![]() “That's kind of who I was for the rest of my life,” she says. That protective emotional armor Speace forged for herself, while clearly not preventing her from becoming a world-class songwriter, affected her creatively in ways that would reveal themselves decades later. Trying to recover from that deeply violating act led Speace to harden herself, and to cloak her pain in humor and cynicism. After the next summer I was like, ‘I’m fucking graduating magna cum laude.’ It was that, ‘You're gonna remember me,’ way of thinking.” It took a while to realize it was a rape and, through sheer force of will, I put it behind me and buried myself in overachievement. I thought it was my fault and I had no idea why I was failing classes, throwing up every meal. “Then I basically went into a decades-long spiral of shame, promiscuity and drinking and disassociating without realizing that what had happened to me was not my fault. “He then slept with a friend of mine,” Speace says of her rapist. The event happened while Speace, now a recovering alcoholic with over eight years of sobriety under her belt, was blacked out, and though she remembers little of the night itself, its effects quickly took a toll on her mental and physical health. Speace recorded Tucson alongside Neilson Hubbard, Josh Britt and Ben Glover (collectively called The Orphan Brigade) whom she describes as her “musical soulmates.” The album traces its roots back to a pivotal, traumatic moment in Speace’s young life, when she was date raped at the age of 19 in her freshman year at college. And then There Used to Be Horses Here was about not quitting music, and about the year in between my son’s first birthday and my father’s unexpected diagnosis and death from pancreatic cancer. “Especially the last two: Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne was about, well, it was about quitting music in order to be with my newborn son. “All of my records have an honest vulnerability, and touches of autobiography,” Speace says. While long known for penning emotional, often personal folk songs with strong narrative bents, Speace lays herself bare on Tucson in a way she’s never done before, for an album that, in some ways, serves as a reintroduction to one of our finest songwriters, two decades into an already remarkable career. ![]() The award-winning, critically revered singer follows her acclaimed 2021 album, There Used To Be Horses Here, with a new, seven-song collection of Speace’s most intimate material yet. Don’t think it’s some rush job, though - Speace spent most of her life finding her way to write it. It took Amy Speace just a day and a half to record her new album, Tucson, out February 25, 2021. ![]() ![]() 5/5 stars - American Songwriter Magazine! ![]()
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