Amy Speace

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 ninth 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.

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.

"Amy Speace is on a roll. Each new release has brought an expansion of her voice and her art, and she has reached the level of absolute mastery. Folk music doesn’t get any better than this.”
- Mary Gauthier