Amy Speace: Making of her personal trials and triumphs a universal kind of poetry that speaks to truths beyond her singular experience and becomes accessible to anyone who’s been out there trying to understand the games people play. (Photo: http://blueridgeconcerts.tv/photos/image/43)

TheBluegrassSpecial.com Interview

‘The Underside Of the Cloud Is Where I Want To Look’

Amy Speace Takes Flight On Land Like a Bird

By David McGee

I wrote my new record, Land Like a Bird, in a new life that fit and fell on me like new skin, not yet stretched out and worn in. I wrote this record in love and for love and broken by love and moved to the highest heights and the lowest lows, but, always with my eyes and heart trained toward the gleam of light on the topside of the shadow. I wrote these songs as love letters. To someone specific, to nobody in particular, to the girl looking back at me in the morning mirror, who has a few more lines than the last time I looked her way.

So writes Amy Speace in notes accompanying advance pressings of her new album. Land Like a Bird is every bit as intense and challenging as the artist’s own words suggest. Though it can be appreciated on its own merits, as simply a powerful, well-crafted, deeply emotional collection of endings and beginnings, of sunrises and sunsets, of hearts despairing and exulting both, Land Like a Bird is best appreciated in the context of her previous long player, 2009’s acclaimed The Killer In Me. Though born from the detritus of a collapsed marriage, The Killer In Me was a moment for the artist to take the measure of her own complicity in the relationship’s ultimate failure, and in its aftermath to find her way back into a self affirming light. The healing wasn’t only self-serving, though: the somber folk ballad “Piece by Piece” that grows more intense, more urgent as it unfolds was the outgrowth of Speace hearing of her father's twin brother's death and wanting to reassure him of her love and support--"If you fall down, I will be there on my knees," Speace sings with a slight, affecting catch in her upper register, "if you break down, I can sing you to sleep/put you back when you're weak/piece by piece." One of the tracks receiving the most attention was actually a bonus cut, “Weight of the World,” a song questioning the burden of responsibility placed on young people in the armed forces, and the toll it takes on them and their families. “I carefully crafted that song so that it spoke to both sides,” Speace explained in a 2009 interview with this publication. “Honored somebody who chose to go off but also says, 'What's the point in all this?'”

In the end The Killer In Me became more than what Ms. Speace had thought it was. As she observed in our 2009 interview, "It's funny, when I put the record together, I didn't think of it as a record that was answering to my divorce at all. I just put the record together as the record--side one, side two, cool, little dark album. But when other people in my life heard it, they would say, 'This is really a powerful record that speaks to where you are, personally.' And it really is--I didn't think about that. In fact my ex is one of my biggest fans and continues to be a very positive influence and force in my life. We have a very good relationship now. He even said, 'Wow, this is exactly where you were.' I think it was cathartic for him to hear it."

Land Like a Bird begins with what is, essentially, a two-part prelude in the steady, somber thump of “Drive All Night”—a subdued but assertive declaration of commitment—and the title track, itself quiet but forceful, replete with spacey blips and bleeps until it roars at the end, as Ms. Speace evokes the fresh start suggested at the close of The Killer In Me, singing softly, “There’s a new world/land like a bird.” Then, eight songs comprising a postscript to the previous album, from the eerie reflections on the dearly departed in “Ghost” to the earnest inquisition of “Change for Me”; the classic, Patsy Cline-redolent country ballad, “It’s Too Late To Call It a Night”; the terse, fingerpicked farewell to “Manila Street”; the frank, folk-flavored confessional, “Had to Lose,” about the solitary journey back to wholeness (one of several songs on this album when Ms. Speace’s softly ringing voice sounds uncannily like that of Judy Collins, the woman for whose label she once recorded), winding up at Ron Sexsmith’s “Galbraith Street,” a tender farewell to a place both literal and figurative (as in the heart). Only in the penultimate song, “Vertigo,” does the music explode as it does in several places on The Killer In Me, as if this is the moment when all the issues she confronts on her previous album are laid to rest, so that “Real Love Song,” the mellow, near-whispered duet with producer Neilson Hubbard that closes the album, marks the start of a new chapter, possibly to be continued the next time we hear new music from Amy Speace.

