American Songwriter on 'There Used To Be Horses Here'

With Her Affecting New Album, ‘There Used To Be Horses Here,’ Amy Speace Finds a Connection Between Poignancy and Purpose

The best songwriters draw from a personal perspective. Amy Speace clearly adhered to that premise with her remarkable new album, There Used To Be Horses Here, a set of songs that reference a period of time between the passing of her father, who grew up on a small farm in Maryland, and the birth of her son a few months later. It made for an emotional journey that she found herself on. The results are touching and tender, offering not only the kind of beautiful and insightful melodies Speace has consistently come up with throughout her career, but also a series of descriptive stories that tug at the heartstrings and share sentiments that have become commonplace in a year marked by distance and disappointment. 

It’s ironic in a way how the record materialized, given the fact that Speace says she didn’t set out to write an album of an autobiographical nature. “The truth is, I didn’t decide to document that time,” she confesses. “I just write songs, and I was writing songs about the experience I was having.  I simply hit upon a song that told me, ‘I think I have an album here.’ I wrote the first one ‘One Year,’ which was literally me sitting on my porch, really quickly.  It was everything I was actually looking at. I didn’t put much thought into it. And then once I wrote that, I looked back at some songs I had written already. I wrote ‘Father’s Day’ for my father on Father’s Day, knowing it would be his last. At that point, I had a couple of songs.”