Header photo credit: Emma Esser
When you dig into the vast discography of Amelia Riggs, it’s clear she has been charting a complex journey for a long time. Under the name Riggings, she spent years putting out records, ranging from queer country to original theatrical scores. They all culminated in CREATURE in 2025 — a “noisy” and “patchwork” collection of experimental singer-songwriter tracks, recorded across multiple home studio sessions and inspired, in part, by trans scholar Susan Stryker’s essay on rage and rebirth.
CREATURE marked a turning point: it was the first record she released as Amelia Riggs, a name she made official only in the past year. Earlier this year, she followed it with “Vibrating Plastic Cup for Reese McHenry”, a tribute single to the late Triangle legend whose influence continues to widen. The album she’s working on now, Kudzu, looks to go even further, closing out an unconventional trilogy of projects and reckoning directly with the songs and self she left behind when she transitioned.
What is something you’ve been listening to lately?
Amelia: I’ve actually been keeping track of my listening habits lately. I stopped posting about it online because I realized posting was giving me the wrong kind of serotonin. It was incentivizing me to keep posting rather than just doing it for its own sake. I also got a seventh-generation iPod Touch about a month ago, and I adore it. I’ve been trying to get off streaming pretty much altogether. It’s been great for keeping me focused on albums.
Today I listened to the new Bill Callahan album [My Days of 58], which is really good. He’s in his elder statesman era, writing about his life and beauty in the mundane.
My friend Niko Stratis just put out an article about “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals, and I’d somehow forgotten that was the name of a song I’ve heard a thousand times.
The new Mitski album [Nothing’s About to Happen to Me] is really fucking incredible. It’s her best writing. There’s a song on it called “Dead Women” that I’ve been thinking about every single day since the album came out. Overall, the album is very haunting, nasty, angry, and kind of wonderful. I’ve always been a fan of everything she’s doing, but all the stuff that isn’t just “normal indie rock” has been so adventurous and challenging in an environment where there aren’t many things that are.
To that end, when you compare your favorite artists, what stands out as a common denominator?
Amelia: I really love artists who take all the money and goodwill from LP1 and then make something that challenges and maybe frustrates people. Not necessarily intentionally frustrating, but artists who are just not paying attention to taste, algorithm, or anyone else’s opinions. Just staying the course and doing their own thing.
I find Geese fits that mold. Getting Killed and [Cameron Winter’s] Heavy Metal are two incredible fucking albums, and I love them to death. And yet, I’m starting to see a lot of Geese burnout. Which means they now have an opportunity to disappear back into the shadows and make something new outside of anyone else’s influence. That’s when we’re going to go back and make something different. I really love that.
Emily Green is such an incredible guitar player. Her playing on Getting Killed, her tones all over that album, and the fact that she doesn’t rely heavily on distortion is remarkable. Her playing is so fluid and rubbery. I probably listen to that album once a day.
When you look back to when you first got into music, who was the first musician or band you remember discovering and obsessing over?
Amelia: It’s gotta be They Might Be Giants. I think about them all the time. When I step back and ask which band has been the most consistently inspiring, they keep coming up. They have a catalog that ranges from really good to perfect. I can’t think of a bad They Might Be Giants song, and there are so, so many of them.
John Flansburgh and John Linnell are two of the best lyricists, period. The way they write is in a very stream-of-consciousness style while still making songs that are both understandable and genuinely fun to think about and interpret. All while being incredible masters of pop songwriting. They were the first band I listened to where I thought, “Oh, you can write about literally anything. There are no rules with subject matter.”
They have a song called “Ant” about an ant crawling up your back at night, and then it becomes the president and sends people to ransack your house. It’s this really fun song about ignoring a problem until it completely ruins your life. They find a way to make songs that are both emotionally challenging and incredibly clever.
Image credit: Hairy-Legged Women
I loved the interview you did with Rainbow Rodeo, which called on queer country to be “angrier, messier, and louder.” What connection do you feel to that label, as someone who isn’t primarily a “country artist”?
Amelia: It’s so funny you bring up the Rainbow Rodeo interview. I love those folks so much. I made one country album that was successful for me, and then immediately pivoted to this weirdo, noisy synth-pop album. And immediately, when I wasn’t making country anymore, everyone who wasn’t Rainbow Rodeo was basically like, “We thought you were this fun new thing in queer country, and you’re not doing that anymore, so bye.”
In that interview, I talked about my feelings on the queer country label and the idea that there is something inherently radical to it. You have a genre usually connected to historically very butch traits, and then you see gay people make it, queer people make it, trans people make it — and they are using those tropes to tell a new narrative. What was so amazing about that period was meeting a lot of people outside my usual weirdo local indie rock community and going places I hadn’t been before.
