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Amy Speace Live On WFUV 90.7FM NYC - Free MP3s!

On December 11, 2006, Wildflowers Records singer-songwriter Amy Speace was in NY for a live interview on WFUV 90.7 FM's "Folk Sunday Breakfast with John Platt." Now her live performances on the show, including songs 'The Real Thing,' 'Dreamin' and 'Step Out of the Shade', are exclusively available through social network site ReverbNation.

Amy Speace is a 2008 New Talent to Watch

WFUV is a New York City NPR radio station affiliated with Fordham University. It is regarded as one of the top radio stations in the country that focuses its music programming on singer-songwriters, AAA and folk music. Every year they release their New Talent to Watch List and Amy Speace was DJ John Platt's pick for 2008, along with other acclaimed artists like Lily Allen, Eileen Jewell, The Bird and the Bee and Swell Season. Click here to check it out.

The True and Incomplete History of Me by Me

I was born in Baltimore at the tail end of the hippie-dippie-love-fest decade to two very solid, faith-based people who had nothing to do with love-ins and be-ins and were probably in church the weekend Woodstock swept the country. My Dad grew up on a really small farm in a really small house with an outhouse, three brothers, a sister, a few dogs and cows and things that a farm would have, and one very solid, very Baptist widowed mother. I think my Dad looks like a movie star in his old black & whites: a football star, Eagle Scout, Bible memorizer. My mother was born in Baltimore and was very much a city girl. A catholic, plaid skirt-wearing, Catholic Girls’ school goin’ city girl. Her dad was a sailor who died in the ocean when she was a girl and her mom was a Boston transplant who never lost her accent, even up until she was 103, lying in her bed in my parents’ home in rural Maryland, whispering to the stars of her long lost love. I was born in Baltimore. My sister and my brothers were born there, too, so I guess we’re from there, but we moved around enough that I felt a bit restless. Minneapolis, Williamsport, Pennsylvania. My feet never rooted anywhere. Part of me thinks of myself as being “from” New York City cause I’ve lived in and around Manhattan longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life and I started writing and playing music here. Home is perhaps where you choose to land.

There was an old, black upright piano in our basement and I remember sitting at it, my feet dangling off the bench, spreading my fingers out over the white keys. I was maybe three or four when they tell me I one-fingered out a nursery rhyme by ear. I took piano lessons my whole life and cheated every step of the way, never practicing, just sight reading my way through the lesson. I was a really good sight-reader and I think I fooled most of my teachers until the last one, who kicked me out for not having any discipline. But by that time, I was playing clarinet and saxophone in the band, and I was singing in the choir and taking voice lessons and getting distracted by boys and lead roles in the high school musicals. I went to Amherst College and studied English and Theater, thought about being a playwright or an academic, but spent a summer acting in Vermont in a small theater company and was hooked. After college, I moved to Manhattan and studied acting for 2 years at The National Shakespeare Conservatory. I taught myself to play guitar and started writing songs during a particularly hard summer, heartbroken and in between apartments. I started my first band, Edith O., with a college friend. We played for a few years, recorded an album and broke up. My life at this point consisted of acting in Off Off Broadway shows, directing plays for my own 5 Points Theater Company, temping at law firms, and playing shows at night at The Bitter End. I lived in the East Village, my friends were actors and musicians and poets and painters. We were all overeducated, unemployed, poor and passionate and it was a thrilling time and place to be a 25 year old. Solo, I got a gig at The Living Room, which was just becoming the underground hotspot for acoustic music in NYC. I made “Fable” on a whim, just a string of songs I’d written in the year I first started playing out by myself. I recorded it in John Abbey’s loft studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with Jagoda and John and I experimenting, ordering pizza, talking about Shel Silverstein and watching the Yankees in between takes.

On September 11, 2001, I was walking my dogs along the Hudson River in Hoboken and watched the sky fall. I spent at least a month in a state of shock, then decided to take an offer from a friend and go on my first tour. It was easy to get focused then. It felt like life or death and I wanted to play music more than ever. I put out “Fable” and started booking any show I could get out of town, cafes and colleges and clubs. I just decided to put my whole heart into this thing called being a Singer/songwriter, whatever that meant. I just wanted to meet others who were doing this, driving around the country in their cars and fighting the espresso machines at night with their acoustic guitars. I made “Songs For Bright Street” with my favorite players, my band, in Hoboken in a recording studio housed in the backend of one of the country’s oldest Homing Pigeon Clubs. It’s a funky place with great vintage gear. I’m really proud of “Songs For Bright Street”. In the two-year course of making it, we found a sound that sits nicely in the sidewalks of my Jersey City. A little town busting at the seams but still a bit stuck as the underdog.

I write songs that sound like what I hear in my head, which is a kind of melding of what I heard when I was a kid, my Dad’s Johnny Cash records, my Mom’s Neil Diamond records, Emmylou, Dolly, twisted up with Ella and Nancy Wilson and Dinah Washington and Matthew Sweet and The Replacements and Tom Petty, etc. I feel a bit like that old Donny & Marie song, in between genres, but I like playing solo and I love playing with my band. I love writing songs but it’s a struggle everyday for me to do it, and I try to stay honest and I hear other writers working and I’m humbled and remind myself to enjoy the journey. Enjoy the music and pass it along!

Visit Amy's Website - www.amyspeace.com

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