While it’s not that unusual for twelve year olds to purchase CDs with money given to them by their grandmother, when young Amy MacDonald from Bishopbriggs, Scotland selected the album The Man Who by her fellow countrymen, Travis, little did she realize how strongly the CD would affect her. With their hits like “Why Does it Always Rain on Me?” Travis’s album is one I personally recall playing so often that I darn near wore out my own copy, but while I was content to listen endlessly, Amy MacDonald had a decidedly different idea.
Picking up one of her father’s unused guitars and armed with “just a good ear and a few chord patterns found on the internet,” MacDonald taught herself to play the instrument without any formal training, instead urged on by her “huge burning, raging desire to write 
and play songs.” As her biography reveals, having left school early to focus on her music, despite securing admission to two universities, MacDonald grew even more serious about her music, playing around Glasgow in locations including amateur open-mic nights until she progressed onto Starbucks and bigger venues like Barfly.
With her own unique blend of folk/indie/soft/alt rock, the precocious talent sent off homemade demos of her work recording in her very first studio — her bedroom — and later impressed London-based Melodramatic Records executive Pete Wilkinson who helped her polish the material. Sure enough, just six months later, she inked a deal with the same company that boasts an impressive roster including The Killers, Vertigo, and with after many higher profile 
performances in 2006, MacDonald signed a five album deal with Universal’s own Mercury Records.
Initially motivated by popular culture including her older sister’s interest in Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ewan McGregor, one early inspiration for the aspiring songstress was none other than American actor Jake Gyllenhaal, whom she described as “the most beautiful thing that’s ever been created,” and in serving as an unlikely muse since the age of fifteen, she hammered out a tune about him in five minutes and called it “L.A.” The song, along with ten others (not including a hidden track) find their way onto MacDonald’s breakthrough debut album This is the Life, released in the states last month.
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