Meet Amy Allen: Co-Writer, Chart-Topper and Singer-Songwriter Starlet

Just a year ago, Amy Allen was nominated for Songwriter of the Year at the Grammys for her work on King Princess’ Hold on Baby, Charli xcx’s Crash, Lizzo’s Special and Harry Styles’ Harry’s House, as the latter nabbed her an Album of the Year victory. But, as the summer winds down, Allen is, at the time I’m writing this, credited as a co-writer on three songs in the Hot 100’s Top 5. Her collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter on Short n’ Sweet has left a definitive, monumental imprint on the zeitgeist in 2024, but that’s only half of the story. Now, Allen has released her debut eponymous record, a 12-track singer-songwriter achievement arriving in all lowercase but unraveling in all-caps. The oldest song on her debut was written over six years ago, while the newest inclusion is barely four months old, but she didn’t realize that she was building toward an album until 2023, when the pieces began fastening into place. “I was feeling really fulfilled with what I’d been writing with and for other artists, and it felt like a nice time for me to dive into finishing some of these songs that I’ve written by myself, for myself,” she says. “I’ve resonated with a bunch of them for a long time.”

While Allen is far and away not the same person on “kind sadness” that she was while penning “the american” on her first-ever writing trip in London in 2018, there was an urge for her to not completely abandon the songwriting of her past. Of course, oceans of material got banished to the “deep, dark graveyard of demos” that none of us will ever hear, but every one of the dozen songs on amy allen symbolizes a piece of herself still reachable. “The songs are making the album because they’re something that still resonates with me deeply,” she says. “A huge thesis of wanting to do this album was I wanted to make something that, when I’m a grandmother, I can still be proud of and show to my grandkids and is still making me feel all the same emotions and I still resonate with it in the same way that I did when I was a lot younger.”

Allen lives by that classic mantra of “my favorite song I’ve written is the one I wrote today,” but amy allen is a stunning ode to not forgetting about the music of your yesterdays, about allowing the way you once read and received the world to still motivate and challenge you. “kind sadness” works like it does because it’s galvanized by perspective, as Allen sings about a healthy relationship unavoidably crumbling through long distance. “The saddest thing, I feel like, in relationships, is not when something goes horrendously wrong and you guys break up,” she says. “It’s when everything’s right and you just can’t figure out how to make it work. I’m going through that in my head, like, ‘Oh, everything is so great and I’m so excited about where it’s heading, but what if, logistically, we just can’t figure it out? That would be so sad, because I love this person so much.’”

Before Allen moved to New York City and got involved in the music industry, she grew up in a small Maine town called Windham. Her family lived an hour away from the school she and her siblings went to, so her classic rock-obsessed dad would drive them all back and forth every day and make the stereo a part of their curriculum. “That was our schooling at the time, from when I was five years old, just rinsing Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and even Sheryl Crow,” she says. At the same time, Allen’s middle sister started playing drums in a band called No U Turn.

At some point, the band realized it needed a bass player, so a nine-year-old Allen stepped up. “I don’t think I even knew what a bass was, but I was like, ‘I can play bass!’” Allen shares. “My parents saved up and bought me my first little electric bass and I started learning Tom Petty songs on it.” Years and years before putting a Grammy on her mantle, Allen and her sister’s friends were cutting up at school assemblies and maling music videos that, according to her, are “the worst blackmail for all of us that exists in the world.” While every boyfriend Allen brought home was subjected to watching those videos on a “you can’t love me if you don’t know my past” prerogative, they were an incredibly consequential entry point into her later desire to pick up a guitar and start writing songs with it.

Now 31, Amy Allen has put together an impressive résumé. She went to Boston College for nursing before dropping out to study with Kara DioGuardi at Berklee. She put out songs with her four-piece indie pop group Amy & the Engine and even nabbed a Teen Vogue feature in 2015, moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to work with Scott Harris and sign with Artist Publishing Group and then, in 2018, scored a #1 hit after co-writing “Without Me” with Halsey. She’d move to Warner Records a year later, picking up more writing credits on Pvris’ Hallucinations and Harry Styles’ Top 10 hit “Adore You” before releasing a very good EP of her own called AWW! in 2021. But the most formative experience for Allen came before all of that. On Thursday nights, for five years between ages 13 and 18, she would play her own original songs at bars all around Maine—often opening for a bluegrass band and, sometimes, stepping in with them.

When Allen left for Boston College, she lost her ability to dedicate so much time into her writing and, through that grief, was able to better-understand just how embedded music is in her personhood in the first place. “I was trying to keep up with my school work. I joined an acapella group, which was horrendously not the correct fit,” she says. “I was so ensconced in music for so long and, then, I went away to school and it was not there for me anymore in the same capacity. I couldn’t put myself into it, and being able to write songs and process my emotions and what I’m doing all the time is such an integral part of who I am. I didn’t realize how much I needed music until I didn’t have it anymore.” Her transfer to Berklee wasn’t because she knew it was a renowned music school, but because her mom saw that its campus was in such a close proximity to Boston College’s campus. In fact, Allen originally wanted to attend Belmont. “I was so grateful to be surrounded by people that had the same passions as me [at Berklee],” Allen says. “To be able to put the time into learning how to get better, I didn’t know how big of a part of me it was until I wasn’t there anymore.”

