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The American Dream finds Amy Speace in a very reflective mood as the songs trace her life as a young girl, her journey beyond her childhood roots and her experiences on the path to becoming the woman and artist she is today.
The album was produced by Neilson Hubbard, who plays the drums alongside contributions from Doug Lanci on guitar, bassist Lex Price, Danny Mitchell on keys, Garrison Star providing harmonies and mandolinist Joshua Britt.
The American Dream opens back in 1976 with the anthemic strummed title track, the drums kicking in as it captures Speace as a 7-year-old in a carefree summer playing “kick the can till the sun went down”, riding her bike with its huffy handlebars, hanging out with her friends Juliet whose family had a pool and Cheryl who “could run faster than the boys at school” and whose “dad played for the Vikings”. But it also has the air of political change in the wind as she recalls, “Daddy said Carter was a weakling/A Democratic farmer could never beat Ford/Said we were heading for disaster/Lost his faith in the Vietnam war”, and wanting to “Hold on tight to the American Dream”.
Echoing that the album was written in the process of her marriage ending and returning to East Nashville, the chiming, walking beat Homecoming Queen is about a former high school classmate (“We were better friends in Junior High/Watching Little League games those August nights/Read the dirty parts of Judy Blume/On her canopy bed in the afternoon/I heard one night up on Tower Hill/She rounded third base with a college kid”) who, semi-famous in their town, moved away but, her dreams never realised (“She ran to California without a plan/Married the drummer from a heavy metal band/Ended up a footnote in Rolling Stone”) came back home, yet with her head high and her dignity (and looks) intact (“I see her at reunions when I bother to go/Twirling the straw in her Jack and Coke/No matter how many years go by/She still looks like 1985”).
A co-write with Hubbard, Britt’s mandolin trilling, the slow-walking, strings-swathed Where Did You Go directly relates to divorce (“Locking the doors pulling the shades/Don’t even answer no more/Stopped wearing the ring pictures came down …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”). It has a companion piece in the chugging, bittersweet, echoey Motown groove Gary Nicholson co-write Glad I’m Gone (“They say people change, you just stayed the same. I know you said you tried, but we both know you lied/Didn’t’ wanna leave but I’m glad I’m gone/Why did I wait so long/Hard to let go, but now I know/I could be that strong I’m glad I’m gone”).
Sandwiched in-between is the late-night bar mood semi-spoken In New York City on which, backed by upright piano and conjuring classic Brill Building and Carole King, she speaks of moving to NYC at 23 to train as an actress (“I’d stumble down Hudson from the meat packing district/Toward the studio flat that I shared with a friend/My bed gainst the window with bars to the street/Impatiently wanting my life to begin”), testing her new freedoms (“Surrounded by photos, my first love from college/One night I got high and I took someone else home/I broke an engagement too poor for a ring”). She recalls moving to the East Village and acquiring unlikely protectors in the street’s drug dealers who saw her always coming home late from her day job. And then memories move to when “A few years later I was living in Brooklyn/married, divorced, I’d moved out on my own/To a basement apartment that faced the cathedral/A narrow backyard made of round paving stones/Where I planted a garden of roses and thyme/Spent mornings in prayer with coffee and clouds/Wrote everything down in a flurry of heartbreak/Sang all my sadness for crowds” as, singing in coffeehouses, her musical career took its early steps. But she also muses on how time can wear rose-tinted glasses (“I know what age does to memory/It softens the edges and everything’s blurred/It fills in the gaps with regret and romance” as she asks “Am I really that many years from that girl?/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 I want to know”). She says it’s her favourite out of all she’s written; you may well agree.
Recalling early Baez, the five-minute acoustic-picked and strummed This February Day is more set in the present and of how she finds calm and relief in walking the Shelby Park Trail (“the deer aren’t afraid there’s a buck and a doe/There’s an owl in the tree I can hear her howl and moan”) along the Cumberland River where “Years ago I walked this trail learning to break free/Of a broken heart and spirit and it helped me to heal”) and now, “I walk in silence and let myself cry/Looking for an answer in the earth and the sky/Reaching for a God I don’t believe in all the time”. She also brings a twist to a familiar country song image as she sings, “There’s something bout a train that makes me feel I’m not alone/The echo of the whistle like a song that I have known/All my life I’ve had the urge to run away to the unknown/Instead of stay”.
