Meet Amelia’s Best Friend

By Lillian Jones

 

Amelia’s Best Friend is an alternative rock five-piece, playing shows frequently in the Austin and DFW areas. I first became intrigued by the band from their name. Specifically because my high school best friend is named Amelia, so I felt a personal draw towards the formally mysterious band. At the time, they didn’t have any music released yet. I found them through their Instagram profile which included a band practice video, a singular show flyer and what people on the internet call “sh*t posting”. Their silly social media demeanor is what got me hooked on the band before I even knew if they made good music or not! 

Back in June of 2024, the group released two singles, “Put You Down” and “Be Safe”. I was very ecstatic to find out that they did make good music! In fact, I fell in love with just their two singles. I got the opportunity to see them play live in October of 2024 at Empire Control Room and since then have declared them as one of my favorite local bands. Their music feels authentic by taking inspiration from country and slowcore genres, adding personal lyrics and having multiple vocalists share the limelight. 

After almost a year of only having two tracks online, they announced their debut self-titled album to be released on April 25th, 2025. I became ecstatic from this announcement and wanted to know more of what goes on behind the scenes with the band! 

Basic question, how did you all meet?

Clay: I guess it’s kind of all over the place. 

Logan: Me and Travis met my freshman year, his junior year of highschool. We’ve probably known each other the longest out of everybody. Then we met Clay through skateboarding. Brandon and I met through our friends and music. Then we met Ethan through music as well. 

Clay: You guys met through music through me. I met Ethan through skateboarding while he was in high school and I was in college. 

Travis: Yup, Logan and I met in high school and then I met Clay through a mutual friend who skated. Then Clay lived with me, then I met Brandon through Logan and then I met Ethan through Clay and other skate related friends. 

Ethan: I don’t think I ever met Brandon until I moved here [Austin]. But I’ve known Clay for a while- 

Clay: Like seven years! I met you in 2018. Which is crazy! 

Brandon: I knew Clay from skate videos way before I met him in real life. 

Clay: Ethan was like 15 when I met him and I was 19, but that’s just because of skating and my friend was his high school janitor. 

So Amelia doesn’t exist, but where did the inspiration for the band name come from? 

Ethan: I have no idea. I came up with the name a long time ago. I don’t know why.

Me and Logan had recorded songs a long time ago, but never finished them. But we did steal a riff from it for one of the new songs on the album. The acoustic guitar riff in “Ceebee” is from an old riff Logan and I did in 2021. 

All of you, except for Ethan, are in the bands Motorsports and Dress Warm, how does each band differ from the other? 

Logan: Dress Warm, Brandon is the primary songwriter and he writes more like indie pop stuff, so that’s where that lives. Travis is the primary songwriter in Motorsports, which is very post-punk heavy and — what’s that other word you always use? 

Clay: Angular! Great word. 

Travis: It’s inspired by lots of what was happening in Calgary in the 2010s. Like the band called Women and then Preoccupations after that. 

Logan: And then Ethan writes most of the songs in Amelia’s, which I don’t know, where do you find your inspiration from in that realm? It’s sort of a bit of old country… just a little bit. 

Ethan: Sometimes. 

Logan: Yeah, it depends on the songwriter because each band has a different one. Me and Clay just kind of chill. We add to it. We help produce the songs. 

Ethan: But even with the new songs we’re putting out, some of them Travis wrote most of and some of them Brandon wrote most of and some of them I wrote most of. 

Brandon: They all sound a lot different from the songs we would write for Motorsports or Dress Warm, which is something I’ve never done before. It’s been fun to write for a specific sound that we’re trying to achieve. 

Logan: It helps when you’re trying to write a song and it doesn’t really fit one project, but it will fit the other one. 

Clay: I feel like each project covers enough ground where if an idea doesn’t work, you can find one of the three to throw it in. I think each project comes alive with how each instrumental comes together. You could write a part and make it work for any project, if you make the rest of the instruments do the right thing. Which I think is what we’re trying to figure out the most in Amelia’s. Like initially the ideas we were throwing at “Satellite” were super western and then I started playing this guitar part that was very not western — it was droning. 

Ethan: I remember it sounding too “Yipee! Happy!”, even though the riff didn’t change, everything else did. 

