Amelia Day — Poetry in Motion and People Pleasing, Live at the Pocket

Food poisoning and a ten-hour drive didn’t stop Amelia Day from bringing the house down in Washington, D.C and the stressful ordeal taught her a valuable lesson about learning how to be comfortable saying no and the importance of prioritizing her health on tour.

In the third stop of The People Pleaser Tour, the Nashville-based folk rock musician brought her impressive guitar skills, beautifully rich and introspective lyricism, and bright personality to the Pocket in Washington, D.C. on March 20 in a deeply personal evening of warmth, laid-back fun, and soul-searching.

It was my first time attending the Pocket, a small 75-person venue, but nothing could have prepared me for how truly intimate it was. With no backstage area for the musicians, they had to load the stage, as well as enter and exit it, through the crowd. It felt extremely odd to see someone slip past you to walk onstage or walk by you carrying a keyboard, but it was strangely nice. And the musicians were all kind and friendly enough to chat with people before and after the show.

The Wonderlands, a Nashville-based band, play a short but energetically vibrant set full of breezy, summery indie pop songs, most of them unreleased. The lights cut out before their last song, and instead of awkwardly stalling until they start working again, the band laughs it off and asks the audience to turn on their flashlights, illuminating the small stage. Right before the last chorus, the colorful lights abruptly turn back on, almost as if it were planned. 

After the Wonderlands clear the stage, genre-blending four-piece Miki Fiki enthralls the audience with their vibrantly eclectic, electro-pop/alt-pop tunes, the kind of music that feels entirely fresh and innovative, a true rarity. (Frontman Ted Hartog tells me after the show he’s largely inspired by ’90s R&B.) With quirky, spirited electronic beats, bouncy guitar, and funky trumpet solos, Miki Fiki gets the crowd moving and even singing along to the simpler parts of their songs.

Shortly after, Amelia Day takes the stage, with Miki Fiki by her side as her band, and hits the ground running with two songs off her latest EP. 

The bright and horns-supported ‘Skippin’ Down the Sidewalk’ sets a jovial, casual, and fun-loving tone for the show, and the next song, ‘Therapist’s Wet Dream,’ is a more folky, lyrically complex anthem about mental health and the destructive nature of people-pleasing tendencies, hilariously ironic due to the nature of Day’s last 48 hours. She sings, ‘So don’t run too fast or you’ll fall; Ain’t nothin’ ever hurt that never mattered at all; Don’t deserve your tears when you cry; Just keep ’em inside and don’t pay me no mind.’

After falling victim to food poisoning after her first show in Atlanta, Georgia, Day was forced to cancel her second show in Charlotte, North Carolina, then drove ten hours from Atlanta to D.C. the day of that show, arriving at the venue minutes before her set was scheduled to start. 

Day calls the whole debacle ‘a learning experience,’ and even though she physically couldn’t perform, she initially struggled to come to terms with accepting that she needed to cancel her Charlotte show. 

‘It was pretty clear that I just [couldn’t], but if it had been more unclear there, I hope that I still would have made the call to cancel the show,’ she tells me. ‘Especially at the beginning of tour, I think it’s important to look at things from a bird’s eye view and see I need to be saving my energy, focusing on my health and mental health [to] be able to make it through all of this.’

After thunderous applause following ‘Therapist’s Wet Dream,’ Day plays her newest release, biographical and self-reflective classic folk and country rock track ‘The Songwriter,’ along with two unreleased songs exploring the transition from girlhood to womanhood, ‘Mama’ and ‘Clementine.’

These three songs will be released as an EP, titled ‘The Clementine Trilogy,’ at the end of May or early June. Since graduating last year, Day has been reflecting on becoming an independent adult, what it means to identify with the term ‘woman,’ and how to reignite childlike wonder to tap into creativity.

‘This trilogy is very much about approaching that transition from girlhood to womanhood and the ways expectations shift, either internally or externally, what people expect of you being different,’ she says.

The lively, lyrically rich ‘Mama,’ which was recently released as a single on April 11, explores the complexities, societal pressures, and double standards of motherhood. Day observes the most important women in her life, many of whom are mothers, sharply criticizing how the world views mothers as opposed to fathers and how women are unceremoniously and unjustly stripped of their personal identities as soon as they become mothers. 

‘Their identity becomes “mother,” rather than this individual with all of these passions and dreams and different creative endeavors and stuff,’ Day tells me. ‘And we should be viewing women as their individual selves, who are also moms, who also have this responsibility. It’s definitely dehumanizing.’

‘Clementine,’ a soft, beautifully simple song, revolves around the concept of growth, specifically learning how to ‘heal from some things that happened in girlhood as a woman, being able to look back on that, and instead of pushing that down, being able to really incorporate that back into the self,’ Day says.

The audience responds overwhelmingly positively to the two unreleased songs, cheering and applauding as Day beams with gratitude. The rest of the setlist is a vibrant blend of Day’s older music, specifically the slow ‘When You Let Down Your Hair’ and the jazz-influenced ‘Silhouette’ off her first EP; another unreleased song called ‘Lady Los Angeles;’ and ‘Alma Mater,’ an indie rock track off her most recent EP. Day also performs her own spirited, folk rendition of Little Willie John’s ‘Fever,’ a song that fits her voice beautifully.

Of course, Day ends the night with ‘Eastward of Eden,’ an incredibly poetic Celtic folk-inspired song about the rise and fall of humanity. Starting with just Day singing while playing the acoustic guitar, the rest of the band joins in spectacularly impressively and cinematically as soon as the first verse ends. Day sings, ‘Our towers, they rose up and set with the sun; Our sermons, they burnt us with fiery tongue; We wrought our wings of metal, surprised when we fell; Oh, eastward of Eden, where heaven’s a hell.’

The audience applauds and cheers Day and her band as the show ends, and she smiles and waves in gratitude before exiting the stage. The venue doesn’t empty out until over an hour later, after the Wonderlands, Miki Fiki, and Day finish selling merch, taking photos, signing autographs, and chatting freely with people. 

It’s past midnight by the time Day sits down with me to talk, and by that time, exhaustion has hit me like a truck. I’m amazed she’s still going, and all with a bright, genuine smile. Nobody would guess she’s recovering from sickness, had driven ten hours that day, played a full show, and spent an hour talking to fans and loading her gear into her Subaru.

After I assure her I won’t be upset if she opts to go get some sleep instead, Day insists on speaking to me as planned, leading me to marvel at her resilience and wonder how touring musicians stay energized and emotionally stable. 

I ask her, especially after the last few days she’s had, how she prioritizes her mental health on tour, and she says she needs a blend of isolated decompression time and social interaction to recharge and function properly.

“I really desperately need both in an intense form consistently, which is sometimes a bit difficult to manage. It’s hard to make that happen on tour sometimes,” she says. “I think as things progress, I definitely will need to find ways to hold on to that time alone, because I think I do need that to be able to put on the best shows that I can.”

This ordeal has definitely taught Day the importance of setting personal boundaries, prioritizing rest, and listening to her body. Though life as a touring musician has proven to be stressfully unpredictable and emotionally draining, Day says she wouldn’t trade it for the world.

”I really do love this,” she says. ”This is what I want to be doing forever, and hopefully, I’m meant to be doing it. It’s just so, so fun.”

Follow Amelia Day on Instagram and TikTok, and stream her newest single, ‘Mama,’  here. Listen to her discography here.

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WORDS ALLYSON PARK