After 23 years out of the spotlight, a Canadian superstar returns with a new album: ‘Nobody was waiting for the record’

Music comeback story of the year?

That would belong to Amanda Marshall, the Toronto-born vocal powerhouse who is emerging from the mists of time following an almost 23-year hiatus between albums.

“Heavy Lifting,” a 12-song opus released Friday, is Marshall’s first original collection since her 2001 album “Everybody’s Got A Story.” On June 16 and 17, she will headline Toronto’s Massey Hall.

As Marshall, 50, explained in an interview, she’s been out of action due to a decades-long dispute with a former manager that started after she fired him, post-tour, in 2002.

“It triggered this endless legal battle,” said Marshall, who has been off the road except for a Casino Rama appearance in 2012 and a string of 2017 gigs. “He wouldn’t capitulate and I wouldn’t capitulate, so it just dragged on and on. I was loath to release any new music during that period because it was clear to me that any new release was going to get sucked into this vortex of chaos.”

Although Marshall continued to write and record — she said she had the new album in her “back pocket” — the thought of rebuilding with a new team gave her pause.

“After it drags on for a while, you get sucked into regular life and you get quite comfortable,” said Marshall, who sold six million copies of her eponymously titled 1995 album — including one million copies in Canada — on the strength of hits such as “Birmingham” and “Let It Rain.” “When you dismantle that infrastructure, it can be really hard to put everything back together.”

Sustained by the consistent royalty income from that first album — plus 1999’s “Tuesday’s Child” (300,000 copies sold) and 2001’s “Everybody’s Got A Story” (100,000) — Marshall hasn’t had to worry about making money to support herself.

“I’m extremely fortunate and I’m very aware of it,” said Marshall, adding that she has no regrets.

The forced pause offered time for self-discovery. “When you do this job, the natural tendency is for people to remove all obstacles from your path,” she said.

“It gave me an opportunity to become the person I am now. I learned crucial life skills: how to pay your own bills; how to keep watch over your own money; how to be in charge of your own life. It sounds really boring, but learning how to cook for yourself, how to buy and decorate your own home, was a way for me to grow up.”

There was another benefit to the time away from the spotlight.

“Nobody was waiting for the record,” said Marshall. “I wasn’t beholden to a label. I was able to write and record and make mistakes and change things and keep going back to the well.”

You can hear that care on the new album. On “Heavy Lifting,” Marshall’s soulful alto sounds more mature and confident, and there’s enough playful attitude being flung about in such songs as “Dawgcatcher,” the upbeat “God Forbid” and the funky bounce of “I’m Not Drunk” that she sounds like she’s having the time of her life.

And it is her life, as the entire album was co-written and produced by Marshall and her life partner and bass player Rob Misener with the exception of “I Hope She Cheats,” the first single off the record. It was co-written by Marsha Ambrosius, one-half of Floetry, an R&B duo out of the UK in the early ’00s. “There was such a swagger and such coolness to her writing, that it made me re-evaluate the tone of the rest of the record.”

Marshall says she loves the new album because “it’s the record to me that sounds like me, but now.”

In the past, Marshall has opened for everyone from Jeff Healey to Simply Red. But when our conversation turned to her hit “If I Didn’t Have You,” from “Tuesday’s Child,” Marshall says that the song provided one of her biggest career highlights when she toured Europe with Whitney Houston in 1999.

“That was a full circle moment for me,” recalled Marshall. “Whitney’s first record came out when I was 12 — she was a goddess to me.”

Several dates into the tour, Marshall was shocked when Houston suddenly appeared on stage beside her to sing “If I Didn’t Have You.”

“That song starts with a whistle,” said Marshall. “But it’s really hard to generate that whistle every night. Sometimes your lips aren’t wet enough, so, we had the whistle recorded for playback on tape.

“I’m drinking a glass of water and turn around and Whitney is on stage. She takes the mic and introduces me, and the crowd is cheering. After thanking me for participating near the end of the tour, she leaned in and hugged me and said into my ear, ‘Damn, I love this song.’

“It was one of the only times I thought, ‘I could die right now,’ — because it wasn’t about, ‘oh you sang that really well,’ but she liked the song. To have a singer of her calibre compliment a song that I wrote, was a huge, huge moment for me. I think of her every time we perform it.”

SHARE: