Amy Speace - The American Dream (2024)

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 eighth 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, 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 20 something New Yorker, a painful divorce - into fuel for chasing down a bolder, brighter present.

Everything begins with the album's title track, whose jangling guitars and heartland hooks find Speace exploring new ground. Set during the bicentennial era of the mid-1970s, The American Dream captures its narrator as a young girl in the middle of a carefree summer, surrounded by a world that feels weightless and infinite. It's the sort of anthemic song that begs to be played in a moving car, the windows rolled down, sunlight streaming through the windshield. Even so, there's a sense of foreboding to the way Speace sings "Hold tight to the American dream" during the chorus, as though she's warning her own protagonist about the stark wake-up call that awaits. As the rest of the The American Dream unfolds, it covers similar territory, measuring the distance between our dreams and our reality.

Pain. Poetry. Resilience. Resolve. It's all part of The American Dream. Amy Speace leaves no stone unturned, writing about her own heartbreak with a beauty that's palpable, turning personal experience into universal songs about the dreams we all share: to be happy, to be loved, to be fulfilled. Dreamy, indeed.