Clay: I think the evolution of Amelia’s is slowcore-ifying country…

Travis: “Tile” is a very traditional slowcore song and then “WRC” is very westernish. 

Describe each band in one word. 

Travis: Motorsports is “angular”. 

Brandon: Dress Warm is probably like “endearing”, most of the songs are sweet. 

Logan: Amelia’s is… 

Ethan: Awesome. 

Logan: I don’t know if you can describe Amelia’s in one word…

Ethan: Rock’n’roll.

Clay: I think the other bands have been around long enough that we have pinpointed them while Amelia’, we played our first show 13 months ago and we started working on the songs six weeks before that. Amelia’s is like a baby band. 

Logan: Maybe that’s the one word… Baba!

What was the process for creating the record, Amelia’s Best Friend?

Logan and Ethan (at the same time): Long. 

Logan: We wrote the songs sporadically all of last year. We got the skeleton in November or December and then we really fleshed it out in January, February, March. 

Ethan: Well we even did earlier songs when we recorded “Put You Down” and “Be Safe”. We didn’t really plan to just record the two and put them out. We had recorded those two and a couple others and then scrapped those recordings. Then we just finished the two songs. 

Logan: Cause we thought we were gonna do a record immediately, but it was like “ehhh, that’s kind of a lot”. And then “Be Safe” and “Put You Down” were sounding good off the bat so. 

Ethan: We figured out those two way before the other ones we were working on and we had shows coming up. Now it’s been almost a year. 

Clay: I think the record almost came out of necessity because we played this one show. Ethan he was like, “Do you guys want to be my band, there’s only two songs,” and we were like yeah, f*ck it. So we wrote a bunch of sh*t-

Brandon: Our first show we played for 12 minutes!

Clay: Yeah, and then we got offered more shows and we couldn’t just play for twelve minutes. I think that goes into what we were talking about with the song writing process. Everyone had ideas that they couldn’t use for their other projects.

Brandon: The song, “Lake”, I think I wrote back in 2023 and never had any use for it because it was not a Dress Warm song. 

Logan: To sum it up, it was a long process, but it quickly came together in the last few weeks. And it’s done now!

Which is better, the Austin or Denton music scene? 

Logan: I would say Denton. I think Denton, because it’s a little more tight knit. Austin’s so oversaturated. There’s like a million bands. I mean we’re part of the problem, there’s f**king three bands amongst us!

Brandon: It’s so easy to make friends here, but like in Denton, everybody just shows up. Austin is not that way. You can be friends with 50 people, and everybody shows up in Denton, while here you have like two or three people show up. Which is fine — I get it, I don’t like to go to shows all the time either. 

Travis: Denton on a Friday will have anywhere between like three to seven shows and then Austin it will be like 17 different shows—

Clay: I mean three to seven is even generous, I feel like it’s like one. Seven is like — Damn! The town is popping today! 

Travis: Sometimes it is though. Like sometimes they’ll do a triple show at Gloves. 

I feel like Austin doesn’t have D.I.Y venues anymore like Denton does. 

Clay: I mean it has the co-ops. Which is cool, you would never play to as many people in Denton as you could at a co-op. Unless you sold out the backyard of Gloves. 

Travis: When the Denton house show scene was at its strongest, you would go from one house to another house to another house. 

Clay: Denton’s so much smaller too. You can walk to every show in Denton in one night. You wouldn’t have to drive. I think too with Denton, part of the difference is that people don’t move to Denton. People find themselves in Denton by happenstance and then they’re like, “I guess we’ll start a band”. People don’t move there to start a band, although it’s a little bit different now. Denton’s put itself on the map for the scene in some ways. But Austin, people are like in a band and choose to move there because it’s the “live music capital of the world”. 

Ethan: There’s people here who are trying to like “make it”. No hate, that’s really cool, but in Denton you typically don’t see that. It’s just a group of people who start a band and play with a group of their friends. 

Clay: It’s the grindset here. 

Brandon: In Austin when you start out that way, for the love of the game, for lack of better words. You follow around people in that grindset, you’re like sh*t… if I don’t do this too then I’m not going to get any shows, I’m not going to play with any bands that I like. I feel like Denton also, people are so much more willing to come and talk to you after. There’s not as much of a wall between somebody playing and the crowd. 

