Over the summer, Amy Speace did a weeklong songwriting residency at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio in Wimberly, Texas. During the week, she had access to a recording studio for three hours with engineer Hayes Howard. She emerged from that collaboration with the sparsely arranged songs on her latest album, The Blue Rock Session. Accompanying herself on guitar or piano, Speace delivers emotionally wrenching lyrics about loss, regret, love, and hope in her crystalline vocals.
Cascading downstrums flow underneath Speace’s pure vocals, as shades of Laura Nyro’s exquisite lyricism and Joan Baez’s poignant vocals float through “On a Monday in London,” an ode to the road as a means of self-discovery in the moments onstage and off. In “God Came to Me,” sparkling fingerpicking convey the shining little moments in nature and poetry in which God reveals Godself. For her, revelation comes in these spaces and not in the gleaming aisles or broken rituals of the church.
