Glide Magazine - Review

AMY SPEACE BLENDS TEXTURE & COLOR ON REVEALING ‘THERE USED TO BE HORSES HERE’

Knowing that Amy Speace hails from New Jersey, the album title, There Used to Be Horses Here, especially resonates. The state is more associated with sprawling shopping malls and office complexes, the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the industrial specter of massive power plants, tank farms, and shipping terminals as one approaches New York City than for its nickname “The Garden State” or the picturesque horse farms that dot much of its western counties. The title is a powerful metaphor for the downside of so-called progress as well as a self-reflective notion of not only her past, but ours too.

Two events are at the core of her songwriting inspiration for this effort, the twelve-month span between her son’s first birthday and the loss of her father. They conjured up her own childhood memories, straddling memories of being raised by a parent while processing how to become one.Hers are detailed songs, surely with some sad overtones, but as we often find with literate songwriters, there is deep beauty in the melancholy too.  We learn that the album title is more than metaphorical. The road to her dad’s house indeed used to run by a horse farm, since sold and replaced with condos. It’s as if a bunch of losses all added together – the horses, the farm, her father, her former home.