Many people came out of the second year of the pandemic with new hobbies or favorite shows, but Reverend Shawn Amos came out with a book, a new album, and a fresh perspective.
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The book, Cookies and Milk, is a middle-grade fiction novel about Amos’ experience growing up in his father’s cookie shop, Famous Amos. The album is an unapologetically honest project with a unique songwriting story behind it. Amos sat down with American Songwriter to talk about both of these writing projects and his journey of self-reflection over the last two years.
When Amos started writing Cookies and Milk twelve years ago, it was not a draft of a children’s novel. In fact, it wasn’t a novel at all. It was a nonfiction short story for The Huffington Post that he intended to turn into a memoir. Amos recounted many dark memories from his childhood in the story. He wrote about his mother’s mental illness and eventual suicide, and his troubled relationship with his father, Wally “Famous” Amos.
“It was dark,” he tells American Songwriter. “It wasn’t a children’s-oriented thing, it was a gritty sort of Hollywood tale. And the Cookies and Milk title was meant to be ironic for what the story is.”
When Amos turned the story into an outline for a book, a producer expressed interest in adapting it into a film. They spent years trying to make it happen but were unable to get the rights to the Famous Amos name because his father sold the business.
However, Amos did not give up on the story completely. When Black Lives Matter protests began happening all over the country in the summer of 2020, Amos was able to reflect on his childhood in a new way.
“I was thinking a lot about how history had repeated itself with me and my father, and now me and my son. And sort of the nature of fatherhood, the nature of single fatherhood, the nature of Black fatherhood,” he says. “What I realize is that my time in that cookie store with my father was one of the only bright spots in my childhood.”
Instead of writing a memoir about the hardships of his upbringing in Hollywood, Amos wrote about his favorite part: the cookie store. The book is semi-autobiographical, following an eleven-year-old boy helping his struggling father open a cookie business in the summer of 1976.
“I wrote that book for Black kids. I wrote that book about Black identity and Black fatherhood, and I think there’s something in there for everybody,” he says.
Amos also notes that writing Cookies and Milk was an incredibly emotional process for him. “I cried writing a lot of it, I mean, just sobbing,” he admits. “It’s the difficult thing about aging, but it’s the beautiful thing about aging. You have these moments to compare to other moments, and patterns develop, and trends develop, and these sort of juxtapositions can get made that give you different insights. It was really cathartic.”
Writing the book was a completely different experience for Amos than writing a song. “I’ve always written alone,” he says. “And it’s partly being a control freak, and it’s partly because the process of songwriting was such a form of therapy. The intimacy of that sort of necessitated that I keep myself alone.”
However, when Amos started writing songs for his new album, it was a collaborative process. During quarantine, Amos’ friend and longtime collaborator Doctor Roberts sent musical tracks to him and the other members of the Brotherhood. As he listened to the tracks, Amos saw a unique opportunity to focus on writing lyrics to music that already existed.
“I would sort of play the track. I just drove around in my car, and I’d play it in the house, and I just lived with it for a while, just to see what came up,” he explains. “Part of the experiment for me was how will I respond to a fairly fully-realized piece of music? What will that bring out in me? How will that change my writing?”
This resulted in Amos’ new album, Hollywood Blues: Stories and Songs from the Family Tree (1997-2022), featuring his latest single, “Everybody Wants to Be My Friend” with Keb’ Mo.’ He added that it is only the first batch of songs that he and the Brotherhood are planning to release this year. “I feel like the lyrics are better, I feel like my vocal performances are better, I feel the songs are better,” he says regarding the new music.
Both Cookies and Milk and his forthcoming album, out May 13, are Amos’ way of reckoning with his identity. Even during dark periods over the last few years, he emphasizes that he always came back to writing as a safe haven.
“I just want to take every opportunity I can to say something that matters,” he says. “That clarity is so freeing, and it’s fuel. And it’s made my work a lot better.”
Cookies and Milk hits shelves on May 17 and is available for pre-order HERE.
Photo by Fred Siegel