Land Like a Bird marks the moment when Amy Speace should be regarded among the finest songwriters of her generation, one who can make of her personal trials and triumphs a universal kind of poetry addressing truths beyond her singular experience and accessible to anyone who’s been out there trying to understand the games people play. It’s not unfair or outrageous to compare her writing and singing to Rosanne Cash’s at similar stages of their careers: The Killer in Me may not have been as brutal and searing as, say, Cash’s Interiors, but it was close, and a frightful howl in its own right, whereas Land Like a Bird might well be her version of Cash’s thoughtful examination of relationships as found on Rules of Travel—in fact, the difference between the two artists’ sensibilities might be found on Travel’s “I’ll Change for You” (a duet between Cash and Steve Earle about commitment) and Land Like a Bird’s “Change for Me” (a solo screed born of frustration with a self-absorbed significant other, who in reality is Ms. Speace’s sister but the sentiments, again, have a universal application, as any number of couples surely will attest).

Land Like a Bird arrives as the latest of several new features in the artist’s life. Since last speaking to TheBluegrassSpecial.com in 2009, Ms. Speace, born in Baltimore, raised mostly in small-town Pennsylvania, has relocated from the New York City area, where she lived for 18 years, to Nashville; changed labels, from Wildflower to Nashville-based Thirty Tigers; changed management, from a New York firm to a Nashville firm; and changed producers, from James Mastro to Neilson Hubbard, Garrison Starr’s long-time producer/collaborator. Against this backdrop a batch of fresh songs emerged.

Again, from her own notes, Ms. Speace explains: But life takes twists and turns and as much as I loved Manhattan, I felt the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another. Relief and anticipation went hand in hand with the grieving.

Then, out of the blue, a rush of wind and I was drawn. I flew south during the harvest season, like the geese, as the days grew shorter. I was following a path well worn by songwriters and dreamers, reasons enough for me to pack my leftover and borrowed belongings and my dog and drive to Nashville in 2009, cradling an aching hope that I was following something I couldn’t see clearly but would illuminate soon as long as I leapt. I trusted the net would appear.

Here, it seemed, was a place to begin a conversation. In late February, when she answered the phone at her new Nashville home, we fleshed out the story of her last two years’ journey.

***

There have been many changes since last we spoke. You left this part of the country and relocated to Nashville. You changed labels. You came to this area as an actress and left an acclaimed singer-songwriter. And indeed, there are farewells to places as well as people on the new album. What’s the story behind the story of these changes?

For a songwriter, Nashville is a kind of Mecca. I’ve been coming here off and on, but it just didn’t feel right. Still, I always thought I would I try to spend more time here. Then there was the massive shift in my personal life, and as much as I have ties to New York, it wasn’t like I was obliged to them anymore. Didn’t have a marriage anymore. So I could, if I wanted to, go anywhere I wanted. I don’t have kids. And I had left my New York-based management and was working with a Nashville-based manager, and I was leaving my label and working with a Nashville-based label. So I thought, It makes sense. As I say, sometimes a door opens and you just walk through it and it feels right. And that’s exactly what happened. I came down here for a week to do some meetings with people, and everybody I met said, “I don’t understand. Why don’t you live here? You should live here.” I kept laughing, saying, ‘Yeah, I guess I should live here.” Then just as I had one of those conversations, this person said, “You know, I don’t say this to many people, but really, you should move here.” And my manager turned to me and said, “That’s what I’ve been saying.” A light bulb went off and I said, “Fine. I’ll move here.” And fifteen minutes later a phone call came from a friend of mine who had a house in Nashville that her tenants were leaving. She said, “Hey, a couple of years ago you were talking about moving here, so I thought I’d give you a call on the off-chance you might want to move here, because I have a house and I need somebody to rent it.” It was fifteen minutes after I had said out loud to the universe, “I think I’ll move to Nashville.” So I just said, “Wow. Okay.” That was October 2009. I have this very strange belief system, and when things like that happen it’s very hard for me not to believe in some other power out there.

As far as the songs on this new record, were any of them underway at that time or did it get underway after you were a full-time Nashvillian?

I wrote “Manila Street” and “Had to Lose” in my apartment in Jersey City in September when I knew that I was moving. I had made the decision to move in August and I knew that I couldn’t get into my house until October first. So I was packing up all during August and September, and that’s when I wrote “Manila Street” and “Had to Lose.” The rest of the songs were written in a really short period of time between May to August this past year.