Be it the Potomac, the Susquehanna, the Hudson, or the Cumberland, rivers have loomed large in Amy Speace’s life and form the inspiration for the swampy blues Something Bout A Town and its simple affirmation “Rolling slowly/Or moving fast/It’s the only /Thing that takes me all the way back…to those days when I didn’t know much/And I worried if I’d stay I’d just get stuck/But there’s something bout a town with a river I trust”.
Another co-write, with Robby Hecht, and, informed by mutual experiences, another breakup number, the slow, piano-based, country gospel-tinted Already Gone heartbreakingly captures that feeling of knowing something’s over before it actually falls apart (“The ashtrays are all empty, there’s no coat on the floor/There’s plenty of room in these half empty drawers/I go to bed early, I’m up before dawn/How can I love you when you’re already gone/You said all the right things, I let my guard down/You got on your knees, and I wore my Mom’s gown/For better or worse, I guess we were wrong”) and the distance that comes when it is (“I came by to see you and stood in the door/You invited me in but just stared at the floor/I see it now, it’s clear you’ve moved on”).
Rather more upbeat with a military drum beat and sleigh bells, First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show is a blow-by-blow description of an event (familiar to every parent) at her son Huck’s pre-school Nativity show (“It was the Christmas Pageant at the Church Day Care/The Ducks on the left and the Owls on the right …Three wise men and plastic Jesus in fake snow”) where “Mary played with her dress with a bored blank stare/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” that positively glows with a mother’s love and pride.
Things ebb back into more melancholic frame of mind for I Break Things, another with Brill Building DNA and tinges of Janis Ian, the chorus a collaboration with Jon Vezner, a song birthed in the aftermath of her separation, snowed in at her temporary cottage accommodation with her guitar and my keyboard, as she pours her soul out in the lines “I loved you from the first and I promised through the worst I wouldn’t leave/But I’m the one who let you down/Let my leaving be a gift from you to me…Cause I break things/I hold the things I love the most then throw them so they shatter on the floor/Pick up all the pieces try to glue them back the way they were before/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’ve made”.
While the story of Ann Frank is well-known, that of her sister, who died in a concentration camp and reportedly kept her own diary, is rather less so. A visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam while on tour was the spark for the penultimate delicate lullabying piano ballad Margot’s Wall, which talks of the pictures of famous women she taped to the wall of the tiny room (“Just an average teenage girl/Passing time inside her dreams/Caught in someone else’s war/Movie stars and beauty queens”) and, at a time when Amy Speace’s relationship was fragmenting, becomes a metaphor for how there’s always something left behind when something breaks apart (“I moved out just yesterday/From the home we built with love
To leave an absence in my place/Once I thought we were enough/Now in this new home all alone/Our faded photos line the hall/I put them up to give me hope/Like the ones on Margot’s wall”).
It ends with a piano-accompanied cover of the positivity-charged Graham Weber/Jaimee Harris song about how whatever storms and darkness may gather, there will be light ahead and, “Maybe when you’re not quite looking/Maybe tonight, my friend”, as the title says, Love Is Going To Come Again.
As universal as it is personal, it reminds us that while life may not get easier, we can become more resilient against its blows; the highest praise I can think of is to say The American Dream is an Amy Speace album…she’s still one of the greatest artists in Americana today. Outstanding.
The American Dream (18th October 2024) Windbone
Order via ProperMusic: https://propermusic.com/products/amyspeace-theamericandream
Amy Speace Tour Dates:
Oct. 21 – London – The Slaughtered Lamb
Oct. 25 – Keswick – Walter Yeats
Oct. 26 – Whitby – Musicport Festival
Oct. 30 – Stirling – Tolbooth
Oct. 31 – Hebden Bridge – Trades Club
Nov. 1 – Londonderry – Sandinos
Nov. 2 – Weston-Super-Mare – Loves Cafe
Tickets: https://www.amyspeace.com/tour
