1. Thank you very much for your time! Before we introduce your new release to our readers – what kind of drink would you recommend to sip on while they listen to your new music?
I’m a wine guy, so I’m going with a really good Langhe Nebbiolo from Piedmont, Italy – something seductive, earthy, and complicated enough that you discover something different with every sip. That feels appropriate for AMATEUR.
Although if you’re listening to “Bespoke” specifically, maybe pour something slightly sweeter, like a Pinot Noir. It could help clear some things up lol.
2. Please give us an update about – new single, new album, tour dates, new videos?!
There’s a lot happening all of a sudden. My new single “Bespoke” is out now, and it’s the first original music I’ve released from AMATEUR – my first major body of original work in over a decade.
The next single arrives September 18 – my version of Tori Amos’ “Tear In Your Hand,” which is actually the first Tori song I’ve ever officially recorded despite her being one of my biggest musical influences. Then “This Dream” arrives October 16, followed by the full AMATEUR album on November 13.
There will also be plenty of visual material accompanying the music – videos, lyric videos, live performances and other pieces that expand the world of the album.
I do have a few release shows planned here in Palm Springs, California (my current hometown), but I’m not announcing a traditional tour at the moment. My relationship with touring is very different these days, so I’m much more interested in creating special live experiences around the record rather than automatically getting back on the road for six months. That said, I am long overdue for a European tour, so Agnes Obel – if you’re reading this – we’ve both been featured in Netflix THE RAIN series, we both have new albums releasing this year, and I think I’d be a very intriguing opener for your album release tour 😉
3. We live in times of many conspiracy theories. Which, harmless, theory would you wish were true?
I may want Bigfoot to be real. Not scary Bigfoot. I want him to have been successfully avoiding civilization for centuries because he values his privacy, has excellent boundaries, and simply doesn’t want to participate in anything unmeaningful. At this point in time, he may be the healthiest among us.
4. What fashion style or brand would best describe your music?
Maybe Alexander McQueen wearing a vintage velvet smoking jacket, barefoot at a grand piano after midnight. Or a John Varvatos t-shirt that reads “Music Saves”. Or more specifically for this new single, something bespoke (pun fully intended). There’s something tailored and theatrical about my music, but I also need it to feel slightly undone. I love beauty, drama and musical opulence, but I’m most interested in seeing the person underneath it. So maybe: stone wash couture?
5. Tell us more about your songs! Topics! Message!?
AMATEUR explores queer adulthood, desire, marriage, sexual freedom, fantasy, childhood, shame, friendship, grief, self-sabotage and ultimately self-forgiveness. I didn’t begin with a concept. I was writing individual songs because certain things in my life needed attention, and eventually I realized the songs were talking to each other.
A lot of the new album lives inside contradiction. Desire doesn’t automatically threaten love. Sexual freedom doesn’t necessarily make someone emotionally free. Something can contain illusion and still change you profoundly. Healing can mean confronting childhood pain, but it can also mean laughing around a table with the chosen family who knows exactly how fabulously queer you are deep down.
The larger question became: Who are you when you stop trying so hard to become the person you thought you were supposed to be? That’s really the heart of AMATEUR – the beauty and heartbreak of still becoming.
6. Beside music, do you have any special talents?
I’m one of those irritatingly multi-creative people who apparently needs seventeen projects happening at once. I work in marketing and content creation, particularly around the gay experience here in Palm Springs (both gay travel and real estate), so I love photography, video, writing, design and figuring out how to tell a story.
I love writing poetry, cooking, wine-tasting (I’m good at blind-tasting), and even yodeling (as more of a parlor trick, lol).
And once a year here in Palm Springs, I become Karen Carpenter. I’ve performed her music in a number of sold-out Carpenters tribute concerts here in Palm Springs, and singing those songs has given me an even greater appreciation for just how extraordinary she was. My theory is that she was queer herself, but that’s another story entirely. So maybe my special talent is shapeshifting?
7. Name 5 things we all should know about you as an artist?!
1. I’ve been fiercely independent for more than 25 years. I came up touring constantly, selling CDs after shows, playing house concerts and building an audience one person at a time. Now, 11 albums later (including AMATEUR), I am as seasoned as they come – even though most platforms will still label me as an “emerging” artist simply because I am indie and haven’t broken through the algorithms yet. #foreveremerging
2. The melody of the song always comes first. However elaborate the music becomes, the song is always trying to tell me what it wants to be through the emerging melodies.
3. I’m interested in complicated feelings, not clean labels and tidy morals. I’d rather write from inside the contradiction than tell you who the hero and villain are.
4. Queerness is increasingly central to my work. Not simply queer identity, but queer adulthood – marriage, desire, shame, freedom, chosen family and all the messy territory in between.
5. I care much more about connection now than proving anything. I still have ambition, but I want the internet to help the right person find a song they might need – not dictate what song I need to make.
8. The road so far…. who or what was your biggest support??
There have been so many people over the years – fans who kept buying records, hosting house concerts, backing albums through Kickstarter, becoming monthly patrons (via Patreon), coming back to shows and telling me that a song met them somewhere important in their lives.
But in terms of the life I have now, my husband Glen has been enormously supportive. He met me while music was still consuming almost everything. I was touring constantly and still carrying this belief that I had to keep pushing or the whole thing might disappear. Building a life with him helped me understand that my career and my identity didn’t have to be the same thing.
Ironically, having a life that became bigger than music is part of what allowed me to return to music with more honesty. Younger Gregory was terrified that stepping away from the machinery meant losing himself. It turns out he was making room to find more of himself.
9. A question you’d like to answer, but never been asked in an interview before?! + Answer pls
What do you hope never becomes efficient about making music?
The part where you don’t know what you’re doing. We’re living through this extraordinary moment when technology – and particularly AI – is promising to remove friction from almost every creative process. And some of those tools are genuinely remarkable. But I don’t want to eliminate all the friction. I don’t want to eliminate staring at a piano until something reveals itself. I don’t want to erase the wrong chord that suddenly becomes the right one. I don’t want to change a singer’s breath, a string player responding emotionally to a lyric, or the moment when a song takes you somewhere you hadn’t planned to go.
With AMATEUR, I became increasingly interested in protecting the evidence of humanity inside the music. I hope some parts of making art remain gloriously inefficient forever.
Instagram: @gregorydouglass