There’s another new name associated with your work this time, Neilson Hubbard. How did you meet him, and what did he do to help you realize your vision for this album?

Neilson Hubbard

Neilson and I were both booked on a television show in Arkansas seven or eight years ago. Honestly, I didn’t understand why I got booked on it. I felt very much like a baby songwriter. I didn’t feel secure as a songwriter. But I was flown to Arkansas to do this television show, and there were three other songwriters on the show. The only person I remember was Neilson Hubbard. I was really drawn to him, but I don’t think we even spoke a word. It was one 24-hour period, we were all put in this hotel, did this show, went to dinner, went back to the hotel, the next day flew out. But I remember hearing Neilson’s music and being really moved by it, and there was something about him as a person. I felt really connected to him even though we didn’t say anything to each other. Over the course of the next eight years I would see Garrison Starr’s records and I would listen and think, I love the production on these. And I would see Neilson’s name. I know he had worked with a couple of other people, and I started becoming a fan of his production. Then a couple of random people said, “Hey, if you’re ever looking for a change, I think Neilson Hubbard would be a great producer for you.” So he kind of stuck in the back of my head, and in the first month I moved to Nashville it turns out his girlfriend works at my management company. I was out listening to music and David, my manager, said, “Oh, by the way, Nancy’s coming and she’s gonna bring Neilson.” And I said, “Not Neilson Hubbard.” He said, “Yeah.” When he walked in he was like, “I’ve been looking for you for eight years,” and we had this great conversation where it turned out he felt the exact same way about me during that taping--he said, “There was something about you; I felt like I wanted to get to know you, I wanted to be your friend.” So we started joking and then the next month we were having coffee and breakfast every morning and talking about our lives, and that merged into writing songs. At the same time, my manager was looking for a producer for me and I kept saying, “Maybe we should talk about Neilson.” He would say, “Yeah, let’s talk about Neilson but in the meanwhile let’s consider other people.” So behind his back Neilson and I were writing and recording and making the record. Because the minute that we started writing, honestly, I felt I had found my musical soulmate. In the same way that at the time I was making The Killer In Me Jim Mastro was the person I needed right then. Neilson’s the creative soulmate that I needed right now.

When we talked in 2009, it was a couple of months after The Killer In Me had come out, and you had done several interviews, which I read before we chatted. In almost all those features the album was referred to as a breakup album, but I remember saying to you that for a breakup album there was a lot of hope in some of the songs. And you answered that by saying: “The songs aren't for the most part autobiographical. I don't write songs about my divorce. When I write a song, I tend to come from a personal place, then I try to take it outward a little bit. I didn't feel like it was a dark, cathartic, mean record about one specific marriage--my marriage. It's kind of not really even about my marriage, but that's where I wrote the songs from." That appeared in our publication, kind of clarifying what kind of breakup album it really was—more general than personal. Land Like A Bird seems to me, then, a natural and unbroken progression from The Killer In Me, in this sense: the first two songs sound to me like a prelude in two parts, and the next eight, possibly with the exception of “It’s Too Late To Call It a Night,” which is a great classic country love song, are postscripts to The Killer In Me. And in “Vertigo,” when you really break loose, musically and lyrically, it’s like a new chapter; the moment when something that began on The Killer In Me is put to rest. Thus “Real Love Song,” the beautiful love song that closes the album, perhaps is the beginning of the next album. That’s my take on it. Am I even close?

You’re totally close. As a songwriter I write the songs and put it together and sometimes I can’t in words describe why I put these songs in that order or where they came from in the history of my work or in the history of my life. But I know. I just don’t verbalize it very well. I think what you just did was describe what was subconscious in me. I remember when we wrote “Drive All Night.” After we finished that song, I said, “That’s the opening track.” I think of my records as films. I’m trying to paint an entire story; not just a series of songs that you put together randomly. I’m trying to create a soundscape to a film, and “Drive All Night” is the opening shot of that film. You’re going someplace, you’re not sure where, you’re trying to drive through the muck, you’ve got a lot of pain but there’s love and there’s hope and all that, which comes straight out of “Piece by Piece” in The Killer In Me. And then the journey of the record to end it with “Real Love Song.” When Neilson and I wrote that I said, “That’s the last song on the record. It has to be.” And Neilson said, “Absolutely. It has to be the last song.” Those are the end pieces. And “Real Love Song” is as pure a love song as I could possibly write. It just says it; that’s what it is. I feel like this record is like a love letter, because it’s got blinders on at first--you’re trying to find your way through, and you’re right, by “Vertigo” it’s like, I don’t care, I’m gonna fall, I’m just gonna let it go and fall.

