With Music in Her Heart

Miranda Lambert. AC/DC. Country music royalty and the sometimes raunchy, kinda paunchy, self-proclaimed thunder from down under. If you’re struggling to make the connection, try looking—or rather, listening—closer to home, like Van Neste Square, the Kasschau Memorial Bandshell, or any number of other venues that feature live music throughout the Village and surrounding towns.

That’s where you’ll find Ridgewood Public Schools teacher Amy Briggs tickling the ears of appreciative audiences with songs from not only Lambert and AC/DC, but other disparate artists ranging from Mary J. Blige to Tom Petty to Norah Jones to Melissa Etheridge.

Parents who’ve had a child in Ms. Briggs’s Spanish class at Benjamin Franklin Middle School or Travell and Hawes elementary schools have been known to express surprise over seeing one of their child’s favorite teachers on stage—as has the songstress herself. Music was always an important part of her life, but singing in a band at this point was not on her dance card.

“I always loved to sing,” she says. “When I was in middle school, I tried out for the spring musical, and I got a part. When I was in high school, I was in the show choir, an a capella performance group. In my senior year, I auditioned for the spring musical and landed a secondary lead role in 42nd Street. I learned to tap dance!”

While she continued to sing in an a cappella group in college, embracing marriage, motherhood, and a career as a postgraduate, young adulthood nudged performing out of the picture for a while. She taught Spanish at BF for 28 years before realizing she needed a new challenge. She’s been splitting her time between Hawes and Travell ever since.

The Winding Road

It was Briggs’ affinity for education that brought her full circle back into singing. A small part in College Capers, a scholarship fundraising show produced through the College Club in Ridgewood, proved to be the first step back to the stage. A fellow cast member was directing the wildly popular Ridgewood High School Jamboree that year and insisted that Briggs come try out for the production.

“So I did, and I ended up getting paired for a duet with Andy Meyer. We did ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’.” Briggs recalled. “At the cast party afterward, he told me he was putting a band together, that he had a guitar player lined up, and a bass player lined up, and they were good friends of his…and I was totally obtuse. I said, ‘Oh, good for you.’ But he said, “‘No, Amy, I’m saying I want you to be in it.’”

Her gut reaction was comically self-deprecating: “I thought, oh, no, I can’t do that—I teach!” Meyer persisted gently, though, and Briggs’s husband provided the additional encouragement that convinced her to give it a go.

So, Briggs agreed to attend a rehearsal with the band that grew to become Amped. Even then, though, her vision of her participation was of a different sort from Meyer’s.

“I thought, well, I’m an alto and acapella; I like to harmonize, so maybe I’ll be a backup singer. And he was like, ‘No, no, I want you to share the lead with me. We’ll each sing the lead on an equal number of songs.’”

That took another round of convincing on Meyer’s part, but Briggs put her nerves aside and committed to trying Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” with the band. And that was all she needed to go all in. “I sang it. Then he sang some stuff, and I did some backup vocals—and that was it. It just clicked. Now we’ve been together for ten years.”

Here, There, and Everywhere

Over that span, Amped has been playing steadily at Ridgewood’s many festivals and music series—Music Under the Stars, Music in the Park, the Ridgewood Guild’s Music Fest, Ridgewood Unplugged, as well as the inaugural Porchfest event last fall. They also booked gigs in town and at well-known spots around Bergen County, like Shortway’s Barn in Hawthorne and the Mason Jar in Mahwah.

While Briggs pairs off occasionally to perform more intimate sets with former bandmate Joe Oriente, an accomplished guitar player and vocalist, her main singing gig continues to be with the Amped crew—in addition to Briggs and Meyer, Frank Muchel, Gil D’Alonzo, Rob Garcia, Mike Black, and Frank Delvecchio.

“I couldn’t ask to play with six nicer men. They are all such great guys, Briggs said. “They make fun of me for this, but I call it our band family.”

Getting Better All the Time

At her core, it’s teaching that continues to be Briggs’ calling after more than three decades in the classroom. And her efforts continue to be appreciated, apparently, as she was named Travell’s Teacher of the Year for 2026–26—thanks in no small part to her continued willingness to step outside her comfort zone to tackle new challenges.

This school year, she directed her first theatrical production when Travell mounted Moana as its school play. Even beyond wanting to put on a great show for the Travell community in her debut, Briggs’s first priority was to ensure that everyone involved, “from the girl who played Moana to the student who painted the glow-in-the-dark monster faces, to the one who operated the lights,” felt equally important.

“I had a fantastic team of people working with me, 100%, and we all wanted to have a real community feel to it,” she says.

To that end, a literal teachable moment occurred early in the rehearsal process when Briggs asked another teacher to stand alone at center stage. “I said, Okay, guys, look—Ms. Paduano is standing on stage. What’s happening here? And they responded, ‘Nothing, she’s just standing there.’ I wanted to show the students that was because she didn’t have any sets behind her or music playing. We need all of us working together on this, or else nothing happens.”

Proof that the exercise had its intended effect came when the mom of one of the students shared a conversation that took place one day after rehearsal. “One of the girls who was in the stage crew went home and said, ‘Today we talked about this, and this, and basically the stage crew is the most important part of the entire show!’ It was rewarding to hear this and realize that everyone got the message!”

Find out about other upcoming gigs by following the band on Facebook at @ampednj.

Photographs by Adam Paray

Harris Fleming is a freelance writer who lives in Waldwick with his wife (also a Ridgewood school teacher) and teenage son. His own gift for belting out a song is best appreciated from a distance.