SINNER

BY FRANK DE BLASE FRANK@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

A DARKER AMANDA LEE PEERS COMES INTO THE LIGHT WITH “SINNER”

Amanda Lee Peers sat in the kitchen of her north Greece home in a chair with a gaggle of helium balloons tied to the backrest. Sunlight streaking through the windows showered a vase of sunflowers. On the table lay party favors, remnants of a recent birthday celebration.

She was there to discuss a time in her life that she doesn’t like to talk about much; a dark time that flies in the face of the cheerful ambience of the room but fueled her muchanticipated six-song album “Sinner,” released late last year.

“This album explores the side of life I don’t really talk about a whole lot,” she says. “It’s the pain, the dark times, the struggles I’ve had… but also being aware of the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Sinner” is a stark departure from her previous “Summertime State of Mind,” an upbeat acousticlaced EP released two years ago that emanated what she calls a “kidfriendly” sound. Her latest work is unapologetic in its raw emotion. More eclectic, more electric, more punch. Its intensity leaves the listener out of breath.

It is the kind of art inspired by plumbing the depths of the soul, and reflects a transformation in Peers, both musically and in her appearance, that those who only remember her as the fresh-faced, girl-next-door who sang pop tunes on NBC’s “The Voice” nearly seven years ago now might be surprised to see.

Peers, 35, has traded in her signature flowing goldilocks, a hairstyle she says she felt “owned” her, for an edgy, close-cropped do. The tattoos she wore on her upper arms have crept to her fingertips. “Paradise” is tattooed across her knuckles in blue ink. A skull is on the back of one hand.

But the feelings and the darkness that inspired her, she says, had been there, latent and lurking. Perhaps ironically it was “The Voice” that helped surface what had been suppressed, specifically in her sharing with the television audience her story of growing up in a Christian household where, as she puts it, “being gay wasn’t part of the plan.”

The show was entertainment, first and foremost. The producers wanted interesting stories.

“I kind of had to figure out what my story was, and they helped pull that out of me,” Peers says. “I didn’t want to be the token lesbian on the show, but they made me realize it was an important story to tell. . . . I definitely left the show a different person.”

More than one cut on “Sinner” hints at heavy topics and the emotional weight they carried for Peers. Take just the opening lyrics of “Cruel Joke,” the fourth track, for instance.

Amanda Lee Peers performing on NBC's "The Voice."

So long, farewell, goodbye, I guess I’m going to hell/ ‘Cause it’s too late for me/ I can’t be who you want me to be.

“Blood on the Strings,” the second track, is a full-throttled march of redemption and power. But it doesn’t come off forced, and her voice is propped up beautifully above the production.

All these feelings I’ve buried/ Is looking like a cemetery/ They coming back from the grave/ Calling out my name/ Better say a Hail Mary.

These songs, and the emotion they evoke, didn’t come easily to Peers. They took years to be coaxed into the light. Even as she recorded “Summertime State of Mind,”

PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE

she wasn’t exorcising what she felt needed to be exorcized.

Stuff needed to happen. Peers needed to confront her past, her religion, even her family. She married her partner, Sandy Peers, in 2017. A year later, Sandy would die of what Peers casts as a degenerative disease.

“Sandy always pushed me to keep going and not to give up on music,” says Peers, who dedicated “Sinner” to her late wife. “I’m not sure if we’d be having this conversation now if it wasn’t for her.”

Peers delved deep into her past. She recalled being 19 and word getting around her church, the Open Door Baptist Church in Churchville, that she was gay. When the news reached the pastor, she says, he kicked her out of the church band and told her she would have to seek counselling for her sexual orientation.

It was a difficult spot for her and her parents. “They didn’t agree with how it was handled,” Peers says. “But it was something that really wasn’t talked about with my parents at the time.”

Then came success on the local music scene with the experimental rock-roots band The Driftwood Sailors. The bluesy Peers-led project packed it in with its full-length album “White Hoses & Black Jeans” in 2012, but taking the necessary time off the day job to tour was too demanding at the time.

Peers went solo and caught the eye of the “The Voice” producers with a cover of Bill Withers’ soulful “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.” The headiness and celebrity of the show, which included being on Grammy-winning artist Gwen Stefani’s team, was followed by “Summertime State of Mind,” a romp with ballsy beats, funky flourishes, and a good-time vibe.