Amy Speace, ‘Ghost,’ from Land Like a Bird

Specific incidents inspired some of these songs. In your notes accompanying the advance press with the album, you mention “Manilla Street” as starting when you were looking out the window of your Jersey City apartment over to where the World Trade Center towers once stood. But it is an album of farewells to people, farewells to places and new beginnings at the same time.

Absolutely. “Manilla Street” I wrote at three o’clock in the morning in a lot of pain, at my desk in Jersey City. I had a studio apartment that looked out into this little tiny garden, like one of those city back yards that are ridiculously small like an alley corner. It was cobblestone and I had put two flowerbeds in; I spent the summer trying to put a garden in, but I’m a terrible gardener. I have a black thumb. But I really took care of that garden, and I was looking out and looking at that, and I remember clearly writing that song. And yes, there is so much of me and my journey in that record, whether it’s feeling love and falling in love, whether it’s leaving my home of eighteen years, or looking with fondness on things. You know, about my “divorce” record, my ex-husband is now one of my closest friends and I’m really grateful for our relationship in my life. Not only did I leave New Jersey and New York City, I left a memory of a 15-year relationship behind. And driving south--my family is not from Nashville, I’ve got no family anywhere near here, I only had three friends when I moved here. And I’m not 22 years old. So that was terrifying. A lot of those songs speak to that directly or indirectly, and certainly there are specific events that triggered some of these songs, absolutely. Will I share them? Not at all. Not at all.

Okay. We won’t go too far in that direction then. But there is a second street mentioned as the subject of these songs, “Galbraith Street,” the Ron Sexsmith song that precedes “Vertigo.” Whereas “Manilla Street” refers to a specific place, “Galbraith Street” strikes me as a place being both on the map and in your heart. It’s one and the same.

Yeah, when I first heard that Ron Sexsmith song I had a real clear picture of two things: I had a real clear picture of my childhood home and all my friends when I was eight years old and the first time I ever moved. We moved from Baltimore to Minnesota. I remember how sad I was, packing everything in that car and sitting--remember those station wagons with the back seat that faced the other way? That’s the seat my sister and I had, and I will never forget that, like in a movie, driving away from our house. And that house getting smaller and smaller and smaller as my sister and I sat there holding each other’s hands and crying, waving goodbye, with everybody else in the car facing forward. And that’s what that song was to me when I first heard it.

Also, my dad's identical twin died last year. The experience of losing my uncle was like losing my father. And I thought of my father and him going through that kind of grief and walking away from his childhood. A move in your 40s is the loss of innocence, and watching my father lose his twin soul at 73 was really painful. So when I heard that song I thought, I don’t know where Galbraith Street is, I’m sure it’s in Canada, I’m sure Ron Sexsmith has a personal story with that song, but I almost don’t care because that song, something about it, I could see the sky, I could see that bedroom window and I knew I had to sing it. So when I sing it it’s my own “Galbraith Street.”

We talked briefly about “Vertigo” being the musical breakthrough, which it is on the record in terms of the narrative arc. But does it reflect a personal breakthrough for you as much as it sounds like on the record?

I started writing that song a couple of years ago; I finished it just over the summer, but I started it when I was at Zion in Utah. I was doing a tour, and I was going through a sort of grieving, knowing I was moving; knowing I was leaving these relationships. I was in a lot of pain. I had done this hike and was sitting at the top of this mountain, and that first line, “watch the sun go down/laying on the ground near the line of trees,” I was watching the sun go down and it was almost like I was a stenographer, just sitting there watching this scene just writing down what I was seeing. I had that melody and I kind of got back to my room and started mapping out the melody and the chord, but left it. It was this snippet of a piece of music, and I knew I wanted to call it “Vertigo” because I had this whole idea of being above the treeline in that thin air place and wanting to fall and at the same time being afraid to fall. A year and a half later I’m in a situation personally where I was feeling that, and I brought the song to Neilson and we wrote it so quickly. I just started talking about the feeling of having a love in your life and wanting so badly to let go, but being afraid to let go. Neilson and I had this conversation about when you do find true love, you have to let yourself go to that place in love where you know it’s so scary and that’s when you know you really found it. Like The Velveteen Rabbit, you know--you gotta be willing to lose fur, and that’s when it’s real. So I think “Vertigo,” when we were writing that song, the person who’s sitting there still scared to mess things up and it’s just like, no, you gotta mess it up, you gotta feel the pain and it’s got blood, sweat and tears and then you know you’re in real love.

