Rachel Mascari Photo
Amber Ikeman’s music is water. Her voice is crystal clear—flowing over your ears and soothing your heart. Her guitar fingerpicking and tender piano playing floats you with its steady, gentle current. The messages she imparts—sometimes strong as a hurricane, sometimes serene as a sun shower—quench and nourish your soul, bringing sweet relief from the heavy loads we all must carry. Inspired by the legacy of powerful truthtelling songstresses like Joni Mitchell, Jewel, and Joan Baez, Ikeman’s songwriting is imbued with the knowledge that without rain, there is no life—that growth and change only come from weathering the storms that will inevitably come. “I want to create transformative experiences through music, to open hearts, and to allow people to feel seen,” she says. “I want to inspire people to be their full and authentic selves.”
Music has always lived in Amber Ikeman’s bones. Ever since seeing her first musical at the age of just 4 years old, she has loved how deeply expressive music can be. She started taking voice lessons at 8 years old, then started performing in local musical theater productions in her hometowns of Toronto, Ontario, and Sarasota, Florida, and started playing guitar and writing her own songs in her free time at age 12.
That’s not to say that her career as a musician was guaranteed. In her youth, she thought that maybe her path lay in the theater. Promising, but not quite right. It combined her love of music and storytelling, but she ultimately needed to tell her own story, not someone else’s fiction.
Later, it seemed her future belonged to her Jewish faith and identity. After completing her undergraduate music degree with a specialization in classical vocal performance, she moved to Israel for six months, embracing the natural transition of graduation and using it as a launch point to explore herself, her faith, and her heritage. She served as Cantorial Soloist and Director of Community Engagement at Congregation Beth Shalom in Bozeman, Montana, helping to strengthen her community by using her gifts as a vocalist to foster connection to the divine. But while prayer leadership is a part of her story, there is more she needs to say. She can’t just sing the scripture that has already been written—she must write her own as well.
Even just going on tour and performing her music wasn’t quite right. In 2015, she released her first EP, Free. Produced by Chris Cunningham, this album is a love song to discovery. Inspired by the journey she took—leaving behind a 9-5 life to embrace the wild possibilities of the west, exploring the splendor of the natural world and making ends meet by washing dishes in Yellowstone National Park—each song spins a tale about a new facet of self-exploration: the pain, the fear, the uncertainty, the exhaustion, and most importantly, the ecstasy. It illuminates the loneliness of wanderlust, while also embracing the relief that comes with freedom and a whole horizon of possibilities.
This album queued up a natural progression, and one that she followed to a tee. She gigged around town, and regionally. Eventually she expanded further, hitting the road for a week at a time, then a couple of weeks, then almost a month. She had the skills she needed and it was time. To support the 2018 release of her first full length album, Rise, she planned her first major tour—spanning the country over the course of five months.
But it all went wrong. Her car got totaled before the tour even started, leaving her fending for herself in a rental. Then tragedy struck: a month into the tour, her mother passed away unexpectedly. She put the tour on pause and went home to be with family. But after a couple of weeks, it was time to go back. And it just… didn’t feel right. Here she was, singing these songs that she’d written to share the true, painful, and beautiful things she wanted to say—but she was also putting on a mask of bravery to obscure the intense grief and loneliness she was feeling. She wasn’t really being honest, not in the way she needed to be.
Nor was she being honest with herself. In her early 20s, Amber began struggling with negative body image, her relationship with food, and her mental health. It was not until 2021, when she began working with a new coach who helped her dive deeper into the body liberation movement, that Amber was able to heal more deeply, see things more clearly, and embrace herself—all of herself—with love and kindness. And she wrote about it. “It felt like something that I’ve been trying to say for a long time,” Ikeman says. “And now I finally have the words.”
Finally, it was clear. Her path lies not just in her classically trained vocals, spirituality, insightful lyricism, engaging storytelling, or poignant confessions. In order to thrive, it must lie in all of them, all at once and all the time. At its heart, this combination is what gives Amber Ikeman’s music its power. Her songwriting is distinguished in her clear-eyed embrace of the unknown, grounded by the trust that whatever comes, she has the tools to make it through. “These rocks were made from sand, over miles and many years,” she says in her 2015 single “Angel’s Landing”. “Maybe they will crumble, but that I cannot fear. I cannot live in fear.”
Amber Ikeman has toured all across the United States and parts of Canada, earning praise from audiences and tastemakers alike. Her 2015 EP, Free, was named one of Southwest Montana’s top local albums of 2015. Songs off of her first full length album, Rise, earned the 2017 Vic Heyman Songwriting Award from the South Florida Folk Festival and the 2018 John O’Hara Outstanding Folk Song Award. Her second EP, titled Wild and Uneven and themed around body acceptance and mental health, was released in March of 2023.
As a way to further integrate her skills and interests, Amber will be attending the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College beginning in the fall of 2024.
