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Amy Kuney

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In the process of recording her second full-length album - "Onyx"

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Hometown	Santa Monica, CA
Genres	Pop, Singer/Songwriter (Female)
Band Members	Amy Kuney
Achievements	» more
Upcoming Shows	None

Contact Information:	Manager Reese Lasher lasher.reese@gmail.com 713-805-1741 Publicist Audrey Marshall audrey@amykuney.com 949-636-9615 Booking Booking booking@amykuney.com 949-636-9615
# Years Experience Performing Live:	4
# Live Perfomances Past Six-months:	10
Market Draw:	Houston, TX: 151-200; New York, NY: 151-200; Los Angeles, CA: 151-200
Venue History:	Hotel Cafe - Los Angeles, CA The Troubadour - Los Angeles, CA The Roxy - Los Angeles, CA Rockwood Music Hall - New York, NY Highline Ballroom - New York, NY 3rd and Lindsley - Nashville, TN Warehouse Live - Houston, TX Mucky Duck - Houston, TX The Grove - Los Angeles, CA Soma - San Diego, CA The White Rabbit - San Antonio, TX The El Rey Theatre - Los Angeles, CA Hawthorne Theatre - Portland, OR Zoey's - Ventura, CA The Boardwalk - Orangevale, CA Lestat's - San Diego, CA Cafe 939 - Boston, MA Molly Malone's - Los Angeles, CA The Viper Room - West Hollywood, CA Chameleon Club - Lancaster, PA The Living Room - New York, NY Cactus Cafe - Austin, TX Hotel Utah - San Francisco, CA Opening Bell - Mosaic - Dallas, TX Dakota Live Music Lounge - Santa Monica, CA The Cellar Door - Visalia, CA Hard Rock Cafe - San Diego, CA Hard Rock Cafe - Universal City, CA Hard Rock Cafe - Las Vegas, NV Hard Rock Cafe - Houston, TX House of Blues - Las Vegas, NV Crocodile Rock Cafe - Allentown, PA JFK JetBlue Terminal 5 - New York, NY The OC Fair Main Stage - Costa Mesa, CA The Gardens of El Paseo - Palm Desert, CA Martini Ranch - Scottsdale, AZ Slim's - San Francisco, CA The Glass House - Pomona, CA The Tin Angel - Philadelphia, PA School of Rock - South Hackensack, NJ Neumo's - Seattle, WA Bootleg Theater - Los Angeles, CA
Opener Experience:	Kate Voegele; Damien Rice; Jason Reeves; Tyler Hilton; The Veronicas; Tyrone Wells; Colbie Caillat; Cherie Currie; The Bangles; Ari Hest; Angel Taylor; Bryan Greenburg; The Rescues; Gavin Rossdale; Varsity Fan Club; Blueskyreality; Zee Avi
Similar Artists:	Fiona Apple; Sia; Brandi Carlile; Adele; The Script; OneRepublic; Maroon 5
Performing Rights Society:	ASCAP
Discography:	Waiting For You Single—2011; Where I Can't Follow Single—2011; Gasoline Rainbows Single—2010; Hope A Little Harder Single—2010; Bird's Eye View LP—2008

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About the Artist

With support from MTV, LA Weekly, Sirius XM Radio & Big Champagne, LA-based Amy Kuney has quite the buzz behind her. Her song “Gasoline Rainbows” is featured as the title track of a benefit album alongside Phoenix, The Black Keys & Damien Rice...

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Music

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Achievements

Music Grand Prize Winner March 2009

Premium Member Competition: Win a Mentoring Session With Music Industry Veteran Rob Stevenson!

Singer-Songwriter (Female) Artists, Win A Year’s Supply of Free Strings & Accessories From Ernie Ball!

Music Grand Prize Winner March 2009

Premium Member Competition: Win a Mentoring Session With Music Industry Veteran Rob Stevenson!

Singer-Songwriter (Female) Artists, Win A Year’s Supply of Free Strings & Accessories From Ernie Ball!

Reached 1st in Best of Pop chart in 2011. 1st for 1 week.

Ernie Ball Sponsors The Singer-Songwriter (Female) Music Channel

Reached 2nd in Best of Pop chart in 2013. In the top 20 for 21 weeks.

Pop Videos Winner, May 2012

OurStage "Kick Up The Keys" Competition

Reached 3rd in Best of Pop chart in 2011. In the top 20 for 13 weeks.