Amy Speace, ‘It’s Too Late To Call It a Night,’ from Land Like a Bird. ‘Let’s write a Willie Nelson song; let’s go for it.’

So you’ve now mentioned two songs, “Vertigo” and “Manila Steet,” that were written in times of great pain. Do a lot of your songs start at such moments?

Yeah! Yeah. I wouldn’t call it pain. My songs are when I’m leaning into a shadow side, and whether that's pain or fear or absolute I-have-no-clue-what’s-going-on, I think I’ve learned as a writer that those are the places that interest me. I’m not really so interested in absolute happy sunshine, because it is and it’s great and how wonderful for that. I’m more interested in when you’re so happy you could cry but you’re not quite sure why you could cry, except you know there’s something under there that doesn’t match. You've got the happy, but there’s a subtext of anger or fear. Like I say, the underside of the cloud is where I want to look, and when I start investigating it that’s when I find that the human experience is never so shallow as to be just one thing.

Do you need that flashpoint in your personal life to spark a song, or can you write basically on request, according to a schedule or by being inspired by a good hook or a catchy phrase?

I can do it that way--on “It’s Too To Call It a Night,” my co-writer, Jonathan Byrd, walked by me at a festival and said that line, “Hey, it’s too late to call it a night,” and I said, “Oh, my God, let’s write a song.” It wrote itself; once you get that line, the rest of it’s easy. And that’s Jonathan’s line, just a genius title for a song. So we sat down and I said, “Let’s write a Willie Nelson song; let’s go for it.” So I can write like that. “Ghost” was a song I wrote thinking about my grandmother’s love story. I had five or six drafts of that song until I recognized what I was writing. It was the moment I thought about, wow, my grandmother was a widow for fifty years and my grandfather was such a strong presence, even though I never knew him. She was only married to him for a brief time, but she was waiting to die to go back to him my whole life, you know. And that kind of love--it’s this specter in my house. I don’t know what that feels like, but I certainly know when the person leaves your bed they leave a scent behind and sometimes you roll in that scent to smell that person and you feel that blissful joy of wow, they were just here. And the loss of them leaving, and wondering will they ever come back—that’s a flashpoint. I can start to craft a song from a story that’s not my own, but I think the songs I sing have to have something that costs me personally--Amy Speace, not just me, this writer who stands objectively outside of it. I have to invest something costly of my own experience. Maybe it’s a secret. I don’t think you can have the universal without the specific.

So when you were writing the songs we hear on this record, were you writing with the idea that this would be your next album or were you writing because these were songs that needed to be written and you’d find a place for them somewhere down the line?

I was writing knowing that they would be album songs. There’s a couple of songs that didn’t make the album that as we were writing them, in the midst of writing them, I had that moment of thinking, This isn’t right for the album. As the songs built up and we started to build this body of work, like four songs in, I kind of knew the tone of the record. So I would have a song I wrote called “The Fortunate Ones” that I love but totally just didn’t work for this record, although I think it’s a really good song and it will find its place on another record. So I knew what tone I was working in.

Amy Speace, ‘The Fortunate Ones,’ a song that didn’t make Land Like a Bird. ‘ I love it but it totally just didn’t work for this record, although I think it’s a really good song and it will find its place on another record.’

“Change for Me” reminded me of Rosanne Cash’s “I’ll Change for You” from her Rules of Travel album.

I don’t know that record.

Steve Earle is on that cut with her and it’s a dialogue about commitment. Rosanne sings “I’ll change for you and I won’t make you pay.” It’s interesting in your song you ask, “When are you ever going to change for me?” and at the end--and I actually counted--you sing “Can you hear me now?” 12 times. Is this you trying to save something or you at the end of your rope?

