Amy Speace with The Orphan Brigade – There Used To Be Horses Here
Proper Records – 30 April 2021
A musical marriage made in heaven, for Amy Speace‘s ninth album, following on from the award-winning Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne, Speace has joined forces with Joshua Britt, Ben Glover and Neilson Hubbard both as her backing musicians and as co-writers and co-producers, the result not only being another spellbinding Americana masterpiece but also her most personal work to date.
Recorded in Nashville in just four days, it sees her reflecting on the year spanning her son’s first birthday and the death of her father, the songs drawing on childhood memories, grief, coming of age and of coming to terms with both losing a parent and becoming one.
Written shortly after her father’s death, the steady strummed title track relates to returning to her parent’s home, and passing a farm she’d loved as a child where horses used to run free “where the grass was left to grow wild/Behind the white picket fence”, but which had been sold to be redeveloped for condos (“they’ve torn down the old brick house/Now there’s just a big hole in the earth”), the song heavy with a sense of loss but also, in the line “Wherever they took them/I hope it’s a place they run free” a sense of hope rather than finality that links to seeing her father one last time before the funeral (“I wanted to see him fly off to forever”) that’s captured in the way her voice soars on the chorus.
It opens, though, with the quietly strummed, softly sung, strings-caressed Down The Trail that, again adopting imagery about running free, brings together a dream he had the night before he died and the memory of his family “driving with the top down/Baby blue Pontiac/10 feet off the ground/My brother and me in the back” and some of the last words her father spoke to her, reworked into the moving lines “Daughter my heart is steady/Daughter I’ve got to go/Daughter my heart is ready/For that trail to take me home”.
It moves from an evocation of the night before the funeral (“Tonight the room is quiet/The lights are low like a wish/Everyone’s come who is coming/Got everything crossed off my list”) to the blues and gospel-infused chug of Hallelujah Train where she imagines the train taking away his body (“Hear the trumpet blow/Everyone aboard/Roaring like a lion/Calling back my soul”) “bound for New Jerusalem… In an angel’s hand”.
A song on the same theme and with the same emotional power as Michael McDermott’s Shadow In The Window, melancholic, widescreen strings introduce Father’s Day before the guitar and piano transport her back to the pines of West Virginia in the summer of 1972 and a photograph of the family taken by her mother, she standing next to her father, that prompts further memories of his life (“You built a small log cabin/West of Baltimore/In the woods where you’d been a forester/Before we were born”) and times spent together (“You’d drive us there on Fridays/After working late all week/And make up games to teach us names/Of trees down by the creek”). When reflecting on dreaming of those lost times, she sings “I stared at the camera/Like I was trying to freeze the frame/Held tight to your hand/To make you stay/For another Father’s Day”, I defy anyone to not feel a lump in their throat and their eyes welling up.
Speace has said that she and her father, an emotionally undemonstrative (“When I needed you most/To just hold me close/It was as if you didn’t know how”) conservative businessman with little time for the arts, had something of an antagonistic relationship, and it was only in his final years that they really became close. It’s a backdrop which makes listening to the simple piano slow waltz of Grief Is A Lonely Land all the more heart-wrenchingly poignant (“You were my father, I’m still your daughter”) as, both sad and angry, voice quivering, she sings of her last visit (“I was the last one to kiss your brow …In the last days I held your hand”) and how “I’d like to think you would say/If you were here today/You’d want to hold me now/Those were the words/I wished I’d have heard”.
It ends by remembering a shared song that her son now sings along to with her, a reminder how photographs and music can offer a link to those we have lost (“Maybe in that old tune/I can hold onto you/And find peace in its sweet melody”) and it also provides the emotional bridge as it’s followed directly by the midtempo acoustic strum of the breathily sung One Year, written while cradling her sleeping infant son, Huckleberry, on their porch. Veined in nurturing mother and child imagery (“A little bird hops through the light/A worm hangs from her beak”), it’s a musing on the mystery of life and of time and the cycles (“Time slows then speeds like a train/Sleep ebbs and rolls like a wave…And so the mystery unfolds/We teach each other to survive/Against all odds against the grain”) from which the arrival of new life eases the pain of loss (“Right before you were born/Grew a dark line like a stain/But since you were pulled from sea to air/I’ve watched it fade”).
Co-written with Robby Hecht, that warm glow continues into Give Me Love, a simple sketch of embarking on a loving relationship (“Want you to turn the lights down/Put that record on now/Now just spin me around/Gimme love gimme love gimme love”). But then the focus shifts with River Rise, another Southern gospel-coloured about heavy rainfall threatening devastating floods (“We were spared last year/This time I ain’t so sure/River is rising They’re closing off our route/Once the water comes in Nobody’s getting out”), an apocalyptic mood that, Will Kimbrough on guitar, is offset by Shotgun Hearts capturing the giddy excitement of moving to New York in 1991 (“Oh we were young and high/In a 3am world/Running against our dreams before they could start…There were holes in that night to fall in where the spin wouldn’t stop/We wandered the cobblestone streets in our costume sin/Late for our lovers and lying about where we’d been”). As it unfolds, though, revising old haunts, as with that farm, it again reveals itself as about holding on to sparks (“So you never grow old never change you just stay 25”), a sense of belonging and identity that informs the lullaby of Mother Is A Country where, addressing motherhood (and, it would seem childbirth), once again a passing (“She knows she’ll grieve the separating life”) is counterpointed by the caring for a new soul, and how “Peace was made with the storms that came”.
It ends with a cover inspired by the pandemic, a lovely acoustic waltz-time reading of the late Warren Zevon’s Don’t Let Us Get Sick that brings together their combined voices its chorus benediction, to think of others’ troubles and forget your own, and a prayer to “just make us be brave/And make us play nice/And let us be together tonight”. Sung as a daughter, as a mother, an album of loss, of love, of grief and of hope that could make stone weep, once again Speace demonstrates why she’s one of the greatest artists in Americana today.
There Used To Be Horses Here is out on 30 April via Proper Records
Pre-Order: https://smarturl.it/amyspeacehorseshere