 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. My name is Amanda Standlut, blues musician, and mostly I consider myself a storyteller. I really like to sing songs that tell stories that aren't heard very often, like about poor people, rural people, and kind of in the style of like old-time music, kind of holding on to like American Roots music. And being a storyteller, how did you get into music as being like your form of storytelling? Well, when I was a kid, my parents kind of figured out that I had an ear for music, so I just remember I was like five or six, and we had kind of started piano lessons, but I would hear things on the radio and be able to kind of pluck them out, and so I started with the piano, and then we had a guitar around the house, and my mom is a musician, and so she has an all-girl band when she was younger, and so she had that, and I think I inherited some of that. My dad was the big listener of music, and with those two things combined, that's how I kind of started, and then I have a cousin. She's actually a fiddler for Kenny Rogers, and his name's Amber Randall. So when I was very young, we went to visit, and she played for me, and I remember just being like, there, that's what I want to do. So I begged my mom to get me a fiddle, and she rented me one, and I started violin and voyager in Morehead, Minnesota, and what was cool about that is that we had a really nice orchestra program and stuff like that, so I got a lot of the orchestra, but there I was like, Amanda, you play too fast, and I'm like, yeah, because I want to play fiddle. I don't want to be, but I feel kind of stuck between those worlds sometimes, but certainly more of like a folky person, so. Let's talk a little bit about your approach to songwriting. Does a melody come to you first, or is it lyrics, or kind of back and forth? It's back and forth very much so, but this morning I woke up with a melody, and I could just have my phone with me now, and I'm like, and then I do that, but I think with the one-line approach, it's like I get one line, and I feel like it's kind of catchy, and then a lot of times if it's like a storytelling thing, lately it's been a lot of character stuff, and so it's not my story, but parts of it I think are universal. But you get one line, like the lately the one that I've been working on is called Sugary Sweet, and the first line that I got was, I know we ain't free, but baby talk sweet to me, and so from that I was like, why would somebody say that, and then you ask yourself these questions, like would we be the situation that that comes from, and I think that that's kind of how that unraveled. Other than that, sometimes you just get weird stuff in your head, and you're just like, okay, cool, and then kind of be like a shell silvesting, just rhyming and fun and whatever, and it can go that way as well. So when you are going to do a performance, do you come in with kind of an idea of what songs you're going to do, or are you kind of willing to improv a little bit when you're playing? I'm an improviser. I used to have a band and they made me do set lists because they were just organized, but I'm not. And my thing too is I feel like you get a feel for it, because like sometimes you're like, oh man, you don't want to play like for totally this like heart-wrenching tunes in a row. You got to kind of spice it up a little bit. So sometimes I'm like, if I have a listener thing in mind, I always end up changing it, so I just stop doing it. It's like a nice thing to feel out the audience and feel what's going on and that kind of thing. What's it like telling other people's stories and having the responsibility of sharing their stories to audiences? Well, what's interesting I think for me is like, even though I feel like a lot of it might come from part of myself, I think I fictionalize the characters in a way to handle it. And I think like a lot of people do that with any sort of painful things or things like that is its way to make it kind of distant from yourself so that you can actually process it a little bit. And for me it does feel really heavy sometimes. The process of writing these songs, I'll just bawl because I feel like I'm super empathic. I think it's like a lot of people do that and they're not really appreciated in a way that they should be a lot of caregivers and I think it's kind of the same thing it's like this giving of yourself and hoping that you're going to help somebody. That's it.