Spotlight Album Review: Amy Speace "The American Dream"

Ever since I heard Songs for Bright Street in 2006, I’ve been a champion of Amy Speace, whose writing and singing have stood out from the crowd. Since then she’s recorded 9 more albums, the last 8 in Nashville, where she’s lived for many years. Her output is fairly prolific, with four albums in the past five years, three of them produced by Neilson Hubbard, her go-to producer since 2011. With the aid of some of Nashville’s best songwriters and musicians, her new album, The American Dream, is a very personal chronicle of childhood, divorce, and motherhood. In another words, stuff lots of folks can relate to.  

The first two tracks are pictures of growing up in America. “The American Dream,” with a Tom Petty/John Mellencamp flavor with a Tom Petty/John Mellencamp feel, is set during the Bicentennial, when she was 8,. Like her great song, “Weight of the World” (co-written with Jon Vezner) from The Killer In Me, it contrasts the idealism of that hopeful moment with the our implied polarization since. (“Dreams are made to keep us moving,” she sings, “Try to find where we belong.”) “Homecoming Queen” takes her to high school football games, and the popular girl (like the Indigo Girls’ “Beauty Queen Sister”) whose dreams don’t get realized:

Everybody wants to dance with the queen
Everybody wants to make a big show
But nobody ever tells you it’s time to 
put away your rock and roll clothes 

“Where Did You Go” is one of several that addresses the breakup of her marriage. Written with Neilson Hubbard, it’s another instance of the dream gone awry, with lush strings and palpable heartbreak:

I took yours you took mine
Hearts never got what they wanted
Love’s empty house all boxed up
Still and quiet as a mouse

“Glad I’m Gone,” written with Gary Nicholson, is another post-divorce song, but with a sense of relief and an R&B groove. On the other hand, “Already Gone” is an unrequited country ballad, written with Robby Hecht after they both endured breakups (“I see it now, it’s clear you’ve moved on/How can I love you when you’re already gone”), featuring a tasty guitar solo.

Although she’s been a mainstay in Nashville, Amy reminisces about her time in New York, where she lived for many years, on “In NYC.” With graceful piano backing and vivid biographical detail, it recalls some of her mentor Judy Collins’ songs and looks back on the girl she was then:

But I look at the photos from decades ago
There’s something about her I may have lost
There’s so much I want to know
New York City

Being in a city brings out some of Amy’s best songs. “Something About a Town” is an ode to Nashville, (“There’s something bout a town with a river I trust/Always tearing it down and building back up”), while “This February Day,” written during a morning run along a river, finds spirituality along the way (“One foot and then the other it’s a comforting beat/That moves the sorrow through my soul and out as I weep”).

The existential tone of the album is lightened by “First United Methodist Day Care Show.” Like any parent’s home video of a Christmas pageant, it’s both hilarious and heartfelt (“My kid knew the words, well most of them/But he sang with heart next to his best friend”) and makes you feel Amy’s all-encompassing and soul-saving love for her son Huck.  

Two piano ballads follow. One, “I Break Things, (co-written with Jon Vezner) is an emotional response to her separation (“I hold the things I love the most then throw them so they shatter on the floor”), while the other, drawn from a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam) puts her shattered life in perspective. The album closes on a hopeful note, with a song written by Jaimee Harris, her close friend Mary Gauthier’s partner (“love will find you and remind you of the things you thought you’d give up feeling/Love is gonna come again’).

Like Mary, Amy has learned to process the experiences in her life and, perhaps aided by her graduate work in creative writing, continues to make the personal poetic, proving that she is one of our very finest singer-songwriters.

photo by Neilson Hubbard