While Allen was living in New York City, as Amy & the Engine was beginning to meet with labels, she had a lightbulb moment that wasn’t a concerted effort to break up the band or retire from touring. Instead, it was a long and winding pathway toward her writing stronger songs. “I had this reckoning that I could write better songs if I really put my time into it,” she says. “All through my time at Berklee, it never dawned on me that I would be a songwriter for other people, but then I was like, ‘I don’t fucking care what it means, but I want to get better at writing songs. I don’t know if that’s a means to an end of being an artist, but I love the writing process so much.’” When Allen did start diving into the co-writing game, she fell deeply in love with it and with the experience of studying why Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton’s songs resonate across generations while also learning from her peers.

Allen still loves to perform—she’s currently opening gigs for Bleachers—and it’s quite elemental to who she is as a musician, but live shows fell to the wayside for her for a long time. But now, it’s becoming instinctual in her songwriting. “It helps a lot to not only be writing for myself alone, but for myself on a stage,” she says. “Seeing what that feels like and what songs resonate and being able to communicate with people that way is important. I’m grateful that I did [end Amy & the Engine], because I know I’m a better songwriter than if I had just put my head down and gone on tour bus after tour bus and never really studied the craft and gone deep into it.”

The first time Allen ever co-wrote was in DioGuardi’s class at Berklee. Sometimes, it would be six people in a room—three producers, three writers—and learning how to co-exist in a space like that was just as intrinsic to the act of making tangible, legible music itself. As Allen puts it, co-writing is its own art form because “there are some people who are the most incredible songwriters ever but they’re not necessarily good co-writers.” To her, collaboration is what makes music consistently new, and her migration into genres like country and R&B lets every turn be a learning curve. “I look back on the first year I lived in New York, where I was really starting to, outside of school, do co-writes and walking into apartments in these alleyways of New York—not knowing who they are—in the middle of the night, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, that was such a scary thing to be doing,’” Allen says. “Now, I’m starting during the daytime and I pretty much know everybody I’m working with at this point. But, it was scary going into rooms where you don’t know anybody there. It’s scary to put your ideas out there and be vulnerable. Even with friends, it’s scary to do that.”

Allen approaches songwriting—and co-writing—holistically. She prefers to come up with the melody, lyrics and chords all at the same time, rather than try writing to somebody else’s track. “It feels like the emotion has been taken out of it,” she admits. “For me, in some way, I know people that are great at doing that, and they can write great, great songs that way, but my entry point to writing a song is finding the emotion in it from the very beginning. I have to storytell from the early seed and then build everything around it.” Allen cites someone like John Prine as a guiding songwriting force, given how his stories are so concise and “each line needs to be there for the next one to make sense.” “And if one line was taken out, the story wouldn’t be conveyed,” she continues. “That’s how important each one is. Each part of it is so important to me that I like to be on the ground floor of it.”

While serving a song that is, inevitably, going to be sung by somebody else remains structurally separated from Allen’s own material, both sides of her artistry feed into each other. It can certainly be difficult finding the time for both elements to co-exist, but they can be so galvanizing and refreshing that, often, they never collide into each other. “They both make me better at the other,” Allen says. “Writing for other people allows me, when I’m writing for myself, to be much more exploratory and feel comfortable moving out of my own little safety box of what I think I do best—because I’ve gotten to learn from so many great writers across so many different genres. I think writing for myself makes me a better writer for writing for other people. Being a performer in any capacity makes me relatable to artists when I’m writing with them, because I know what it feels like to really have to stand behind every line of a song if you’re going to release it. And I know what it feels like to be standing in front of an audience and delivering lines that feel really authentic and true and vulnerable.”

Obviously a song like “Espresso” doesn’t sound like “darkside,” but you can hear Allen’s influence in every song she works on, whether it’s her own or someone else’s. When you hear a song like “Please Please Please,” you can tell that Allen helped write it, because her penchant for dreamy, sugary melodies coupled with brazen lyrics shines through. Of course the person who wrote “Can you imagine tits on Mount Rushmore?” also penned “If you don’t wanna cry to my music, don’t make me hate you prolifically.” It’s as funny and anthemic as it is intimate and honest, and Allen’s technique of using gentle, poppy arrangements to nurture lyrics written in boldface is unconventional yet masterfully executed over and over again, especially on her debut album (“girl with a problem” is an especially rousing moment).

“I subconsciously do it, for sure,” Allen says. “But I’ve always been drawn to really pushing outside the box on what a song sounds like versus what it’s saying. When people do that well, it’s so interesting. The one that so many songwriters think about is Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own,’ where it sounds like this big, dancing anthem, but she’s saying such heartbreaking lyrics on top of it. A song that sounds like your heart is breaking from it, but it’s saying something pretty positive, I’ve always been interested in playing with things like that. I think it makes the listener listen more.”

amy allen is a record that sounds exactly like the environment it was made in. People like Ethan Gruska, Tobias Jesso Jr. and John Hill—writers who have worked with everyone from Adele to Phoebe Bridgers—leave their mark on these songs, and you can hear those dynamics play out. Allen’s eponymous debut is not just an indie folk record; it’s a map of many vernaculars put together by a bunch of artists who she’s worked with on so many other artists’ records. “Getting to then write with them on my own project felt really special and pretty humbling, because I’m such a fan of them and I know that they trust me and my songwriting and storytelling,” she says. “So it was really fun to just create the world with them.” And that world is a cross between Sheryl Crow, Cocteau Twins and Tom Petty, and the songs use everything from 12-string guitars to banjos to synthesizers to drum machines.

