How Amy Shark Nearly Joined New Found Glory

Australian indie-pop singer Amy Shark nearly joined the guard of 2000s emo and pop punk, the Adore singer revealed in a recent interview.

Discussing her “favourite song” she’s ever written, Beautiful Eyes, the new season of Australian Idol, winning a Logie Award and more in a chat with The Music, Shark dropped a bombshell: she almost became the touring guitarist in US pop-punk band New Found Glory.

“I nearly went on tour with New Found Glory, playing in their band,” she began. “That's something I haven't said out loud! But I had Australian Idol, and that was coming about the same time we were working out if I was going to do Idol or not.”

She continued to explain that one of the band’s guitarists, Chad Gilbert, was unwell – he was receiving intense chemotherapy for a rare cancer called pheochromocytoma in February 2023 – and because of that, she was asked if she’d like to join them on tour.

Shark said, “One of their guitarists is not well, and I’m like, I know so many New Found Glory songs. They're like, ‘Do you want to come and be in the band?’ And I was like, What a crazy idea, but I kind of like it! So, yeah, I nearly went on tour with them.”

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Amy Shark joining a pop-punk band isn’t totally outside the realms of possibility. In 2018, she dropped the single Psycho from her album Love Monster, featuring blink-182’s Mark Hoppus.

She told Zane Lowe at the time of its release, "I sent him my demo of Psycho overnight, and he wrote back and said, 'I love it, let’s do it.'

"It’s the first song I go to on the album at the moment. I just can’t stop listening to it. I’m addicted to it. Every time his voice drops in, I’m just like, Mark Hoppus is on my album."

Hoppus added, “We were talking about an album she was working on, and she said, 'Would you ever like to work on something together?' I said, 'Absolutely'.

“Literally, two days later, we were in Dave Grohl’s studio working on a song that she had an idea for that was really cool. She asked me to be a part of it, and I produced and sang on it. It turned out really well.

"That’s the awesome balance of working with different artists and producing other bands and working with other people, where you take their ideas and bring your idea to it, and hopefully, you bring it to a better place. Amy had this great idea for a song, and for me, it was a lot easier than working with a lot of other artists because her music is so sparse.

"A lot of times it’s just her and a guitar, so even just her an acoustic guitar and maybe a beat behind it. My job was really easy; I just had to not over-add stuff to kill the idea that she already had."