​Amy Speace (from the album The Blue Rock Sessions

​Amy Speace (from the album The Blue Rock Sessions

​Amy Speace (from the album The Blue Rock Sessions available on Windbone Records) (by Danny McCloskey)
 
Amy Speace experienced magic during a writer’s retreat at Blue Rock. Of the environment, she shared that Blue Rock is ‘part private home, part artist retreat, part world-class recording studio, part concert hall, there are miles of hiking/walking trails, a rainwater pool, birds, cedars, sagebrush, and blue Texas sky, walls and walls of bookshelves with every conceivable kind of inspiration from science to poetry to autobiography to painting’. Amy Speace immersed herself in the space, mining creativity for new songs as well as fine-tuning words and music from her notebook and past album releases. Her new album, Blue Rock Sessions was an unexpected gift for the renowned Folk musician, who told of her journey by explaining that ‘as part of the residency, we were each given a few hours in the studio with an engineer.  I decided to lay down all my new songs on my 1956 Gibson J-45. I didn’t think too much. I just sat in front of the mic and sang the songs, freshly written, still forming in my mouth. Mostly, they were the first or second ‘take’. There was some magic in the air. I brought out my notebook of other new songs I’d written over the past year and kept going. With each song, I’d say to Hayes ‘I think there’s something happening here' and he’d smile and say to me ‘hell yeah, there’s something happening. You’re making a record!’ Three hours later, 11 songs down, and I was exhausted and giddy. I’d made a record I hadn’t even intended to make’.
 
Confident strums lead the way into Blue Rock Sessions with opening track “On a Monday in London” as Amy Speace brings listeners along for a walk through the English city. She offers acoustic versions of “Weight of the World”, “Both Feet on the Ground”, and “Kindness”. Backed by simple guitar and piano accompaniment, Blue Rock Sessions is a beautiful example of how a stripped back sound is the perfect vehicle for Folk singers. Amy Speace’s world-class vocal rises and falls through her stories as she tells of “The Dream of a Hawk”, tenderly picks out notes for the tale of “The Mother”, speaks of her dreams in “Out of the Blue”, and tentatively begins solitary life with “In This Home”. Bringing back a track from her 2013 release, How to Sleep in a Stormy Boat, Amy Speace delivers an acoustic version of her duet with John Fullbright from the album, “The Sea and The Shore”. (by Danny McCloskey)
 
Listen and buy the music of Amy Speace from AMAZON
For more information head on over to the Amy Speace website