It’s me at the end of my rope. Yeah. Total exasperation with not being heard. The truth about that song, because she knows, is that it’s a song I wrote for my sister, who is my best friend in the world and who I adore. If you can imagine two girls a year apart, we were not friends when we were kids. We are polar opposites, and as we’ve grown and become adults we adore each other and really respect each other for our differences. But sometimes those differences flare up. What happened was we had a period of about three months when we did not speak, and that has never happened to us. The whole family was kind of involved in this feud, but it was a very quiet feud and neither one of us were really able to speak to the other because there was so much pain, until I realized, This has nothing to do with what we think it is. She actually called me to say, “I miss you.” And when I called her back, I said, “You know what? What we think we’re fighting about is not what we’re fighting about. What we’re fighting about goes back to us being four and five years old.” I was in such angst about this long drama that when Neilson and I were writing one day, I sort of tooled around with this melody and started singing that line, “can you hear me now, can you hear me now, can you hear me now,” and we decided, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good piece of fiction. So after we recorded the song and put it into the context of the record I realized, you know, nobody needs to know it’s about my sister. Because if we’re talking about the record being a love letter or the journey into and out of and back into love, that could be talking to a lover and saying, “When are you going to change for me? When do I get my turn here?” But for me, the truth of that song was that it was for my sister, it was written out of exasperation, I don’t know how to reach you, I don’t know how to get this resolved.

It’s a very quiet record and the subdued nature of it draws you in as a listener. It doesn’t get very loud until “Vertigo.” It’s quite a different feel from The Killer In Me.

Well, I’m a different person, I’m a different songwriter. The Killer In Me came out of years of working with the same band and I was crafting a sound with those specific people based around my sensibilities as a singer-songwriter, with Jim Mastro, who’s like a punk rock guitar player. And I loved that dichotomy of Jim’s energy versus my energy. But in a sense, as I came out of that process and that personal shift, the songs I started writing demanded a lighter touch. One of the first people I sent this to was Jim Mastro, and he called me and said, “I love it. It comes right out of Killer, it’s exactly where you need to be.” And that really was the one I wanted. He’s a long-time collaborator of mine, a good friend of mine, I missed working with him, but I knew I couldn’t make this record with him and he said the same thing back to me. That was the piece of criticism I wanted--him giving me his stamp of approval.

Amy Speace, ‘The Weight of the World,’ the bonus track on The Killer In Me that generated some controversy for questioning the burden of responsibility placed on young people in the armed forces, and the toll it takes on them and their families.

You’re not entirely alien to the southern culture, but you are new to that part of the country. Are you feeling at home in Nashville after having lived for eighteen years in and around New York City?

Yeah, I do. My family moved every five or six years, so I got real used to it. You get used to adapting but also to letting go. As much as I loved New York I was totally ready to leave it. But moving down here, it was a culture shock. The changes were that you couldn’t go to your dry cleaner around the corner or to the nail salons or the Chinese food places on every block. It’s not a walking culture. But the level of intensity that New York has that I loved for so long, I was so happy to let that go, and I feel like my heart has kind of slowed down a bit here. It’s an affordable town to live in as a touring singer-songwriter, because we don’t make a million dollars a year. You have to be a pretty frugal person to live in the lower middle class, and it’s hard to be lower middle class in New York City and not feel poor. And here, everybody does this. The community warmly embraces you. Tons of the best songwriters and the best players, and the best producers, and the best everything around--and there’s enough good restaurants to keep me well fed. I love it; I really love it and I feel very wide eyed down here. Everything is new and I’m just discovering it. I feel at home finally, but it took awhile.

With the record being so new you may not be able to answer this yet, but do you have enough feedback to have a sense of whether people are getting Land Like a Bird?

Yeah. I think that’s due to Neilson being a great producer--not a really good producer; Neilson’s a great producer, and he’s a great songwriter. It means everything to have a great songwriter and producer working with me and making sure that I’m at the top of my game right now, that everything is of a piece, that I’m singing these songs from a truthful place and writing them from a truthful place; and that we’re playing them as a band from a truthful place. I really trusted, as we made this record, that I was putting something very honest out into the world that was my best work. So the few people we played it for off the top just got it right away. So far so good.

Amy Speace’s Land Like a Bird is available at www.amazon.com