Ethan: I don’t know if this makes sense, but in Denton, it feels more casual? It’s like, “hey the person on stage is like a real person” and everyone’s just hanging out. 

If you could play with anyone, living or dead, who would you play with?

Logan: As a band, I don’t know who we would choose…

If you were playing a festival, and each got to choose someone on the lineup, who would you each pick? 

Logan: … MJ Lenderman. 

Brandon: I have two as far as who we should play with sound wise that I think would fit well. I think Duster would be sick as f**k. 

Clay: Or Helvetia, honestly we would fit Helvetia more. 

Brandon: Yeah that would be lit, but I’d want it to be Pinegrove selfishly because they’re my favorite band. 

Clay: The other band I was gonna say is Silver Jews. That won’t happen though… cause dead. Ethan you got anything? 

Ethan: Not really. We all like MJ Lenderman… let’s not pretend we don’t all love MJ Lenderman! But that is somebody that is relevant right now that I take a lot of inspiration from and I think our sound would fit. 

Describe the best way to listen to your album. 

Logan: If you have a lake house, go to the lake house and grab a speaker. Drink like two to five Miller Lites and then walk down to the lake and listen to it. 

Brandon: Maybe Michelob Ultra, depending on what you like. 

Ethan: No, don’t do that. Grab a Miller Lite. 

Logan: That’s kind of the band beer I would say. But yeah, speaker on the lake. 

Clay: We did do that last weekend. We listened to the mixes that night and then I was like, I should probably listen to these sober. So I listened to them on my way home. Driving through like super super small towns in central Texas. It was pretty nice. Open roads. 

Brandon: All the way through as well. I think we were very selective with the order and the way the tracks go into one another and sound next to each other. It came out a lot better than we could have planned. 

When I was sent it early, I drove around San Marcos at night. Specifically through the historical neighborhood with sweet little houses. 

Ethan: I was about to say driving at night. My favorite time of the weekend, usually Saturday morning, I’ll go fishing somewhere. I like to pick a spot the night before and I like going somewhere that I’ve never been. It’s the only time I don’t mind driving far. I’ll get in the car real early in the morning, still half asleep and I’ll have something planned to listen to. It’s my favorite time to listen to music and the past few weeks I’ve been listening to the album that way. 

What’s the biggest fish you’ve caught? 

Ethan: The biggest largemouth bass is 6.4 pounds. That’s typically what I’m trying to catch. I caught a catfish one time that was probably close to 20 pounds though, when I was 16 or 17. But catfish get way bigger than largemouths do. I hate catfish. I love eating them, but they will hurt you if you’re holding them. But the bigger the catfish, the less sharp their barbs are. It’s kind of backwards, the big ones seem scarier, but it will probably hurt you less. That’s why people who noodle, they stick their whole arm through one and pick it up, it’s like 200 pounds— they’re a little scratched up, but they’re fine. 

Last question, if you were in Minecraft and you died, what three items would you drop? 

Ethan: I feel like we have to answer for each other that would be funny. I know what Logan would drop. A basketball, a sandwich and a pair of headphones or something. 

Brandon: A basketball, a JM sammy and airpods.

Logan: Alright, Ethan’s would be a Miller Lite, a fishing pole and if you could drop like an entire T-shirt printing machine. Or the birria taco truck. 

Brandon: Travis would drop a cigarette… 

Ethan: Those Vans. 

Clay: Falling apart Vans. I think Travis would also drop a goofy, cropped, vintage T-shirt. Like hyper cropped. 

Travis: I love my cropped tees. Clay would drop a pair of Warby Parker glasses. A smoothie—  mans always got a smoothie on him. And a fingerboard. 

Logan: I’ll do Brandon. Brandon would drop a tuner, probably like a knife with peanut butter on it that he forgot to wash off and maybe like a Stanley. 

Travis: Or like two slices of 7/11 pizza. 

Logan: Oh wait, scrap the peanut butter knife that was like a personal thing. I’m projecting because I leave the peanut butter knives out. 

Ethan: His left lung. 

Make sure to give Amelia’s Best Friend a listen as well as check out KTSW 89.9’s Studio C session with the band on our YouTube!