March 2009 Pop

Pop Winner, January 2012

Pop Videos Winner, October 2011

Pop Videos Winner, September 2011

Pop Videos Winner, August 2011

Top 10 in Singer-Songwriter (female), July 2011

Press Coverage

People Magazine by People Magazine 5.19.08
Kate Voegele - My Myspace Faves:I stumbled into an L.A. lounge she was playing at. She totally worked it! She's like Fiona Apple and Sarah McLachlan. An amazing lyricist.- Kate Voegele

VP MTV Creative Music Integration by Joe Cuello
I first came across Amy and her music three years ago. Watching and hearing her deepen from an artist I admired then has been amazing. Her songwriting, lyrical ability, and captivating live...

People Magazine by People Magazine 5.19.08
Kate Voegele - My Myspace Faves: I stumbled into an L.A. lounge she was playing at. She totally worked it! She's like Fiona Apple and Sarah McLachlan. An amazing lyricist. - Kate Voegele

Sirius XM Radio by Larry Flick
Hope A Little Harder, Gasoline Rainbows... my darling, you have me on the floor with emotion. You’ve hit a new level of your gift. What a joy to witness your evolution. You’re going to be a MASSIVE star.

Buzzine by Buzzine: Indie CD Grab Bag
With a husky voice and baroque-pop style, Amy Kuney will appeal to fans of Aimee Mann and Shawn Colvin too. The winsome “Simple Things” is a greet-the-day morning song, while “Angel Tangled in the Telephone Lines” has a bittersweet air of regret, and “Love is Trippy” is a Beatles-influenced ditty, though her vocal delivery remains irony-dipped. The folky strum of “Time Machine” is very campfire/coffeehouse, and the closing title song is a forlorn acoustic waltz. -Darryl Morden

Ectophiles Guide to Good Music by Ectophiles Guide
Amy Kuney follows her strong debut ep with a full-length that really satisfies. She's a terrific singer and songwriter and this round of songs is insightful. "Simple Things" celebrates life without seeming trite; Kuney's vocals are soulful and sincere. "Angel tangled in the telephone wire" is a lovely song, with a shade of Fiona Apple's expressiveness in the delivery and a complex arrangement. "Love is trippy" is richly orchestrated without being smothered by it all, and the Beatles influence works well. Kuney's matured nicely as an artist and lives up to her early promise. She should be able to make many albums like this. (stjarnell@yahoo.com)

Amy Kuney's journey to fame by Good Times Santa Cruz
WRITTEN BY CHRIS J. MAGYAR TUESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2008 The singer-songwriter from Oklahoma and Honduras on her unusual life Music is a series of bits and pixels these days. One day, while trolling a site called The Sixty One —which treats new songs by indie musicians like stocks for music lovers to invest in—a tune called “Simple Things” caught my ear. Featuring YAFSS (yet another female singer-songwriter), the song immediately grabbed me with the singer’s perfectly controlled alto laced with that sly Midwestern accent first mastered and popularized by Judy Garland. By the time the line “the sky is tired of being scraped” hit and the hook unfolded like a sunrise tinged with a hint of orange irony, I was already surfing the artist’s MySpace and clicking through to several YouTube videos of her covering Coldplay and Damien Rice . By the accident of a glance, I saw an upcoming tour stop in Santa Cruz … for free? This process of serendipitous discovery is more orchestrated than it seems—labels place the songs on social networking sites and instruct their young acts to video themselves performing cover songs in order to foster just that sense of proprietary “I’m the one who found this musician” feeling—but what’s remarkable about the story of Amy Kuney , this particular find, is that her life story is as convoluted and sideways as the modern marketing methods that are putting her into the spotlight. “I started out as a classical piano player for church and all that, and that’s what I always thought I would do,” she says of her early childhood. By the time she was an adolescent, her father had left his day job and took the family to Honduras, stranding young Kuney in a country without much to do or anyone to talk to outside her family. Young, alone and upset enough at her circumstances that she initially refused to learn Spanish, she turned to writing songs just to pass the time, then found herself in a church salsa band. “I was always in the back,” she says. “It was an all-boy band and they wanted to be the lead singers. I asked the lead singer at one point that, if I learned guitar, if I could be out front. But by the time I learned guitar, I said, ‘Screw them, I’ll go on my own.’ ” By college age she was back in California (she now lives in Santa Monica) putting together a few songs. She caught a lucky break early and wound up on stage in the background of a "Gilmore Girls" episode, but things started really rolling this year, after college. “I’m always a workaholic and I like things to go fast, but especially during the summer things went fast,” she says. “Getting a song on the season finale of 'One Tree Hill' helped a lot. Kate Voegele mentioned me in People magazine and I started touring with her. I started covering songs on YouTube, which was my label’s idea, and I enjoyed that. I am a huge fan of Damien Rice and I covered one of his songs—‘The Blower’s Daughter’—and one of his fans sent it to him. He liked it, I guess, and wrote a few days later and asked me to come to Iceland. I agreed pretty fast. We left four or five days later.” The whirlwind tour of Iceland happened just before that country’s infamous bankruptcy, which made for a strange experience. “The economy was pretty crazy over there. The dollar over there had no worth, so we were trying to figure out how we’d survive. We were there right before [the economic collapse] happened. I made some money there selling CDs and by the time I switched it over to dollars it had lost a third of its value. I kind of have a fanbase there now, and they want me to come back because at this point I could live like a queen.” From Honduras to Iceland, Kuney has evolved into a pop ballad machine, in the mold of such lightning-fast stars as Regina Spektor and Ingrid Michaelson , with twisty and clever lyrics (“Rocket Surgery” shows them off best). But her success is due to more than accident. She says most of her free time is spent responding personally to every e-mail her fans send her, which has led to making friends all over the place. This Halloween, she and some of those friends in Texas went trick-or-treating. “I went for the first time in my life,” she admits. “My parents are Southern Baptist missionaries so I was never allowed to go trick-tor-treating, and the last couple years I was in college I thought, ‘I’m getting up there, so I won’t be able to pull it off much longer.’ So I did it with some friends in a little neighborhood in Houston. The kids are so young, and there was hardly anyone after 9 p.m. I’m used to going out late, so I must have seemed kind of creepy.” She has also solicited reading material from her fans, and is currently reading “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston, though her next fan recommendation is the teen vampire romance novel “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer. “I like to communicate with the younger kids,” she says, then laughs. “I feel like an old person talking.” Courting that younger fanbase—she played mostly jazz clubs and sit-down venues to older crowds in her earlier career—has also meant embracing the digital, so she and her label decided to release her latest album, Bird’s Eye View, in an eco-friendly mini-package. “I wouldn’t call myself a tree hugger or anything,” she says, “but I noticed that when I buy a CD, I take the disk out, stick it in my computer, and throw the package away. I wondered where all the plastic and cardboard go.” She says the CDs are only peddled to the older fans anymore anyway. “Today I played at a high school in the morning, and I just gave out a card about how to get to it on iTunes.” And the digital whirlwind of music begins anew. But the miracle of this new system is how it’s bringing fans closer to musicians like Kuney, who answer every e-mail, and have an interesting and personal story to tell. Perhaps this is what the future of music is—everything but the fake, fancy package.

Rhapsody by Nate Cavalieri
The showpiece of this collection is Amy Kuney's dusky alto, which offers self-assured pop songs that are too smart to ever get overblown. Topping things off are the clever turns in songs like "Rocket Surgery" and "Love Is Trippy," when the Tulsa songwriter's coy charm helps sweeten the sarcastic barbs.

LA Weekly: 2008 & 2009 Write-ups by LA Weekly
It’s hard not to like the younger singer-songwriter Amy Kuney... Even with the album’s mainstream style, Kuney flashes more wit and intelligence than most pop starlets of her generation.

New Songbird Alert: Amy Kuney's "Bird's Eye View" by San Diego Union Tribune
Thanks to Sophie 103.7's constant rotation of Ingrid Michaelson, I've been enjoying the dog days of summer best with less hip hop and funk and more folk and soul. On that note, I have to recommend you Street readers check out on-the-rise singer/songwriter Amy Kuney when she comes to Lestats tomorrow night. Kuney, who just released her CD "Bird's Eye View" yesterday, mixes the lyrical honesty best reminiscent of Fiona Apple with a truly unique and beautiful voice. You may recognize her music from the season finale of "One Tree Hill" but apparently she also spent some time as one of the folk singers featured on the quirky dramedy "Gilmore Girls" a few years back. Some of my personal favorites from her CD include "Simple Things," "Thank You for Last Night," and especially "Rocket Surgery. - Kate Stanhope

Playlist: Adam Lambert's 'Mad World,' plus 10 more by USA Today
USA TODAY's music critic Jerry Shriver highlights 10 intriguing tracks found during the week's listening. Gasoline Rainbows" - Amy Kuney The title of the title track from this new album benefiting oil-spill-plagued Gulf of Mexico towns says it all.

Music Picks: Amy Kuney by LA Weekly
Tulsa singer Amy Kuney was kidnapped by rebels when she was a teenage tourist in Guatemala, but she has seemingly recovered from that ordeal with few traces of tragedy or terror in her gentle piano-pop tunes. Her musical backing is quite mainstream, but there are hints of depth and soulfulness in power ballads like "Hope a Little Harder." She even reveals a social conscience in "Gasoline Rainbows," which shares lyrical imagery with Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger's recent "Rainbows in Gasoline" but is actually about last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Gasoline Rainbows by CHARTAttack
This new compilation is one of those efforts, and it features brand new songs by City And Colour, Damien Rice and Amy Kuney. All the proceeds will go to Global Green's relief work in the gulf. Kuney's tune, which kicks off the collection, is particularly moving, and its lyrics encapsulate just how devastating the spill has been on the communities and environments throughout the gulf coast.

