his vocation. “It was just a nice place for me to go with my emotions,” Lee tells American Songwriter, “because I didn’t have that before. I was locked away for many years.”

Today, Lee, who released his latest LP, Transmissions, in August, says he’s fascinated with the ephemeral, necessary thing called language. If each of us is honest, the truth of communication is that it’s very difficult. From a philosophical perspective, some might say it’s even impossible. Lee deems it “a struggle” to communicate with the people we love or even strangers. When you venture to another country, he notes, you realize how tied your sense of self is to your speaking ability. When you can’t speak the native tongue, you feel stifled. In this way, we’re all at least somewhat stifled. No sentence is perfect, and no chorus is complete. And those who don’t pursue a study of language are even more so, it would seem.

“I heard this question,” the 47-year-old Lee says. “If you could play every instrument or know every language, which would you do? And it’s easily language for me. Easily language. That gives me the ability—my interest in songwriting is just about trying to communicate. If I can travel to anywhere in the world and be able to speak to anyone, all walks of life and get to know people’s stories and their personhood and depths of them, I would never stop traveling.”

Growing up, Lee says he was a normal, even “basic” kid—sports, not books. Television, not reading. Cartoons, not poetry. He recognizes, though, that he was going through severe bouts of anxiety and depression, even back then. Panic attacks, too. But when he got a little older and opened up to the realm of ideas, he “dug deep” into literature, reading, poetry, and songwriting. “Listening to tons of music and reading tons of books of poetry and short stories,” he says. The world quickly became fascinating. He realized what he’d been missing. He pursued and pursued. He later worked in a record shop, “bombarded” with new music. He refined his mind and tastes. He saw that he could get depth and high-level thought even if he’d never be a master of it like his heroes Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Prince, Bill Withers.

“I’m never going to get to a level of communication like some of those artists,” he says. “But it was a pursuit because I loved it. I was just completely fascinated, transfixed, overwhelmed. I was inundated by the power of this form. And it continues to this day, and the obsession and love of language just was sort of my—they’re kinds of pathways. When you get the right words and say the right thing, there’s really no better feeling.”

He was raised in a single-parent household in the 1980s. Back then, there was no internet. Life was outdoors and indoors. Kids today are self-aware to the nth degree compared to those who grew up before dial-up. Perhaps too much so, Lee contends. Seven-year-olds are teaching their parents about gender. Suffering from anxiety and depression, Lee felt as if he was in “survival mode” often as a kid. The object wasn’t to find out what Descartes said or meant by a footnote, it was to get to the next day. But thanks to the guitar, songs, a bag of weed, and notebooks, he found a sense of depth.

“I’m not even an ocean away [from the skills of my idols], but a galaxy away from all that stuff,” he says. “But I feel it in me. I’m not afraid of it, even if I can’t master it, even if I’m not an all-timer, even if I’m not great, even if I’m just okay, I feelit in me, and I’m not afraid of it. And I want it.”

Lee has worked as a bartender and a teacher during his life. When he interacts with people, he says he prefers vulnerable, authentic communication—something that’s very evident if you listen to Transmissions—not the idea of being in a crowd of people “wearing their big masks.” That, he says, repels him. He is not an extrovert. He cares about the stories people carry and he cares about helping them feel understood. He listens. “I know how it feels to feel completely alone in the world,” Lee says. Music has helped shed light on his sense of absence. “I care very much about humanity and the human race and especially about vulnerable people,” he says. “If somebody comes to a show and says, ‘Hey, I lost two of my sons to overdoses last year,’ I want to sit down and talk to them and listen to them.”

The 12-track Transmissions is rich with examples of this—songs like the brittle “Carry You On,” about keeping the flame of memory alive after someone has departed (died), the rhythmic “Hold On Tight,” about a call to courage and the piano-driven “When You Go,” about coping with loss. For Lee, his life is about output. He’s not keeping score of the songs he writes, but he knows he will always write them. Give him a guitar and some time, and tunes will fall like raindrops from a dark cloud. “I am no fucking guru,” he says. “However, the one thing I do think I’m able to say to younger songwriters is don’t stop yourself before you start. Just write. Just let it out.” These days, he says, there is too much feedback. There is ample opportunity or time to wonder, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ You aren’t doing anything wrong. Just write.

“I don’t think I have a hit song in me,” he admits. “I’m writing my songs and not worrying about it. What else am I supposed to do?”

For the Philadelphia-born Lee, who has opened for artists like Dylan and Norah Jones early in his career and who has since grown a devoted audience that allows him to work as a professional musician while still not necessarily being a household name, life remains one of hard work. But that is his lineage. He comes from a working-class family. To him, this is a “sweet spot” of a career. He can be anonymous one minute and onstage singing “I Shall Be Released” with The Bard (Bob Dylan) in another. He can see the world with two eyes and sing about it with thousands staring in appreciation. Still, it’s work.  

“It’s hard,” he says. “I’m not going to say it’s not hard. It’s a grind. The music industry is a fucking grind. Because so many people are doing it, and there are so many avenues to promote and self-promote, I’m not particularly good at those. I don’t particularly like them… For me, the best part of it is the writing… Without music, I’d probably be in a lot of trouble.”

Performing is important even if, at times, it doesn’t quite feel like a natural endeavor to Lee, who has been on tour since May, continuing through the end of September. Promotion is a burden, even though he knows it’s often necessary. Life is about tradeoffs, in a way. Compromise. Get through the day to the next. Survive the obstacle course. And tell the others behind you how to manage it, too. Time is a funny thing. When Lee thinks about it from a personal standpoint, he wonders where it went. And in front of him is more of it, which he’ll use to write, sing, and continue forward. But time is also shared. If you believe some, the human race could be out of time within a few hundred years. There is so much pain, danger, inequity, and abuse out there in the world. Why does the future always seem bleak? Especially when we have the capacity for so much wealth and abundance?

“I don’t understand how, as a world population, we are buying into this narrative, saying, ‘It’s okay if I have if you don’t,’” Lee says, adding, “Instead of focusing on these deeply divisive issues, focus on the humanity.”

And that is precisely what his music does, in spades. It focuses on the fragility and confounding nature of being alive today while offering a timeless perspective. Existentialism and loss. Death and wonder. Ideas captured in nets of language set loose to your own two ears. What else is Lee supposed to do? It’s all he can—all he wants. For someone who grew up without these tools early on, he has manifested a life surrounded by them now. And yet, music, he says, somehow remains mysterious. There still isn’t quite the right word for it.

“It makes me so upset because we place value on the wrong things,” Lee says. “What’s so beautiful about music is that you can sit in a room with six people, and it feels fucking great. Or you can sit in a stadium or in venues, and it doesn’t feel good. It’s a very mysterious thing. What do I love about it? It’s so fucking mysterious. So mysterious and brilliant you can’t even begin to quantify it. It is the universe. There is no telescope large enough for me to look into it. It’s the thing I find most sacred on Planet Earth.”