Singer-songwriter Amy Speace’s new album is one of those projects whose success you’re tempted to attribute to the big names that appear in the credits. In the case of The Killer in Me (available June 30), it’s a stellar list: in addition to James Mastro, her producer and guitarist, who once led the Bongos and the Health & Happiness Show, there’s Brit-rock legend Ian Hunter, who lends backing vocals to two tracks, and recording engineer Mitch Easter, who hosted sessions for the album at his Fidelitorium studio in North Carolina.
Still, it’s Speace’s album, though Speace herself defies easy characterization. She records for Judy Collins’s label, Wildflower, but she’s not a pure folkie. She recorded a bluegrass rave-up of Blondie’s “Dreaming” for her last album, Songs for Bright Street, but nobody will mistake her for Alison Krauss (or Debbie Harry, for that matter). She sounds just as comfortable rocking a fuzz pedal as she does backed by fiddles and banjos.
As a result, The Killer in Me is truly killer — one of the finest Americana albums to come along in years. Recovering from her recent divorce and other personal calamities, Speace holed herself up in a cabin in the Catskills and emerged with songs as caustic as the title track and as bleak as “Haven’t Learned a Thing,” with its opening lyric “I have failed and I have fallen, cried ’til I was bawling / Been down so low my face was on the tiles.” But the album also has room for tracks as radiant as “Better,” which Speace says she couldn’t get just right until she, Mastro, and Easter spent some time “dancing around the control room to the Faces’ ‘Ooh La La.’” Popdose caught up with Speace last week in Cleveland, where she was about to kick off her U.S. tour.
It’s hard not to be impressed by the diversity of styles you engage in your music. So many singer-songwriters get bogged down in a sameness of sounds and tempos, but you just blow right through one genre after another. How do you account for your ability to bring such variety?
I think it’s that I just don’t give a shit. (laughs) I don’t care about genre classifications, and I’m not going to limit what I’m doing to fit into somebody’s little box of who I should be. Maybe it’s because I came into this as a second career [previously an actress and drama teacher, she once toured with the National Shakespeare Company], and never had a chance to spend much time thinking about what kind of artist I want to be. I know that ever since I was a kid, the stuff I’ve liked to listen to went from Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt to the Replacements and X.
So I figure I should just make the music that’s in my head and not pay attention to radio genres, because I’m not gonna get a lot of radio play anyway. You know, people aren’t going into Wal-Mart to buy my record. It’s people like me, who read No Depression and sit around at folk festivals all day and are constantly seeking out new shit to listen to.
It’s important to know what to expect from a show when the marquee lists four talents as formidable as Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller – and particularly when the ticket prices are jacked up as high as they have been for this year’s “Three Girls and Their Buddy” extravaganza. Surprisingly, the tour has left a trail of mediocre responses from critics and bloggers griping about the limited song selection for each artist, the lack of “greatest hits” performances or evidence of much rehearsal, the ratio of between-song patter to actual tunes sung, and the short running time (just under two hours).
The ubiquity of the soundtrack album has rarely flagged over the six decades since the introduction of the long-playing record. Kelly Stitzel’s treasure-trove column 
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As Leonard Cohen’s marathon world tour completed its final North American leg last week, Sharon Robinson –Cohen’s frequent songwriting partner, occasional producer and currently his full-time backing vocalist – says she’s looking forward to her upcoming vacation, and to its end. “I’m gonna cram as much of nothing as I can into the next three weeks,” she told me as she prepared to leave her Boston hotel room for an afternoon of pre-concert sightseeing. “It’s not that long a break before we leave for Europe, but nobody cares. We all know we’re part of something special here, and everyone’s enjoying themselves.”
Even Obama has begun to backslide from the fortitude he displayed during the campaign, when he demanded that the detention regime (like other unconstitutional elements of Bush’s “war on terror”) be brought under the rule of law. Now Obama suggests that, despite the military’s inability to try and convict these detainees – either because the cases were flimsy to begin with, or because even military judges won’t convict a suspect based on evidence obtained via torture – our inhumane treatment has turned them into such monsters that we can’t afford to release them. After all, if we did they might become involved in the types of terrorist activity we can’t pin on them now! So we’re just going to continue holding them, without trial, until such time as … I don’t have a conclusion to that sentence, and apparently neither does the president. He’s also suggested that he’s willing to perpetuate the Bush Administration’s military commissions, continuing their perfect record: They’ve never secured a major conviction, nor have they once withstood a court challenge.
