The combination of beautifully poetic spoken word and pure, melodic singing in Amy Speace’s Days of Letting Go is utterly absorbing. Speace has just released a poetry collection, The Cardinals, along with this gorgeous accompanying single. It is a fabulous double-release from such a fine lyricist. Both this song and Speace’s new poems will feature on her upcoming tour.
The song features lots of narrative detail that places us in the life of a character, while tackling the universal theme of time’s relentless passage: “Time don’t care, no not at all // The days of letting go.”
Days of Letting Go was produced by Neilson Hubbard and was inspired by Bluegrass Highway, one of the poems from her collection. It was written as part of Speace’s MFA thesis. She explains: “I went to graduate school in Louisville, Kentucky and somewhere on 65 North there was a large black billboard with white writing that said, ‘Opium Kills. Jesus Saves.’ I was working on a series of ‘persona poems’-poems where the narrator isn’t me, is a character, a specific voice – and I imagined it as a male narrator driving back home after the funeral of his father’s death. Of course, my own father had died in late 2019, and that was also a subject I was writing about in my work at the time. I wrote the poem with the repeating refrain, clearly in song form, but wanted to keep it a poem until one of my mentors asked me why it wasn’t a song. I sang the whole thing to my friend Vance Gilbert, and he said, ‘You know what would be cool? If you spoke the verse lyrics.’ And I told him it was originally a poem, and he laughed.”
Video, song, melody, lyrics, poetry: this is immersive and beautiful art.
