Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne

A modern folksinger 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 traveler, 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, averaged 150 shows per year which included tour stops at the Glastonbury Festival and NPR's Mountain Stage. Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne finds Speace focusing on the other side of the so-called dream. The real side, filled with an ever-shifting balance of struggle and joy, and stripped free of fairytale dust. 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 dreamers... and, in a way, 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. Years before Americana music received it's own category at the Grammy Awards, Speace was one of the genre's earliest champions, mixing the best parts of American roots music - gospel, alt-country, folk, classic pop - into her own songs. The Ghost of Charlemagne follows in that diverse tradition, but it also shines it's light on a new Amy Speace: a clear-eyed, reenergized songwriter who's done with chasing things that don't matter... but isn't anywhere close to being done with her art.