Bio

Caught halfway between modern folk music, timeless roots-rock, and classic pop, Amy Speace's The American Dream is an album about balance and transition. It's also the eighth solo record from an award-winning songwriter who's spent most the 21st century on the move, playing 150 shows a year, forever keeping her eyes glued to the road ahead. With The American Dream, she gives herself the grace to glance backward, too, writing reflective songs that turn glimpses of her past — a childhood bike ride with friends, an artistic awakening as a 20something New Yorker, a painful divorce — into fuel for chasing down a bolder, brighter present.

Everything begins with the album's title track, whose jangling guitars and heartland hooks find Speace exploring new ground. Set during the bicentennial era of the mid-1970s, "The American Dream" captures its narrator as a young girl in the middle of a carefree summer, surrounded by a world that feels weightless and infinite. It's the sort of anthemic song that begs to be played in a moving car, the windows rolled down, sunlight streaming through the windshield. Even so, there's a sense of foreboding to the way Speace sings "Hold tight to the American dream" during the chorus, as though she's warning her own protagonist about the stark wake-up call that awaits. As the rest of the The American Dream unfolds, it covers similar territory, measuring the distance between our dreams and our reality.

"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," says Speace, who wrote The American Dream while splitting from her ex-husband and returning to her beloved community of East Nashville. "All of these songs deal with that. They're a response to the pain and grief I felt at the time."

Dreams unrealized, indeed. On "Homecoming Queen," a teenaged beauty moves to California in search of love and fame, only to return empty-handed to the town she once couldn't wait to leave. On "Glad I'm Gone," Speace surveys the aftermath of a wrecked relationship over Motown grooves and soulful organ. On "I Break Things" — written while she was still in the early stages of securing her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetry from Spalding University — she draws connections between the darkness in her own head and the darkness of a country on the brink of collapse.

This is poignant, personal, and heavy stuff, but there's levity and beauty, too. "First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show" is a comical play-by-play of her son's pre-school nativity pageant, delivered by Speace in a straight-faced deadpan that highlights just how beautiful her usual vocal delivery — flecked with a vibrato that's earned frequent comparisons to Judy Collins and Joan Baez — can be. "In New York City" unfolds like a love letter to the city where Speace began playing low-key coffeehouse gigs between her commitments as a classically-trained Shakespearean actress. "That was my life in my 20s and 30s; I walked through Manhattan and never got tired," she sings over upright piano and light touches of orchestral strings, sketching a richly-detailed world of East Village speakeasies, romantic flings, sidewalk book sales, and backyard gardens tucked between slabs of concrete.

Speace recorded The American Dream in Nashville, teaming up with longtime producer/drummer Neilson Hubbard and lacing her songs with contributions from guitarist Doug Lancio, bassist Lex Price, keyboardist Danny Mitchell (who also wrote the album's string arrangements), harmony vocalist Garrison Starr, and mandolin player Joshua Britt. "In the band, we had two other great players who are also great producers," Speace explains. "Doug Lancio has produced Patty Griffin and Kim Richey. Lex Price has produced Peter Bradley Adams and Mindy Smith. That changed everything. The combined experience of everyone — the creativity and confidence — really informed the tunes." Equally influential were her co-writers, including Robby Hecht (who contributed to the classic country waltz "Already Gone"), Grammy winner Gary Nicholson (Speace's creative partner on "Glad I'm Gone"), and fellow Grammy winner Jon Vezner (who helped pen the keening chorus to "I Break Things").

The result is a diverse, dynamic album that shows just how far Speace's artistic reach can be, with a track list that evokes Tom Petty one minute and Tom T. Hall the next. At the center of that sound is Speace's triple-threat talent as a songwriter, storyteller, and otherworldly singer — the same traits that have already earned her an international audience, a touring schedule laced with bucket-list appearances at the Glastonbury Festival, and critical acclaim for songs like "The Ghost of Charlemagne," which was named "International Song of the Year" at the UK Americana Awards.

Pain. Poetry. Resilience. Resolve. It's all part of The American Dream. Amy Speace leaves no stone unturned, writing about her own heartbreak with a beauty that's palpable, turning personal experience into universal songs about the dreams we all share: to be happy, to be loved, to be fulfilled. Dreamy, indeed.