For Amy Shark, the Sunday Scaries are best mitigated with red wine, spaghetti, and a good record – that she wrote, of course. In our interview, the Australian indie pop artist dives into her intimate third album ‘Sunday Sadness,’ an ode to the most controversial day of the week.
Stream: ‘Sunday Sadness’ – Amy Shark
Sunday rituals are deeply personal.
Some people stay in bed until 7:00 at night, rewatching familiar sitcoms and DoorDashing McDonalds. Some people wake up at 7:00 in the morning to make it to 8:00 pilates 15 minutes early (to get a spot right in front of the mirror). Most people fall somewhere in between professional bed-rotting and manic productivity. Singer/songwriter Amy Shark circumvents the spectrum entirely. The Australian singer spends Sundays searching for her birth certificate, eating spaghetti, drinking red wine, and writing songs that she could eventually record with any given member of blink-182.
Sunday Sadness, Shark’s third studio album, is an ode to the most controversial day of the week. Historically, songs about Sunday span feelings of warmth and intimacy (“Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5) to existential despair (“Everyday Is Like Sunday” by Morrissey). While Monday and Saturday are universally loathed and loved, respectively, people can’t even agree on whether Sunday is the first or last day of the week, much less its dignity.
Growing up, Shark’s Sundays were shrouded in loneliness. An Instagram post teasing the album’s launch described days spent dreading school, pondering mortality, and shuffling between her parents’ houses to start the week.
“I hated,” she says, pausing just briefly enough to correct herself, “I hate Sundays because no one’s working. Everyone’s with their families and stuff, and my family’s a little cooked.”
Talking with friends, Shark realized that she wasn’t the only one who felt overwhelmed by the deafening silence of Sundays.
“The more people I spoke to, they were like, oh my God, I get the Sunday Scaries too,” she laughs as she continues, “you know, I always wonder where my birth certificate is late at night.” In creating Sunday Sadness, Shark reclaimed her least favorite day of the week by allocating the once frightening, quiet evening hours to songwriting – her favorite activity – rather than wallowing. The resulting album is cut from the same cloth as the day it honors. It’s sometimes calm, sometimes chaotic, and always observant.
“Slide Down the Wall” kicks off the record with a dose of cautious optimism, with Shark’s raspy vocals mixed against acoustic guitars and soft pianos. “I really wanted a classic song to open this album… Just really something beautiful, and something that will last the test of time,” she tells me. The first track, she confesses, is probably her favorite. But selecting just one favorite song was a nearly impossible task. Shark, whose songwriting is praised across her oeuvre, admits that Sunday Sadness came surprisingly easy. “I wanted it, and then it happened,” she says. That ease is doubly apparent in “It’s Nice to Feel This Way Again,” as Shark sings about the excitement of uncertainty with uncharacteristically breathy vocals over upbeat percussion claps.
Songs like the album’s third and fifth tracks, “Beautiful Eyes” and “Can I Shower At Yours” are reflective of the raw emotion that catapulted Shark to fame with “Adore,” her first true hit. “This album, as much as we experimented, it’s still very classic me,” she shares, likening each song to an intimate short-film about her life. She points me towards Closer, with Julia Roberts and Jude Law, and cult favorite Cruel Intentions as comparables for Sunday Sadness. When listening to the record, “you’ll go through a range of emotions,” she explains, “like love and and and then maybe jealousy… I’m not really scared to use the ugly emotions and show that that’s in me as well.”
Deceptively dark tracks like “Loving Me Lover” briefly mask unpleasant sentiments with what could be sappy titles and buoyant tunes, but Shark completely bares the ugly with “Gone.” I swear I can hear car doors slamming and engines spewing as the final chorus closes:
Yeah, it’s gone, even your dark-blue sweater
Gone, even though we both said forever (Gone)
Gone, what you said to me (Gone)
Tell everyone you’re dead to me
“I think when people think of me,” she smiles, “it’s always going to be kind of honest with potentially a little bit of guitar mixed with some beats and a little bit of punk attitude.”
Shark goes so far as to say there was no fear in creating and releasing Sunday Sadness, in spite of the album’s vulnerability.
Fearlessness is a luxury afforded to her in part because of her age and wisdom relative to her peers, but mostly because she is a bad*ss, through and through. The members of blink-182, arguably one of the best known punk bands of the 21st Century, think so too. Shark has managed to secure a cameo from every member of the band on her first, second, and third albums. Tom DeLonge, the band’s co-lead vocalist and guitarist, is featured on track ten of Sunday Sadness, “My Only Friend.” DeLonge’s unmistakable pop-punk vocals add a little spice to Shark’s poignant and melodic counterpart, as the two harmonize,
“You’re my only friend in the room
And my heart goes out to you
And I know this party sucks, it’s never ending
And I’m sorry to drag you here
I know it’s not your scene
And if he tries that shit again,
say you’re here with me
Just as many of us spend Sunday afternoons filled with anxiety and overanalyzing our relationships, Shark uses Sunday Sadness to explore the depth of human connection. “My Only Friend” isn’t the only track in which she illustrates the intricacies of friendship. With “Two Friends,” she invites us to eavesdrop on a conversation between longtime friends on the brink of something more. It’s seemingly a look at the aftermath of the fateful night between “two friends who liked to play fight” she sings about on the record’s eighth track, “Babe.” The opening lyrics read like a risky text, the kind that makes you throw your phone across the room and spend at least two hours vacuuming before daring to check for a response. “Just had a crazy flashback of a night / Where you were saying words that we know weren’t right / And I feel like things have never been the same between us,” Shark sings.
“I’m really proud of the bridge in ‘Two Friends,’” Shark gushes. “It’s kind of like a big gossip session. Sarah told Becky, and Becky told Tegan, and Tegan told Sophie… It was really hard to come up with all these names and have it sonically sound okay.”
Sunday Sadness sounds more than okay.
Amy Shark has never been one to second guess herself and her music, a reality that shines through on her third album. In coming onto the popular music scene in her 30s, Shark avoided becoming somebody else to become a successful artist.
“For like 15 years no one really cared about what I was doing,” she posits. “I was sort of so beaten down that, by the time I got signed, I was like, ‘I’m Amy, this is my music.’”
From the emotionally charged, cinematic “Slide Down the Wall” to the reflective, bittersweet, and aptly named final track, “Our Time Together,” Sunday Sadness paints a portrait of Shark as a woman who knows how to live. “I never thought I’d be signed,” she reflects, “I never thought I’d play shows… So instead of stressing and second guessing everything, I’m just going to really enjoy it and put out cool stuff and do cool sh*t and that’s it.”
After decades of despising Sundays, her relationship with the day has improved, thanks to red wine, spaghetti, and her best album yet. If Sunday Sadness is a movie to Shark, it’s a poem to me – the first verse of Days by Philip Larkin, to be exact. I’ll leave you with that.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
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:: stream/purchase Sunday Sadness here ::
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Stream: “Loving Me Lover” – Amy Shark
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