Zoh Amba Wants You To Look Closer

Ahead of Eyes Full, the Tennessee-born free-jazz saxophonist and songwriter reflects on friendship, healing, and finding home between Appalachia and New York City.

By Stevie Olivia Carter

Published on June 3, 2026

There’s a looseness to the way Zoh Amba speaks that is immediately disarming. Thoughts arrive half-finished before unfolding into something profound, yet nothing ever feels rehearsed. They speak with the same emotional openness that runs throughout their forthcoming album, Eyes Full; a record rooted in vulnerability, friendship, healing, and the slow process of learning to exist more gently within yourself.

“The winter was so long,” they say early in the conversation, speaking to RANGE about the sudden arrival of warmer weather. “I forgot that [summer] existed.”

What begins as a conversation about the weather quickly becomes a sentiment that quietly frames much of the discussion that follows. Throughout the interview, Amba repeatedly returns to ideas of softness and relief: the importance of community, safety, and finding spaces where people can fully be themselves. And it is in these quiet moments of ordinary intimacy, community, and gathering that inspiration and creativity are found. Playing cards at bars in Brooklyn, sitting in the park with friends, wandering through museums, or talking late into the night over beers while records spin in the background. That grounding in everyday connection feels central to both their music and the way they navigate creative life more broadly.

As the conversation transitions from the weather to the joys of the season — including festivals and live events — we arrive at Amba’s recent performance at Coachella as part of Iggy Pop’s band, an experience they describe less with grandiosity and more with quiet disbelief.

“I think I have this thing where, when anything’s so good, I just get so numb, you know,” they admit with a laugh. “I’m just so happy, but I definitely feel like I can’t feel my body. That was definitely one of those experiences.”

Rather than focusing on the scale of the festival itself, Amba keeps returning to the people surrounding it, the dynamic within the band, and the feeling of creative closeness.

“The band is the greatest thing I’ve ever been a part of,” they say. “Even if we never played the festival and just did rehearsals in LA in this room, that would’ve been enough for me. It was just precious and everyone is so funny and sweet and lovely.”

That emphasis on collaboration and emotional trust surfaces constantly. Whether discussing directors, photographers, bandmates, or friends, Amba speaks about creative relationships less as professional partnerships and more as forms of kinship. Working on the visual world surrounding the album has only reinforced that feeling, particularly through the creation of the music video for “Eyes Full,” the latest single and title track from their upcoming record.

Directed by photographer and filmmaker Grace Bader-Conrad, the video came together through an organic series of events, with Amba recalling stumbling across Bader-Conrad’s work online and immediately feeling struck by it. The resulting visual feels intimate and understated rather than overly conceptual, with boxing-inspired imagery subtly shaping its visual language and echoing the piece of Bader-Conrad’s work that first drew Amba to her.

That same instinct appears to be carrying over into future music videos, as Amba discusses the creative vision for their upcoming self-directed video for “Dead End Street,” filmed casually with friends in Tennessee. There’ll be a pickup truck, a dog named Ruby, a camcorder, rolling hills, and fragments of imagery scattered throughout. Most notably, though, it emerges from the same place as the songs themselves: instinct, trust, and closeness with the people around them.

“I’ve been really blessed that I’ve been introduced to a lot of people that I feel like… they’re just family, you know?” they reflect.

That sense of safety seems inseparable from their songwriting process. Throughout the conversation, Amba repeatedly speaks about friendship as something sacred.

“Especially with my band. I feel like they know me. They know everything about me,” they say. “The things that keep me up at night, the things that make me panic, the things that make me cry […] I think everyone deserves a place and a space in the world that they can just be themselves.”

The sentiment quietly becomes one of the emotional centres of the conversation. For all the abstract beauty and spiritual searching embedded within their music, Amba’s perspective on creativity remains deeply human. Art, in their world, is less about performance than mutual understanding and a means of making people feel less alone.

“I get more out of just playing cards and having a nice beer in the sunshine with my buddies in Brooklyn,” they say.

The image feels fitting. For Amba, inspiration exists within community, slowness, and everyday rituals — throwing frisbees barefoot in the park, visiting botanical gardens, staying out too late at local bars. At one point, they excitedly describe their long-term dream of building a food forest somewhere in North Carolina, allowing plants and ecosystems to naturally sustain one another. It’s difficult not to hear parallels between that vision and the way they speak about creative life itself where everything is connected, and everything is supporting everything else.

When discussing the album itself, they resist imposing too much singular meaning onto it. While themes of healing, spirituality, and emotional growth undeniably surface throughout the songs, Amba seems more interested in what listeners themselves bring to the experience.

“I’m hopeful that everybody just takes what they need from it,” they say softly. “I just hope people feel like they got a friend and a sweet little hand on their shoulder that’s got their back.”

It’s a strikingly tender way to frame a record. Even their description of the album’s origins avoids traditional narratives around intentional world-building or conceptual planning. The songs simply accumulated over time, organically and without any real expectation they’d become an album at all.

“I never really thought about making records in my life,” they admit. “But yeah, I had all these songs and they all slowly came together without any intention of releasing necessarily at the time, or making a record. I just did it because I had to do it.”

For all the searching that runs through Eyes Full, Amba doesn’t seem particularly interested in providing answers. They’re more interested in offering company. A friend, as they put it, with a sweet little hand on your shoulder. By the end of the conversation, that feels less like a description of the album than a reflection of the person who made it.