Peter Cooper On Music: Amy Speace shows her hand

by Peter Cooper.

Read article on The Tennessean website.

Amy Speace thought it might be easier.

She had acted, after all. She’d found ways to shape her Baltimore-bred diction into believable Shakespearean enunciations, and she’d transformed the long-dead Bard’s words into stirring and immediate emotions.

But this folk singing thing … this was difficult.

“I’d never been afraid onstage as an actor, but suddenly I had terrible stage fright as a musician,” says Speace, speaking from the happy ending side of this story. “My knee would shake and wobble, and my lip would twitch, and I would sweat. When I started, the object was to stand onstage for 45 minutes and not throw up. It was a constant audition for me, and I was a terrible auditioner. I felt like I was begging the audience, ‘Please like me.’ ”

Nowadays, it’s not as if Speace doesn’t want the audience to like her. It’s just that she’s 11 years and countless shows (actually, they could be counted, but it would be a long, arduous and boring task) into her career as a recording and performing artist. She’s studied this thing from most every angle, and she’s stood in living rooms, clubs and performance halls and sung the words and melodies she’s conjured in solitude.

She knows how it works now.

It’s never easier. It just feels that way, most of the time, once you get better. On a bad night, maybe the acting helps. On a good night, there’s no need to act.

“The first time it switched for me was when I went out for the first time on a seven-week tour, playing every night,” says Speace, whose latest album, “How To Sleep in a Stormy Boat,” will be released Tuesday, April 16.

“That’s when I saw the theater in it: The set has an arc, and each song is a different tact on the way to the end of that arc. You’re taking people on a journey with you, and that journey isn’t just about, ‘Please, God, let me say something funny in between the songs.’ ”

The trick, then, is that there is no trick. Now, go out on an arena stage with dancers, pyro and synchronized videos and there are plenty of tricks. But for an acoustic musician who is as likely to be playing the hallowed-but-tiny Bluebird Cafe as to be opening for Judy Collins or Nanci Griffith in a grand theater, tricks don’t help. There’s no hat in which to hide the rabbit.

“At one point, I wound up getting thrown into the fire and was asked to teach a class in performance. That began a fascination for me about performance, about the job of somebody doing this. In a philosophical way, it’s ‘Why am I doing this?’ ‘Why are people coming to spend $15 to see me?’ ‘What is my role?’ ‘What is their role?’ Then it became an obsession, and I never wanted to do anything else.”

‘It doesn’t hurt yet’

For the past few years, Speace has been doing all this from Nashville. The east side of town is her home base, and when she’s in town on Monday nights, she hosts an informal Song Salon, where the acclaimed, unknown and in-between gather to sing and to talk about the art and craft of song.

Some of the works on “How To Sleep in a Stormy Boat” emerged from the Song Salon: Speace would share a kernel with the group, gain perspective from the sharing and then whittle away at lines until the song emerged as something fully formed. Sometimes the songs don’t come together until Speace is in the studio, particularly with producer and occasional co-writer Neilson Hubbard.

“Once, we were working on something and Neilson said to me, ‘I love this song, but it doesn’t hurt yet. There’s a moment in the song where you have to show your hand. What do you think you’d say if you were allowed to say the exact words you want to say?’ ”

What Speace says — what she sings — she tries to say with a confluence of poetry and honesty, of emotional specificity and what Paul Simon calls “enriched language.”

Among the new album’s standout tracks is a gorgeous allegory called “The Sea & The Shore,” written with Robby Hecht and sung with Grammy-nominated John Fullbright. It’s a song about attraction, about patience and timing, about want and need and consequence. And it ends in a breakup.

“So the Sea took one last look and turned away, and the Shore was more than strong enough to stay,” Speace sings, in a well-trained voice sometimes compared to elegant folk predecessors Judy Collins and Joan Baez. “And castles melted back into the sand, Driftwood drifted up onto the land/ Rocks rose up proud in shiny skin, Shells began their gossiping again.”

“When I was in college, I wanted to write songs,” she says. “I’d sit at the piano and wait for the thing to show up, but it never came out. I thought it was some mystery.”

It wasn’t a mystery.

It just wasn’t as easy as she thought it might be.

If You Go

What: Amy Speace Nashville CD release show for “How To Sleep in a Stormy Boat”
When: 9 p.m. May 9
Where: Bluebird Cafe, 4104 Hillsboro Road
Tickets: www.bluebirdcafe.com