Amy Speace “The Blue Rock Session”

Amy Speace strips everything back – and proves how powerful her voice and songs are.

Some albums feel deliberate – structured, strategised, road-mapped to the last harmony. “The Blue Rock Session” is the opposite, an album that slipped into being, written in a week of rare solitude. What emerged is the closest thing Amy Speace has ever made to a document of how she sounds live, guitar in hand, a contrast to her consistently excellent studio work, which is rich, arranged and full of colour.

The album came about after Speace had travelled to Blue Rock – part writing retreat, part recording studio, part sanctuary – in Wimberley, Texas. She normally has such a busy schedule that a week of unbroken writing must have been its own small miracle. Speace spent her time writing and by the week’s end she had six new pieces she hadn’t expected to write. And here they are, alongside some re-recordings of other songs – all unadorned and startlingly intimate.

Of the new songs on the album, some were conceived in Wimberley, some before. Opener ‘On a Monday in London’ is one of the new songs. It is an aching travelogue about loneliness, memory and the way grief or heartbreak follows a person from city to city. The song captures life on the road as a musician, the disorientation of constant travel and the way performing becomes both escape and confrontation – “I wake in different towns and beds/To worlds I make up in my head/Write down the things I wish I’d said”.

‘God Came to Me’ follows with gentle conviction. It’s a soft-spoken rebuttal of organised religion based on her lived experience. Speace sees the divine as something encountered privately, in quiet moments that require no permission. And the expression of this is beautiful in its simplicity at times – “God came to me in the lonely/And in the fallen leaves and dirt”. ‘In This Home’, one of the Blue Rock pieces, is more personal still. It marks the emotional renovation of a home once shared in marriage – “May this house be more than brick and wood/May it hold more than what it did” – the complicated relief of reclaiming space, memory by memory.

There are a number of older songs too which find new edges in this stripped-down setting. ‘The Sea and the Shore’, one of the greatest Americana songs, is no longer a duet and so becomes lonelier, more exposed. The tragedy and aching romance of the number remain, but without the other voice, it feels more like a confession than a conversation. And as with all great covers, it gives a fresh interpretation of the old. ‘Weight of the World’ receives a long-overdue airing having just been a hidden album track before. Known through Judy Collins’ interpretation, Speace’s new version, and her soaring vocal, emphasises the lyric’s compassion and pain – “It was the middle of December when the Army sent my brother home at last…Still everybody turned out from our town/As we laid my brother in that frozen ground”.

Some of the record’s most vivid moments come from borrowed ideas. ‘Dream of the Hawk’, was, according to Speace, written in response to the word “dream” given to her at a folk music conference. It drifts dreamlike, blurring the line between myth and longing and is touching in its simplicity – “Once I dreamed/You’d love me for forever/We could fly together”. ‘I Found a Halo’, revived from a half-finished idea dating back to 2016, sharpens into a metaphor for America’s uneasy political soul. And there is a literal borrow: Ben Glover’s ‘Kindness’ played here as Speace plays it live – the song she uses to close her concerts, offered now as the album’s final blessing.

“Blue” is also a theme. ‘Out of the Blue’, inspired by the windless stillness of an oceanic doldrum, is a beautiful song with Speace on piano and has an almost musical feel. Its off-kilter chords echo that drifting sensation. But the emotional centre of the album is ‘The Mother’ written days after catastrophic flooding in Hill Country. Speace wrestles with the ethics of telling someone else’s tragedy, ultimately choosing specificity over abstraction. The song honours not the scale of the event but a single impossible moment in it – and in doing so, becomes one of her most courageous pieces. The lyrics are very powerful and haunting – “While I saw something I know I won’t forget…A woman hanging on a tree with one arm/The other holding up a child/Crying out in the dark to the other/No one could swim against that tide/Is there a God who decides/Who survives”.

Amy Speace has one of the most beautiful and distinctive voices in Americana. If this is your introduction to her, you might want to delve into her recorded work. The resonance of these naked versions of songs has even more power as a complement to her other albums. For those who know her songs well, “The Blue Rock Session” feels like a ceremony of artistic renewal. Songs from different seasons meet in one place, forming a whole greater than their chronology. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue – not a wedding, but the making of an artist who has lived long enough to trust her own raw voice.