Emil Amos

Holy Sons is a one-man solo band built around Portland songwriter and drummer Emil Amos. Amos is notable for releasing “genre-bending” albums, according to LA Weekly music reviewer Chris Martins, and for being a prolific songwriter; one account in Spike Magazine suggests he has written over a thousand songs. Amos is also a multi-instrumentalist for groups such as Grails and Om and Lilacs & Champagne. Amos was born of the lo-fi home recording movement of the ’80s and early ’90s. Amos described the mission of his music as “facing your personal reality.” Amos said in an interview that, beginning at age sixteen, he used drugs every single day and didn’t let up for years. A music critic for The Guardian described him as a prolific songwriter and as having a “great voice”. Reviewer Rob Cullivan of the Portland Tribune described Holy Sons’ album Survivalist Tales to be an “ode to the dime novels in the early 1900s that peddled the stories of wilderness explorers,” and described the music as “sonic wanderings” with “strange song structures.”

Quotes:

“With an LSD knowledge base, you have a MAJOR sonic advantage over most people who mix sound. Once you work outside of the known sphere of hearing range, you’re affecting people’s emotions in a completely different way & you’re talking to their subconscious mind”

“It’s so important for the artist to really know what they like before they start producing. Consider the one-hit wonder, where you can see it in their eyes that they really don’t know what they like & they don’t know what it is that they were supposed to say.  The difference between a one-hit wonder & somelike like Neil Young is that Neil Young has such a massive amount of opinions”

“Think of a real punk or a real hippie–that’s someone who’s super in touch with the core elements of a movement with hardcore opinions. So if you’re getting into a craft & you don’t have a deep connection to something then you’re just flying in the breeze & the entertainment industry will confuse & exploit you like a flash in the pan”

“So this is why for me I was trying to ground myself & come from a knowledge base that was my own. It was more a protective instinct that a strategy–I wanted to know how to make great music on my own without any dependency”

“If LSD dissolves anything, it’s the things that are not you & leaves behind what is you”

“Will you get to the top of the Holy Mountain? It’s like you won’t know until you actually do it, & by then I don’t think you’ll have the ego left to feel any pride to bask in it. And say you do get to the top of the mountain, you’re looking around for another mountain top! You still need a new thing to work on. It just seems that that’s how our consciousness works.”

“Everybody falls from grace and it’s probably part of the circular path where it’s just something that needs to be done if there’s more work to do”