She cut off her hair. For a time, she packed in touring. After her wife died, she devoted herself to making music full time. All the while, she underwent a metamorphosis from a religious person to what she calls “a spiritual person.”

Still, as she says, “The dark wasn’t getting out. I don’t think I was ready to explore it.”

Peers' new album "Sinner" reflects a darker, deeper approach to songwriting

than in her previous work. PHOTO BY MAX SCHULTE To mine the darkness, Peers sought the help of producer Sam Polizzi and Johnny Cummings. Their Rochester recording studio Sound Notion has recorded artists like Lou Gramm, Chris Daughtry, and Roses & Revolution, and worked on television shows and commercials.

Polizzi says he could sense that Peers was scratching for something below the lighthearted fare of her earlier work, and helped her bring out the songs that would eventually become the catharsis for her that is “Sinner.”

“I could tell she wanted to go in a different direction than she had in the past with her music,” Polizzi says. “Once we chose the songs, working with her felt like we had known each other forever. We were always on the same page.”

A delight of “Sinner” is the job Polizzi and Cummings did highlighting Peers’ voice, careful not to overdo the sugar-coated studio stunts.

“She was open and loved to experiment with ideas,” Polizzi says. “Actually, her talent made it easier to capture the sound. What was hard about it was making sure the production was as good as she is.”

Tour dates booked in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Florida to showcase her work had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Now, Peers says she’s focused on making music and planning her

next studio recording. Just her and her guitar, her first love for which she was never made to feel guilty.

She knows, too, that love of any kind is something for which no one should feel guilty. What, then, was her sin?

“What isn’t my sin?” she says. “It’s just being a human and I kind of more or less wanted to name the EP that because A, we’re all sinners in the Biblical sense, and B, it was kind of more like I felt I was being branded as a sinner at that time.

“So that’s kind of why I decided to name it that. I owned it. It was like, ‘OK, you want to treat me this way?’ Then that is how I’m going to be.”

SINNER

By Amanda Lee Peers

RELEASED OCTOBER 30, 2020 AVAILABLE ON APPLE MUSIC, SPOTIFY, AMAZON AMANDALEEPEERS.COM

Songwriter-keyboardist Avis Reese used COVID-19's pause on live music for new collaboration. PHOTOS BY JACOB WALSH

PANDEMIC AND RACIAL RECKONINGS FUEL BLACK ARTISTS

BY IRENE KANNYO

For artists, the extreme changes of 2020 — from the world being put on hold by disease to the country’s reckoning with racial injustice — had an undeniable effect on their creative output and, in some cases, led to more radical art.

Sweeping and sudden COVID-19 regulations meant artists were forced to contend with the notion that they were deemed “non-essential.” As museums, galleries, theaters, and music and arts venues shut down and major arts events — like the Lilac and jazz festivals — were canceled, creatives were left in the lurch.

But the Rochester arts community quickly made moves to adapt.

In April, the WOC Arts Collaborative held “COVID-19 Live ROC,” a 24-hour live-streamed event of local performances to raise money for emergency grants for BIPOC creatives who lost income. In May, several Rochester art spaces collaborated to produce a virtual First Fridays event, and Rochester Contemporary Art Center’s annual “6x6” opening was held exclusively online.

By the end of spring, as artists and audiences were adjusting to a “new normal,” the image of a Minneapolis police officer killing George Floyd inundated TV screens and prompted artists to respond anew. It happened again in the late summer, when the public learned of the death of Daniel Prude at the hands of Rochester police officers five months earlier. Their deaths brought systemic racial injustice to the fore.

In speaking to a few Rochester artists to see how the crises of last year affected them creatively, two themes emerged.

RARE OPPORTUNITIES FOR REFLECTION AND CONNECTION

For local R&B singer-songwriter Marshay Dominique, the events gave her time to reexamine her sound, work on new projects and take her writing in a more honest direction. One outcome of this process was freeing herself of preconceived notions about what it takes to reach success as a musician.

“[2020] taught me that I can definitely stand on my own as an independent artist,” Dominique says. “I want to just be raunchy. I wanna swear. I wanna be angry. I wanna party. I wanna sound like a rapper even though I’m not.”

Dominique released a mixtape on Soundcloud last year that she says hints at her new sound.

