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, a collection of poems that grapples with memory, motherhood, place, family, and loss—in other words, the business of being human. Her voice is one I’m grateful to have in the world.”

Poet Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem, says: “This is Amy Speace’s first collection of poetry, but she is, perhaps unsurprisingly for such an accomplished songwriter, already a poet of great perceptiveness and skill. If you love poems that are utterly clear and also strange, personal and intimate without the slightest hint of self- absorption, and above all permeated by an unobtrusive yet undeniable music, this is the book for you.”

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