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.