Artist, filmmaker, photographer,

Marshay Dominique. PHOTO BY JACOB WALSH

and organizer Adrian Elim says time suddenly allowed them to focus more intimately on their art, and in particular, collaborations — some of which culminated in the “New Futures” project, a series of videos inviting Black people to envision their future beyond injustice, oppression, and turbulence. Preview visuals, published on Elim’s social media, featured femme voices and bodies from across the diaspora, broadcasting what a new era for global Blackness looked and felt like, from Elim’s lens.

One of Elim’s goals was to shake up perceptions of how people working in the advocacy space should behave.

Elim wanted to challenge the idea that “just because you fight for social justice, you have to live a very tortured, impoverished, really shitty life on the backend.”

“That is not fucking true at all,” they say. “We deserve luxury, we deserve creativity, we deserve to look as fab as possible. . . . We are human and this is a holistic thing.”

A forced break from traveling and touring enabled Avis Reese, the songwriter, keyboardist, and music director of Danielle Ponder’s soul band, to work on a project she might not have been able to otherwise.

Reese contributed to the progressive hip-hop band Suburban Plaza’s tracks “Philando/Nat” and “Nat II.” The latter appeared on the group’s EP “TULSA,” released in November to fortify and inspire Rochester Black folks demonstrating all summer.

“It felt really good to have it be not just a song just for pure entertainment, but really a song that spoke to the moment that we’re in right now,” Reese says of the song, her first collaboration with the band.

Her sentiment is a common one. When the Rochester community’s focus turned almost entirely to the fight against local police brutality, artists uplifted the message of the movement in their own personal ways.

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE MOVEMENT

Rapper, singer, and actor Chi The Realist, a.k.a. James Boykins, returned to Rochester from Los Angeles to join the protests. He wrote a song for the cause called “Flippin’ Shit Over,” which he calls a “battery for the revolution.”

“Protesting became such a ‘I’m getting ready to go to work’ thing,” Boykins says. “It’s emotionally draining. It’s mentally draining, especially knowing that I have to put on this gear and get ready to go out there and potentially have my life in danger. So it was like, well now that this song is done, if anybody needs anything to fuel them, I will fuel you.”

Mixed media artist and Monroe Community College faculty member Athesia Benjamin won a Wall Therapy mini-grant, which enabled her to create a mural at the Rochester Public Market. The piece is simple and vibrant: “Black lives built this country” written in black, green, and red against a white backdrop.

“That was inspired by some of these incredible handmade protest signs,” Benjamin says. “There’s one sign this young man in South Carolina was holding, and it just really struck me. It said ‘“Matters” is the minimum.’ So I kind of added to that.”

Benjamin says that it’s important to honor and teach the societal contributions of Black people, beyond a mere acknowledgement that “Black lives matter.”

“I just felt so inspired to put that really radical truth — but more truth than radical — on that wall,” she says.

One of Elim’s artistic priorities in 2020 was centering on darker skinned Black femmes, who are often on the front lines of Black Lives Matter protests, and challenging perceptions placed on them by the world at large and even other activists.

“Trying to flip these notions on their head, you know, dark-skinned Black people can’t be soft, or they can’t be tender,” Elim says. “When people think ‘soft’ they think ‘light,’ and I’m like, ‘Why?’ I know why that is, but I’m not interested in that narrative. How do you treat people who are experiencing trauma, who are at the forefront of these things and who are now reacting to things, but then they are not allowed the space to process, be afraid, and be vulnerable?”

Dominique channeled the long history of oppression against Black people in her music. On her Instagram page, she previewed a song called “Maafa (Roses Remix).” In the post, over a track called “Roses,” produced by SAINt JHN, Dominique sings her take on the true story of a runaway slave while a selfie snaps in and out of focus, as if there were static interference.

“I flash images from the Black Holocaust, from slavery: people with whipped backs, people with chains on, just very horrifying images — someone hanging from a tree — and this is all in the middle of my pretty face,” she says. “That was the point.”

Dominique says she didn’t want to shy away from the reality that injustice toward Black people is ongoing.

“When I go research what happened to my people and I still see it happening today, I’m not okay,” she says. “So it was like, ‘Put this here and leave it. Don’t take it down. Don’t put it on private.’”