Folk Radio - UK

A musical marriage made in heaven, for Amy Speace‘s ninth album, following on from the award-winning Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne, Speace has joined forces with Joshua Britt, Ben Glover and Neilson Hubbard both as her backing musicians and as co-writers and co-producers, the result not only being another spellbinding Americana masterpiece but also her most personal work to date.

Recorded in Nashville in just four days, it sees her reflecting on the year spanning her son’s first birthday and the death of her father,  the songs drawing on childhood memories, grief, coming of age and of coming to terms with both losing a  parent and becoming one.

Written shortly after her father’s death, the steady strummed title track relates to returning to her parent’s home, and passing a farm she’d loved as a child where horses used to run free  “where the grass was left to grow wild/Behind the white picket fence”, but which had been sold to be redeveloped for condos (“they’ve torn down the old brick house/Now there’s just a big hole in the earth”), the song heavy with a sense of loss but also, in the line “Wherever they took them/I hope it’s a place they run free” a sense of hope rather than finality that links to seeing her father one last time before the funeral  (“I wanted to see him fly off to forever”) that’s captured in the way her voice soars on the chorus.