The banjo was never an instrument Amy would have imagined herself playing.  However, when given the opportunity to borrow a banjo and play in the Austin Banjo Club with 16 old men, she gleefully plunked along at the senior center every Tuesday. Little did she know the instrument would stick around.  After purchasing the original banjo she borrowed she spent several years learning how to play bluegrass, eventually realizing that what she really enjoyed was not imitating a genre-specific style, but instead discovering her own.  Amy plays bluegrass occasionally, but with patience.

Amy began taking her 24 year collection of half finished songs and night table poetry and ending them.  Ending them this time, not by throwing them away, but instead by editing them and deciding she had finished them. After the breakthrough discovery that a song is done when YOU tell it to be done, she was transformed.

Tony Rogers started playing the cello in elementary school, and immediately it became a most significant part of his life. 

Tony is founder of the Portland Cello Project, a collaborative collection of improvisational cellists based in and around Portland, Oregon. 

In the Fall of 2006, Tony started the website and business StringTracking.com, which offering string compositions and arrangements for singer songwriters and film producers across the United States. 

His first and last love is his work with Amy in The Ahs.

ON RECORDS: Projects of Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater, The New Shoes, Nat Baldwin, Jens Lekman, Will Stratton, The Receiver, Whu Gnu, and Lindsay Fuller, plus hundreds of other artists/filmmakers/songwriters via the entrepreneurial business “StringTracking”.

IN FILMS:  Currently involved in the scoring of a  documentary based around training wild mustang horses.  “The Secret Life of Moe Berg” 2007

TOURED:   Jens Lekman, members of Magnolia Electric Company, The Ahs, and The Impossible Shapes. He has also performed with members of The Polyphonic Spree, and with the 70s pop band Air Supply.

Click here for some of Tony’s looped cello music/songs and other compositions.

        ‘The Ahs’,  singing/songwriting duo Amy McIntire and Tony Rogers, made their debut at the Keene Music Festival in Keene, NH in August of 2005 to an auditorium of 186 empty and 14 occupied theater chairs.  Their hopelessly entwined romance with one another and with their music was born six months prior to their debut after a mutual friend introduced them at The Diner, in Peterborough, NH.

The sound they produce together has been called ‘comedy and tragedy.’  Tony’s explosive cello lines compliment Amy’s pared-down, ethereal banjo riffs.  Their harmonies sweeten even the coarsest lyrics.  And there is passion a plenty.  Underlying it all, there is deep respect for the traditional background the Ahs descended from.  Tony, trained as a classical cellist, draws from years of mostly German etudes and Bach Suites, but is equally at home with improvisation.  Amy grew up listening to and idolizing songwriters from the folk tradition.  The two together make their unique blend of ‘symphonic folk.’  Their autobiographical songs express beautifully basic emotions of passion, love, fear, and hope.