Amy Speace

The American Dream

Windbone

Singer-songwriter Amy Speace has a special gift for capturing nostalgia and for writing honestly about an array of emotions. It would be tempting to call The American Dream a breakup album, but there’s much more here than just tunes about her bitter divorce. Memories of the past seem to keep driving her forward. Even through songs where her lyrics speak so directly and eloquently to those feelings of lonely directionless, her resilience comes through. Speace, with now her eighth release, just gets incrementally better each time out. Testaments to Speace’s rising trajectory are an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival and International Song of the Year at the UK Americana Awards for “Ghost of Charlemagne.”She is now unequivocally among the best in that haven of songwriters in East Nashville, able to tap the best supporting musicians and co-writers. Producer/drummer Nielsen Hubbard has produced albums for Mary Gauthier, KIm Richey, and Rod Picott among others. Guitarist Doug Lancio has graced and produced albums from John Hiatt, Gretchen Peters, Patty Griffin, and Jim Lauderdale among many. Bassist Lex Price has produced Michael McDermott, Mindy Smith, and Peter Bradley Adams. Also contributing are keyboardist and arranger Danny Mitchell, harmony vocalist Garrison Starr, and mandolinist Joshua Britt. Speace also worked with leading co-writers such as Bobby Hecht, Gary Nicholson, and Jon Vezner.

There’s multiple themes or double themes running through some of these songs, especially “American Dream” and “Homecoming Queen.” Speace talks about the thread that binds the album together – “Sometimes you reach for the dream and you don’t get it, or it doesn’t get realized, or it turns out to be something different than you thought it would be. All these songs deal with that. Thye’re a response to the pain and grief I felt at the time.” The title track, by her own admission, rather unintentionally casts light on the fragility of democracy at this time. Speace was recalling the sense of freedom she had as a seven-year-old, the bicycle with “A joker in the spokes and huffy handlebars…Yankee Doodle Dady and Sparklers in the yard.” Yet her reference to her conservative dad’s feelings of impending disaster can’t help but bring us to the present day, amplified by the chorus “Hold on tight to the American Dream.” In the jangling “Homecoming Queen” Speace writes about a real-life character that she knew in high school who left home to pursue her dreams, only to find herself defeated, returning home again.

The first definitive breakup tune is the swirling “Where Did You Go” where her expressive vocal soars over a bed of strings with such startling poetic lines as “Love’s empty house all boxed up/Still and quiet as a mouse.” She plies similar turf, teaming with Nicholson on the mid-tempo organ infused ballad with its emphatic line “Glad I’m Gone.” She and Bobby Hecht, who was also going through a painful separation, collaborate on a fictional story about breakup in the pensive “Already Gone,” featuring an incisive Lancio guitar break. Arguably the best of these is “I Break Things,” written with Vezner as physical breaking becomes a metaphor for emotional wreckage – “I’ve done this all my life breaking vows and dishes in a rage/Tonight alone here in this house I’m lying in the lonely bed I made.” Yet hope appears in the last verse, as she sings of the magic of East Nashville bringing us together, one can’t help but read those lines too as a plea for unity in this divisive country, another angle on the ‘breaking.”

Speace’s nostalgic songs are very bit as strong if not stronger. She feels that the autobiographical “In New York City” is the best song she’s ever written, detailing her days as an aspiring actress living in the rather dangerous East Village in the early ‘90s. Over ringing piano chords and strings, she paints vivid imagery of those times, only to revisit it recently to view how much she and the city have changed. “There’s lines on my face and my long hair is grey/But I look at the photos from decades ago/There’s something about her I may have lost/There’s so much more I want to know/New York City.” She finds sustenance in rivers, recalling how she’s always lived near one in the upbeat Petty-like rocker, “Something Bout a Town.” She sounds joyful in the humorous “First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show,” singing about a real life event for her pre-school son. It’s packed with lines like these – “Joseph cried for Mom, snot running everywhere/They sent in a sub, a shepherd in a shawl/But Joseph wouldn’t leave, so it was a menage-a-trois.” One of the best here though is present day as Speace delves into her inner most thoughts, the aforementioned lonely directionless in the bleak but oddly comforting “February Day” where she still manages to express resilience. “…And I’m hoping for a miracle on this winding way/This February Day.”

There’s hope too in “Margot’s Wall” where Speace was struck by Anne Frank’s sister, Margot’s hanging pictures of fmaous women on the walls of the Anne Frank house. Despite the bitter memories, she hands past photos of happier times in her new home to give her hope. To close she covers the Jaime Harris/Graham Weber “Love Is Gonna Come Again,” one that sums up her state of mind with its chorus – “I know it hurts like hell right now/and only you know how/No one can tell you when/Oh, but love is gonna come again.” In Speace’s world, dreaming never ends.

Amy Speace has delivered her best record and one of the best singer-songwriter efforts of 2024.

– Jim Hynes

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