WEST MILFORD — It has been quite a journey that brought Amy Speace from respected actress with the National Shakespeare Company to the critically-acclaimed singer-songwriter The Houston Press referred to as the “unconscious cool of Americana.”
On Saturday, Nov. 16, Speace will headline at Music at the Mission.
As Speace was making her transition into the singer-songwriter world, she was “discovered” by the legendary Judy Collins and signed to Collins’ imprint, Wildflower Records, where she released two critically-acclaimed albums: “Songs for Bright St.” in 2006 and “The Killer in Me” in 2009. Collins herself recorded Speace’s song, “The Weight of the World,” referring to it as “one of the best political folk songs I have ever heard.”
Speace’s lean poetry - intertwined in a rootsy folk sound - gained the attention and praise of such legends as Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Ian Hunter, and Alejandro Escovedo, to name a few. But it is her voice that catches the audience off guard.
In 2011, the spectre of losing her golden voice took Speace’s journey to stardom on an unexpected detour. She was in a restaurant with a friend when she started having trouble speaking. Thinking it to be allergies, she went home and put herself to bed, then woke the next morning to find that her voice was gone.
Acute laryngitis was the diagnosis, and Vipassana meditation - a practice which requires many days of commitment to Noble Silence - was the cure. Speace described the depth of this silence, which involves abstaining from verbal and non-verbal communication, as “overwhelming and terrifying, but in the end life changing and healing.”
By the end of the experience, her voice - both literal and artistic - had returned.
What began as a profound detour became a gift which led to the writing and recording of her current release, “How to Sleep in a Stormy Boat,” an album legendary rock critic, Dave Marsh, called “the most daring, confident, ambitious, and beautiful album Amy Speace has made since she began recording.”
Recorded in Nashville and produced by Neilson Hubbard, “Stormy Boat” brings in such collaborators and luminaries as Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter John Fullbright, cellist Ben Solle, and Americana troubadour Mary Gauthier.
Speace herself is proud of this latest project.
“I’ve never put so much of myself into an album, before, and never been as happy and proud of the results.”