Amy Kuney Was Once Kidnapped. True Story. by The Deli: LA
Amy Kuney may seem like the cutesie wootsie girl next door armed with a guitar and a diary full of lyrics to her sweet pop gems, but peel off a layer and it'll be revealed that the popstress was once kidnapped by Guatemalen rebels at the age of 17. Um, WTF, right? Artists who need a backstory: the benchmark has been set.

Fractured Industry: Companies That Serve Musicians by NPR - The Record
The business model for musicians is changing. Instead of just a handful of major labels, there are now thousands of small companies in the business of helping musicians connect with listeners. Amy Kuney's "All Downhill From Here" has been listened to nearly 250,000 times on her Myspace page. Kuney, who is 25, is part of a new class of musicians who are bushwhacking their way to success. Kuney isn't necessarily trying to use the old formula of getting signed to a record label — which is becoming increasingly difficult as the business splinters. Instead she's using a variety of online tools — from social media to YouTube. If you do things according to the formula you have so much competition," says Reese Lasher, Kuney's manager. "If you do things in a very different way, you forge your own path." Whatever Lasher is doing for Kuney is working; as an unsigned artist Kuney is making enough money to support herself, her manager and a small staff. Eric Garland, the founder and CEO of Big Champagne, a company that tracks music online, says Kuney represents the new D.I.Y. dream for tens of thousands of musicians. "You do have artists, many artists, who set out to make a living as a small business — as an independent artist — and grow that business without necessarily having any intention or expectation that they will do business with a major music company," he says. But these independent artists do expect to do business with a growing array of small companies. Lasher says she is constantly sifting through new sites that promise to help musicians manage their fans, their download sales or their social networks. "And to figure out which one is the best is really difficult," she says. "There are all sorts of like, hidden fees. You know, with Bandcamp they take 15%, which sounds great — it's significantly less than iTunes, obviously — but then there's the 3% that you have to pay for PayPal.

((New Video)) Amy Kuney – Gasoline Rainbows by HunnypotUnlimited
LA’s own Amy Kuney, releases her latest music video for her song “Gasoline Rainbows”. The song and video raises awareness, not just for the situation in the gulf, but for the overall welfare of this planet itself. Check out the video, which is brilliantly directed by Ryan M. Costa, and brings out the true meaning and feeling behind this beautiful composition. 100% of the proceeds from the “Gasoline Rainbows” benefit album go toward Global Green’s oil spill response. You can get the album on iTunes here

Phoenix, Vampire Weekend and More Donate Songs... by Spinner
Indie rock giants Phoenix, Vampire Weekend and the National are among the artists that have contributed music to an upcoming charity compilation that will assist in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill recovery effort. Titled 'Gasoline Rainbows' and due exclusively via iTunes on Nov. 30, the 14-track digital album will aid Global Green USA and also counts tracks donated by LCD Soundsystem, Silversun Pickups, the Black Keys, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Passion Pit and Surfer Blood. The project was the idea of 'One Tree Hill' stars Sophia Bush and Austin Nichols, who first visited Louisiana earlier this year to see the devastation that the oil spill caused. Named for a song penned by singer-songrwiter Amy Kuney specifically for the disc, 'Gasoline Rainbows' also boasts new songs from Damien Rice and City and Colour. All of the artist and label proceeds from 'Gasoline Rainbows' will be used for Global Green's oil spill response to directly assist the communities, people and ecosystems impacted by the BP Oil Spill. Funds from the album will also be earmarked to educate the public, push for more regulation to prevent future environmental tragedies and advocate for a greener, cleaner economy. The tracklist for the album is below: 1. 'Gasoline Rainbows' -- Amy Kuney 2. 'Armistice' -- Phoenix 3. '40 Day Dream' -- Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros 4. 'There's No Secret's This Year' -- Silversun Pickups 5. 'At the Birds Foot' -- City and Colour 6. 'The Connoisseur of Great Excuse' -- Damien Rice 7. 'Bloodbuzz Ohio' -- The National 8. 'Tighten Up' -- The Black Keys 9. 'Let the Time Roll By' -- Onward, Soldiers 10. 'Moth's Wings' -- Passion Pit 11. 'Floating Vibes' -- Surfer Blood 12. 'Mama Taught Me Better' -- Black Rebel Motorcycle Club 13. 'I Can Change' -- LCD Soundsystem 14. 'Cousins' -- Vampire Weekend

Playlist: 'Drive All Night' with NeedToBreathe by USA Today
Waiting for You, Amy Kuney On the one hand, it's an ode to Lady Gaga. On the other, it's a thumping pop-rock tune with an edge-of-glorious chorus.

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