And at the exact same time, I started to see how short the shelf life was for all of us. Even Orville Peck; the mask is off, he’s doing Broadway, and is in the Street Fighter movie. He’s osmosed himself into pop culture. And so many of us who don’t fit that mold were kind of left in the dust to fend for ourselves. It was a fun little moment in the middle of lockdown, and then people got bored with us when we started getting more political and louder and less twangy.
How do you approach songwriting when you have so many different modes to operate in?
Amelia: I have a piece of paper taped over my desk, written in Sharpie with a quote from Stephen Sondheim: “Content dictates form.” That’s how I approach making music. I never start by saying, “This will be the ____ record.” Even CREATURE doesn’t have tremendous sonic consistency throughout, and that was absolutely on purpose. I wanted to make a patchwork album of different ideas stitched together.
It starts with the theme. What is the album about? That will dictate what it sounds like. The album I’m working on right now is called Kudzu, and it doesn’t sound anything like CREATURE. I always try to change up how things are written, recorded, and performed. Because it’s a hobby, you’re constantly learning, getting new things, and figuring out how to do it better or differently.
What can you tell us about Kudzu?
Amelia: It’s kind of an album about reckoning with the parts of yourself that you say goodbye to. It’s the end of a trilogy that I started with Egg. I started thinking about death and rebirth and loss, all the usual moody singer-songwriter tropes. But also about the idea that when I transitioned, I tried to symbolically kill my past self. I literally held a funeral for Al Riggs and played all of those old songs for what I said was the last time.
I’m now four years on hormones. Next week is the one-year anniversary of my name change. I’m doing a lot of big changes, but at the same time, it’s causing me to reflect on the fact that I lived a whole life before I transitioned. Reflecting on that decision to kill off Al Riggs had me thinking that I really didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
I’m planning on doing a new version of “Local Honey” for the album. There’s also a sequel to “Local Honey” on the album. It was a murder ballad from the murderer’s point of view, very bluntly about a trans woman being murdered. I wrote it when I was 21. I didn’t know anything about gender or being trans. I just thought I was being cool and edgy. The song got bigger, and I started playing it during shows, and I started thinking about what the song actually meant — and I grew and changed and started hating it.
A couple of years ago, I started thinking that maybe I wanted to give the dead woman a better sendoff. Write her a new song where she’s a ghost that haunts the lake her body was dumped in, and offer a chance of reincarnation. It was a way of realizing that there is no “these are the Al Riggs songs and these are the Amelia Riggs songs.” It’s all been one very, very long project with long and complicated lore.
Thinking about all that, I started considering how to record all of these songs without any obfuscation or shielding. I’ve had to re-record the album a couple of times, and I’m still in the middle of it. I’m taking away all the reverb and all the fake effects. I’m trying to hone in on performing the damn thing better; how much I can get out of the instruments and pushing myself to my actual performing limits to see what I can do without falling back on studio trickery. Sonically, it’s very different from CREATURE, but thematically it’s very close to what I’ve been writing about.
Tell me about Horse Complex Records. Is it just a vehicle for your own music, or have you been putting out other people’s records too?
Amelia: I started Horse Complex during lockdown as a means to put out mine and other people’s records. But the stress of putting out other people’s records got to me when I realized I was the only one doing all the work. So I said fuck it, it’s just my record label to release my own stuff, and as a means to give anything I do some sense of legitimacy. It’s a lie. [laughs]
Who are some of your favorite local or North Carolina musicians?
Amelia: I’m going to give you a list of names, assuming that if you hear the name, I’m giving them a 10 out of 10 recommendation: DUNUMS, Owen Fitzgerald, Sinclair Palmer, MK Rodenbough, Libby Rodenbough, Sluice, Fust.
There’s so much incredible local music right now. Basically, anything being made over at Betty’s in Chapel Hill from local people is going to sound amazing because that room sounds amazing.
Go back and listen to all of Reese McHenry‘s music. Just go back and listen to all of it. Suah Sounds just put out a new compilation of her final recordings [Forever], and it’s really incredible. Go back and listen to her albums. Check out The Second Wife and The Dirty Little Heathers.
Also, spend a day listening to nothing but Nina Simone, then do it again the next day. Ideally, Nuff Said, her live album recorded days after Martin Luther King was shot. It is such a beautiful, fun, heartbreaking live album, and I think it’s a perfect introduction to Nina Simone if all you’ve heard is “My Baby Just Cares for Me” or “Sinnerman” or “I Loves You, Porgy”.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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