Interview: Johnnyswim And The Shadow Of Summer
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- When the folk pop husband and wife team of Johnnyswim heads to Philadelphia this Saturday, November 19th to play Union Transfer, they'll be bringing along one extra crew member.
It's their one-year old son.
"He's been on tour since he was seven weeks old - he's twenty months old now - so he's been traveling for his entire life" says Johnnyswim's Abner Ramirez over the phone on an exhausted day off. "He's good at it. It's a lot of fun. It's fun to be able to take him to new places and new cities, new experiences and all that."
"We're excited that he can kind of grow in his independence and feel comfortable in different places" adds musical mom and singer-songwriter Amanda Sudano. "Being able to be comfortable even when you're uncomfortable I feel like is something most adults don't even know, so I hope that's what he gets from it."
Amanda has seen the bright stage lights shine on parenting before, being the daughter of Donna Summer.
The legacy of "The Queen Of Disco" is something that Sudano grew up within, and as she herself began making music it was a mold that many tried to make her fit.
"For years working with people they wanted that to be the sound, so they always wanted to make me into the new version of what she was or what she could be in this time period" Amanda remembers. "That was one of the things that I loved so much when I met Abner, was that we both were kind of over people telling us what that they thought we should be."
The moody folk pop the couple has crafted is definitely different from the mirror-ball bangers that landed Donna Summer in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, but it's sincere and personal and very much their own.
"I never felt any pressure from my mom. The pressure came in the opposite way" explains Sudano. "I think she had a lot of ideas for these sounds that she wanted to create and genres that she wanted to dip her toe into, and there was always a ton of resistance for her to do that because she made her name doing one thing."
"So she always encouraged us to just find our own voice, to not rush it, to just enjoy writing music and figuring out who we were on our own. Luckily I had the good kind of pressure to do that thing, which is right for us."
You can hear the voices of both Amanda and Abner this Saturday November 19th as Johnnyswim plays Union Transfer in Philadelphia. To hear more from Johnnyswim check out the full interview below.
