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Newport Mercury (Rhode Island), by Lisa Utman-Randall, Fall 2005 http://www.newportmercury.com/articles/2005/09/28/home/

MOTIF Magazine (Rhode Island), by Jim Vickers, Summer 2005

   “The first Motif Music Awards have a few surprise winners, and perhaps the biggest is Lori Amey running away with Best Female Vocalist. That is, unless you’ve heard her sing.
   If Norah Jones has a suede-smooth voice, Lori Amey smolders seductive silk. Although relocating from Michigan to Newport in 2001, and now residing in Bristol only a few years ago, Amey was the top vote-getter of any category. That means she garnered more votes than U2 and Green Day after being in the area for four years.
   Amey also has a new CD, This Little Illusion, ready to roll off the presses in the next week, that showcases her winning songwriting and vocal talents.
   The 11-track disc, which she’s putting the final tweaks to it at Golden Road Studios with Keith Sartini, runs from straight folk to throw back club jazz with a few curves thrown such as a “Bonus” track that reminds of Lisa Girard’s work with Dead Can Dance. The song incorporates the words of Hildegard von Bingen into a Middle Eastern-sounding hymn. Hlidegard was a 12th Century poet said to have clairvoyance and the ability to predict the future.
   Her steady, seductive jazz songs, such as “Into You,” create an inescapable, trance-like mood. “Into You,” Amey says, is about “encountering someone who completely overtakes all thoughts and desires” and the resonating chorus only enhances:

Only you can set me on fire
With one smoldering glance
And send my thoughts on a whirl of desire
On a mystical trance
Oh, if only you knew
How I’m so into you

And Amey has a knack for simple and moving choruses throughout Illusion. In her intimate folk-moan, “As It Should Be,” she creates and idiosyncratic introspective of emotional want in the tradition of Emily Dickenson, though not nearly as oblique or laced with loneliness:

In stillness I will rest here
Between my courage and my fear
And let the liquid numbness fill my head
Where thoughts just fall as flakes of snow
And melt into the hazy glow
Until I just cannot recall
A word you’ve said

   The mid-August CD release of this Rhode Island Songwriter’s Association artists will be her fourth since her college days at Michigan State, and relates a series of metaphorically presented autobiographical experiences.
   This Little Illusion, Amey says, has a binding theme of “discovering your own truth, versus Illusion.”
   In “8,” Amey delves into “letting go of the little things that we learn as a child, and recognizing they no longer work for us as adults. Learning to live according to what makes you happy rather than making yourself accepted by others. Living according to you,” she says. The song tends toward metaphor rather than specific instances and story-telling.
   While Illusion leans mainly on Amey’s emotional/spiritual persona, she does add in a pseudo-political piece, “What’s Done Is Done.”
    “What’s Done Is Done” is a peace song,” she says of the song written about 9-11. “It was more reflecting on what is would be like to be someone who lost someone. It’s a time to make amends with people.”
   Advocating for anti-retaliation, Amey sings, “As I recall battles never won/Can we forgive and say what’s done is done?”
   Though “What’s Done is Done” steers clear of heavy-handed proselytizing, Amey plans on recording an amusing political lampoon about Pres. George W. Bush Called “Barefoot” with participants of the Ryan Fitzsimmons-led Songwriters-in-the-Round program on the theme of “Barefootin.””
   Amey imagines the world through Bush’s eyes, makes sport, and critiques taking advantage of one’s personal agenda.
   The Songwriter’s CD is expected to be recorded in the fall.
   Currently Lori Amey has been building her reputation as an outstanding vocalist and songwriter by networking with other artists between Boston, Providence and New York. Hopefully, the Ocean State will remain her home.”

Ectophiles Guide to Music (Includes Review of This Little Illusion, 2005)
http://www.arts.ri.gov/blogs/index.php/?p=320