Such instrumental variety then opened the door for songs like “weirdo” and “unafraid” to be sonically dissimilar but fit together like an odd blend of Allen’s most beloved milieu. The “Hail Mary of a song” “even forever” has a bombastic poppiness that fades away on the pensive, stripped-back “girl with a problem” while the electronica of “pillar” pushed Allen miles out of her comfort zone, only for her to come back into focus on the chest-ripped-wide-open melancholy of “break”—and yet, they all scratch the same itch, because they all began as poems in Allen’s kitchen that, eventually, got some chords added to them. “I had such a clear vision, sonically, of what I wanted [the album] to sound like, and everybody that I involved in it on the production end are people that have a lot of similar instincts that I do and love a lot of the same music that I do and they know me well as a person and as a writer and as an artist,” she says. “It was off to the races right at the beginning, because they understand me and they know my influences. Everyone on this album is like a close friend of mine. It felt pretty seamless; they all have their own lives.”

“girl with a problem” confirms as much, as it’s a catchy acoustic guitar tune with a windswept, echoey hook. There’s a kaleidoscope of sounds that loop over and over at the song’s end, and you’re not quite sure if it’s Allen’s voice or a synthesizer—in fact, it very well could be a mixture of both. But “girl with a problem” is tight and kinetic, offering a folk soundscape that doesn’t necessarily link up with Allen’s pop sensibilities that have landed her on the Hot 100 chart so often—and that’s a good thing, as a song like this showcases her talents and knack for bite-sized perfection. On “darkside,” the chorus is filled-out with an ensemble of glowing, enchanting, orchestral sounds, while the verses are more spacious. Allen’s hushed vocals counteract the song’s final-minute breakdown, which features synthesizers that sound like strings, thumping percussion and a distinctive, cacophonous vocal melody that soars into an ecstatic, crushing coda.

The old saying goes that you “have your entire life to write your first album, and then you have a year to make your second one,” or something like that. amy allen spans a good chunk of Allen’s life, and it’s going to still do so even when she’s three, five or 10 records down the line. “[The album] was a really nice insight into how certain emotions and certain feelings, like heartbreak or excitement for a current love interest or love for my family, have rang very, very true for me for the past six years,” she says. “That’s what this album has proven, and I think it’s really stabilizing for me to be like, ‘These are things that are going to be true to me for my entire life.’ There are things I was writing about every day six years ago that are still things I’m writing about every day today, and they will be things I’m probably writing about in the next 60 years. That’s an amazing feeling, to know that, every year of your life, there are parts of you that are just going to be true and seasons that you’re going to move through and move out of that you’ll keep coming back to.”

For the last two years, the world got to know Amy Allen the songwriter better than ever, as her work with Olivia Rodrigo, Tate McRae, Justin Timberlake, Blu DeTiger, Charlotte Day Wilson, Diplo, Leon Bridges and Carpenter have made her a regular chart staple. But these 12 songs are a portal into meeting Amy Allen the musician. And, as fate would have it, this is the kind of record that reaffirmed Allen’s relationship with the thing that made her a Grammy winner and industry favorite in the first place: Her urge to tell one good story after another. “Every time I’ve walked into a room with another artist, I’ve always felt like, ‘I know that I can be here for you, because I’m able to be here for myself,’” she says. “‘I can walk through the writing of this song with you and give my ideas and speak from the heart and let my stories also inform this song that we’ve been writing about your story, because I’ve done it every day for myself since No U Turn.’ It’s somethin that has always felt really integral to my day-to-day experience, and I think that’s really nice, finding people that you can share that with. It’s also really nice to be able to share that with yourself. I’m at the seven-year mark of doing this professionally, and I think, sometimes, it can run away from people and they can lose the love of it. I’m grateful that, seven years in, I’m putting out my first album and I feel more in love with songwriting than I’ve ever felt before.”

At the moment, Amy Allen has around 10,000 voice memos on her phone. Some are just snippets of melody hums or fragmented lyrics, while others are more fleshed out but still far, far away from becoming a demo ready for any kind of forward movement. Most of them will never be listened to again, but that quantity is just a prime example of how Allen’s mind is a cache of momentum, and she’s precious even about all the few-second recordings she hasn’t touched in forever. “It’s like when you have a closet full of clothes you never wear and you’re like, ‘But just in case I ever want to wear that really ugly sweater that I haven’t worn in nine years, I’ll keep them,” she laughs. As Allen concludes on her first album: “Life goes by and we make choices.” For her, there will always be an idea worth sitting down with and a muse worth tailing into the unknown.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.