Amy Speace

, 328 Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross, WC1X 8BZ. Doors open 7.30pm. Music starts 8.15pm.

GREEN NOTE PRESENTS – AMY SPEACE:

Acclaimed Nashville-based singer-songwriter and poet Amy Speace returns to the UK with a new live show, The Cardinals: Songs, Stories & Poems, an intimate concert experience weaving together songs from her ten-album catalogue with poems and stories from her new collection, The Cardinals.

At the heart of the show is a deceptively simple question: what is the difference between a song and a poem?

Speace traces a path through a life shaped by words and music: from learning to read at the age of three with her grandmother, who taught her through road signs and later gave her a book of Robert Frost’s poetry; through her beginnings as a songwriter in New York City and her years in the theatre; to

motherhood, the birth of her son and the death of her father. Rather than presenting poetry as a separate reading within a concert, Speace allows poems, stories and songs to flow into one another. The poems become connective tissue — opening doors into the songs, revealing where they came from and illuminating the experiences behind them — creating a seamless evening of music and storytelling.

It is an approach that brings together the qualities that have long defined Speace’s songwriting. As Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote: “What Amy Speace says – what she sings – she says with a confluence of poetry and honesty, of emotional specificity.”

THE CARDINALS

The Cardinals is Amy Speace’s first published collection of poetry, exploring memory, motherhood, family, place, grief and loss — the same emotional terrain that has informed much of her celebrated songwriting.

Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod, writes: “Amy Speace is an accomplished singer-songwriter, so she knows how to tell a story, how to make the listener care, and how to create something beautiful and meaningful that will live inside a person for years to come. She’s done that with The Cardinals,