Nashville, TN · folk · singer-songwriter

Amy Speace

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Literary Nashville folk — graceful, devastating story-songs that earned covers from Judy Collins and decades of songwriter-circle respect, delivered with an actor's sense of timing.

Amy Speace was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and trained as a stage actor, working for a time with a touring Shakespeare company in New York before turning to music full-time. She is now based in Nashville, Tennessee, where she has become part of the city's songwriter community.

Her writing tends toward narrative: character sketches, plainly worded reflections on marriage, motherhood, grief and middle age, set to acoustic arrangements that leave room for the lyric. NPR has described her voice as velvety and achy, comparing her to Lucinda Williams.

She began releasing records in the early 2000s, with early work appearing on Judy Collins' Wildflower label. Collins later recorded Speace's song 'Weight of the World' on her 2010 album Paradise. In 2020 the Americana Music Association named the title track of Speace's Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne International Song of the Year, and in 2021 she released There Used to Be Horses Here, coproduced with the trio the Orphan Brigade.

Speace teaches and mentors other writers in Nashville and has produced records for artists including RJ Cowdrey, whose album reached the Top 10 of the Folk Radio Charts. She also writes for SongwritingWith:Soldiers, a nonprofit that uses songwriting to help military veterans process trauma, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times and No Depression.

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