By Victoria Wasylak
From our September 2024 issue
Growing up in Windham, songwriter Amy Allen spent summers waterskiing and tubing behind her parents’ speedboat on Sebago Lake. In winter, she and her two sisters would skate 10 minutes across the frozen lake to their grandparents’ house. “Over all the years spent on that lake, we discovered so many hidden swimming and cliff-jumping spots that I could probably drive you to on a boat with my eyes closed,” Allen says. When she wasn’t on the water, she was often in the car, commuting to guitar lessons and school at Waynflete, in Portland. At age 10, she began playing bass in her older sister’s band and, when she was a teenager, the two had a recurring gig opening for the bluegrass Jerks of Grass at a couple of Portland pubs, Gritty McDuff’s and the former Bull Feeney’s. In 2015, Allen graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in songwriting.
Today, Allen lives in Los Angeles, where she has co-written hits for pop stars like Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Lizzo, Olivia Rodrigo, and Harry Styles. Last year, she earned a Grammy nomination for Songwriter of the Year, and, this month, she’ll release her debut solo album, a self-titled compilation of acoustic-leaning indie-rock tunes she says are too personal to let anyone else sing. Writing and recording in her adopted city has been a thrill, Allen says. But thinking back on the thrill of clinging to an inner tube as it careened in and out of a wake, she adds, “Sebago Lake will always be home.”
