Amy Speace - Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne (2019)

A modern folk-singer whose music nods to the genre's 1970s glory days, Amy Speace has spent two decades chronicling the high marks, heartbreaks, and hard roads of a life logged on the road. She's been a tireless traveller, chasing the dream from the coffeehouses of New York City to larger stages across the globe. Along the way, she's built an international audience without the help of a major label, relying instead upon a touring schedule whose milestones include Glastonbury Festival, NPR's Mountain Stage, and a yearly average of 150 shows.

Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne finds Speace focusing on the other side of that so-called dream. The real side, filled with an ever-shifting balance of struggle and joy. Produced by longtime collaborator Neilson Hubbard and recorded during the final weeks of Speace's pregnancy with her first son, Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne captures Amy Speace at her most nakedly honest, with sparsely-decorated songs that double down on her larger-than-life voice and detail-rich songwriting. It's an album about the colliding of dreams and reality, full of characters making sense of their lives when something is lost and then found. Really, it's an album about the trials and triumphs of an artist's journey - a journey that's no longer focused upon the destination, but upon the actual trip itself.