For those unaware, caught halfway between modern folk music, timeless roots-rock, and classic pop, Amy Speace’s The American Dream is an album about balance and transition.

It’s also the ninth solo record from an award-winning songwriter who’s spent most the 21st century on the move, playing 150 shows a year, forever keeping her eyes glued to the road ahead.

With The American Dream (out October 18th, 2024 via Windbone Records), she gives herself the grace to glance backward, too, writing reflective songs that turn glimpses of her past — a childhood bike ride with friends, an artistic awakening as a 20something New Yorker, a painful divorce — into fuel for chasing down a bolder, brighter present.

1. The American Dream
2. Homecoming Queen
3. Where Did You Go
4. In New York City
5. Glad I’m Gone
6. This February Day
7. Something Bout A Town
8. Already Gone
9. First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show
10. I Break Things
11. Margot’s Wall
12. Love Is Gonna Come Again

This sumptuously honed, effortlessly impassioned new recording opens on the free flowing musical melodies and jangling guitars that drive the titular The American Dream and then the tale is spun further through the firmer Homecoming Queen, the unyielding Where Did You Go, the rhythmic storytelling of In New York City, before we are brought both the mid-tempo foot tapper Glad I’m Gone and the beautiful gossamer of This February Day.

With the album’s focus set during the bicentennial era of the mid-1970s, along next is the emboldened Something Bout A Town and the gently melodious Already Gone, and they are in turn backed seamlessly by more joyful, albeit a little tongue-in-cheek storytelling within First United Methodist Day Care Christmas Show, the all-embracing balladry of I Break Things, the album rounding out on the lonesome Margot’s Wall, closing on the touching Love Is Gonna Come Again.

Official Website

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