Amanda B. Perry “List of Lovers” Album Review
Review by: Katy Tessman, Writer @summit.presents
Edited by: Andrew Perrizo, Owner/Editor @melodicnoisemedia
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“List of Lovers” by Amanda B. Perry (album cover)
A Bold Evolution in Sound and Honesty
By album three, Amanda B. Perry could easily settle into familiar territory, especially given her reputation for a soaring, powerhouse voice and a catalog built on heartfelt love songs. Instead she turns the lens inward. List of Lovers stretches across genres and reads like a collection of unfiltered journal entries, each track capturing a moment of desire, doubt or revelation exactly as it felt in real time. These ten songs are snapshots taken without retakes: raw, candid and emotionally precise. Perry writes with clear-eyed experience and sings with the conviction of someone finally telling the story as it actually happened.
The record unfolds like a collage of scenes viewed through different lenses. Her genre-hopping feels instinctive, giving each song the setting it deserves and lending the album a cinematic quality that feels both familiar and surprising. Recorded at River Rock Studios in Minneapolis with engineer and producer Eric Blomquist, the production ties everything together with careful intention while allowing the emotional imperfections to stay visible.
A Cinematic Opening: “I Can’t”
The opener, “I Can’t,” lands with a cinematic sweep that genuinely echoes Bridgerton: lush, emotional and charged with the slow-burn tension that builds right before everything unravels. Joe Peterson’s piano lays a steady, elegant foundation, while DGS’s violin (Zippy Laskey, Annie Fitzgerald) arcs across the melody like the slow pan of a camera in a candlelit ballroom. The track feels like the first page of a journal you know is about to reveal something she has been avoiding for far too long. The music creates a world around the lyrics, refined on the surface and turbulent underneath, the kind of setting where a love story can turn beautifully catastrophic.
Emotional Whiplash and Revelation: “You Said”
For this writer, the album’s emotional bullseye is “You Said,” a song that feels like the moment you finally hear the truth you have been trying to outrun. Perry drops you straight into a car, engine running, heart wrecked, on the kind of road trip nobody brags about. There is no melodrama here, only the awful clarity of betrayal settling in. The writing is sharp and cinematic, and her delivery makes the song feel lived-in, like she is handing over a page from a diary she knows she should keep to herself.
Raw “ohs” and “ooos” bleed through the mix like someone crying out before they can form actual words. Then Perry lands the line that defines the track: “it’s the same as before / ain’t nothing changed but the weather / ain’t nothing changed but my forever.” It becomes a photograph of emotional whiplash: the instinctive sound of loss followed by the stillness of recognition. It is Perry at her most precise.
Self-Inventory Without Filters: “List of Lovers”
The title track, “List of Lovers,” is where Perry stops editing herself. The song reads like a confession written in the margins of a notebook, blunt, unpolished and honest. Lines like “I guess I’m dirtier this time around” are not dramatic flourishes. They are Perry acknowledging who she is and who she has been, with no attempt to retouch the image. Her smaller admissions land hardest, like “the names keep scrolling in my bed,” a stark acknowledgment of longing, habit and regret intersecting in one frame.
“Carefully planned it but I’ll never plan this” is another unfiltered truth, a recognition that love keeps ignoring the plans she sets down. Joe Peterson’s harmonica moves through the track like a voice from an old photograph, familiar and worn, underscoring everything she is finally willing to say.
The Album’s Flash of Light: “I Found You”
“I Found You” arrives as the album’s brightest, most urgent moment. It feels like a torn-out journal page someone tried to throw away but could not. Perry is fully exposed here, dramatic and self-aware in equal measure. The song carries the emotional sweep of Florence and the Machine, with a melody that surges forward and refuses to sit still. David Feily’s guitar (BZ3 Organ Trio, LA Buckner’s BiG HOMiE) adds grit and motion, pushing the track between hope and collapse.
The final line, “it may take years just to find you… 70 years but I’ll find you,” reads like a sentence underlined three times in a notebook. Hopeful. Exhausted. Impossible not to believe.
A Tender Final Page: “My Old Heart”
The closer, “My Old Heart,” pulls everything inward with quiet clarity. Joe Peterson’s piano offers a warm, unhurried foundation, while DGS’s violin drifts through like a faded photograph rediscovered in a drawer. Perry’s lyrics feel like a conversation with every past version of herself, moving through innocence, regret and reckoning.
Her voice rises with understated strength, and when she sings “This is me,” holding it for four bars, it lands like the final line of a chapter she has been trying to write for years. It is an unguarded moment of self-recognition. The album exhales here.
A Closing Snapshot
List of Lovers stands as Amanda B. Perry’s most daring and emotionally revealing work to date. Blending cinematic arrangements, fearless lyricism and a willingness to present each moment with its original emotional grain, the album feels like a series of honest snapshots laid out without retouching. Perry’s voice remains steady and expressive through every confession, and the production elevates that honesty with clarity and intention. The album is polished without losing the emotional detail that makes it resonate. It stands as a powerful, cohesive statement from an artist growing more confident, more adventurous and more unflinchingly truthful with each release.
