Amie Penwell

Amie Penwell    

Windows

“Beast and beauty ride in tandem.”
(lyric from the song “Window”)

I believe all of us are trying to better navigate and understand our roles, plights, masks, defenses, and reactions to a world in an increasingly, desperate need to experience more of ourselves in these confines, real or imagined. Giving voice to our own truths, our realities, our power, our fear of that power, and the paradox of the need to admit powerlessness before true change proceeds.

I’ve spent the last few years working on a collection of songs that came out of conversations I had, and experiences I’ve shared, with women of diverse ethnic, economic and religious backgrounds.

With the help of my collaborators, that collection has become my new record, Windows. It’s an intimate, firsthand look into the lives of nine women on nine different journeys. Each song is a portrait of individual and collective exploration through acceptance, power, will, humility, denial, willingness, faith, surrender, and freedom.

The ultimate goal of this work is to stimulate conversations with one another, to help each other and the upcoming generations be more awake, objective, vocal, and free. To walk with one another through the sometimes brutal inventory of facing of ourselves, through the society we find ourselves in.

My main objective as an artist is to focus on what the moment has to teach me, to extract truth, the lesson from the beastly, the beautiful, and every ordinary passing in between. My experience has made clear to me that the more honest I am with myself, the more connected I can be with others. I believe there is no work worth sharing that won't at least try to be of service to another.