Dance Artist Amber's music has evolved from lighter, simpler dance pop to pop/rock with a more serious message. On her upcoming dance CD, she stretches the boundaries of the genre by tackling subjects rarely mentioned in dance music.
International Recording Artist Amber began her career in 1996. Her first single, the dance music track "This is Your Night", was an instant success, charting around the world, and more than a dozen #1 and top ten dance hits followed.
Immediately after her debut, the singer was labeled with the moniker Euro Dance artist and all of the baggage that it implied. It's not that the label wasn't accurate to a point. After all, she was from the Netherlands and had worked with prominent German producers on the track. The reality, however, was that Amber was much more than the stereotypical dance music artist.
Amber came from a long line of artists. Her father is an opera singer and her mother, a piano teacher and songwriter. In addition, her family tree contains a higher than average number of performers, painters, composers and songwriters.
As an artist, Amber found the confines of the dance music label restrictive. She felt that she had much more to say than the genre allowed but, commercially, she was expected to make simplistic and happy beat driven music.
To break the chains, she wrote introspective lyrics with deeper shades of meaning on topics that are rarely tackled in dance music. Although she continued to release singles that were remixed for the dance clubs, she peppered each successive album with more and more ballads and mid tempo tracks, all the while taking on more serious subject matter.
Her progress saw her move from the producer driven debut CD "This is Your Night", which contained more than it's fair share of party tracks, to 1999's "Amber", on which she had much more creative control. It was on "Amber", in fact, that her true potential as a songwriter and vocalist shone. The next album "Naked" represented an even greater artistic leap, which reached it's peak two years later on her pop/rock CD "My Kind of World", with not a dance music track in the mix. (She did continue to commission remixes, however, namely for the three singles).
"My Kind of World" was a showcase for Amber's talent as a singer and a songwriter and, as such, is perhaps the most important album of her career. That set, the first released on her label JMCA, demonstrated exactly what Amber was capable of doing when freed from the restrictions of a major label.
Not only did she branch out stylistically, but her lyrics reflected the depth and experience of a mature artist. Gone were the sexually playful tracks for which she'd become known, replaced instead by songs about broken relationships, the responsibilities of parenting, and spiritual rebirth.
This isn't to say, however, that Amber abandoned her dance music audience. To the contrary, she simply brought them along for the ride. She continued to release remixes for dance radio and club DJs, just not the "paint by numbers" sound alike mixes from her major label days. Instead, she chose edgier DJs like Jason Nevins as well as up and coming producers like Yinon Yahel, whom she knew would craft club anthems that didn't sound like every other song out there.
Amber's new upcoming 2012 CD will bring more of this innovation and creativity to the forefront. This set will see her revisit the dance genre on a full length album for the first time in a decade but this time on her own terms. Amber has come a long way and has much to say and listeners can expect to be challenged, inspired, and moved. And who would want to be anything less?
