Buffalo, New York college student Amanda Nagurney spends every free moment working on her one true aspiration, her music.

Beginning piano lessons at the age of seven and vocal lessons the year after. Music, she remembers, was something inside her from the start, “I was sitting in a music store and playing a song on the piano by ear. Before this, I’d never touched a piano. So, I started taking piano lessons.”

As she grew up, Amanda says she was, “A very busy girl. I was enrolled with many different activities including dancing, singing, piano, guitar, Girl Scouts, volunteer work, softball, cheerleading, volleyball. I had a very good childhood. We were always vacationing and just living life to the fullest. My upbringing shaped my life.”

That same ‘live everyday like your last’ spirit that her parents instilled in her is part of what drives her today. “I am a person who likes to take things day by day. I have long-term and short-term goals but I really like to focus on my short-term goals.” Amanda, who has a CD out called "Gettin Out Of This Town", is working on getting sponsorships to go back to Nashville for and record a follow-up album. “While I am doing that, I am giving 15% of all the money I make to Roswell Park Cancer Institute for Cancer Research. I feel that if I am that lucky to be receiving money for the pleasurable things in life, that I can give some of the money back to the people who need it the most. I am working on a new band and my acoustic duo. Most of my time is working on songwriting, promoting, practicing my singing, playing guitar and teaching voice lessons. If I am not doing any of these, I am in school going for music education, working my way through college and I’m out performing whenever I have the opportunity.”

Some of those performances have landed her as the opening act for several recording artists including The John Corbett Band, LoCash Cowboys, Miranda Lambert, Phil Vassar, Joe Nichols, and Sammy Kershaw. “I have sung the National Anthem for the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Sabers several times, World’s Toughest Rodeo and the Buffalo Bison’s. I have been nominated for the Best Female Vocalist in Buffalo in 2008.”

“I do what I do for several reasons.” Amanda says, “Number one being the fact that music makes me so happy, it gets me out of a stressful day that I have had and allows me to be somewhere else. Number two is making people feel good while listening to me and to my music. I feel that music comes from the heart and how you express it and the way it makes you feel is the true meaning to music.”