Photo Credit: Neilson Hubbard
8/28/26 – The Loon Wine Bar, 4124 Hamilton Ave, Cincinnati, OH, 8pm show – Buy Tickets
Award-winning singer/songwriter + poet Amy Speace will release her debut collection of poetry titled The Cardinals available Tuesday, September 1 published by Red Hen Press, with the accompanying single “Days of Letting Go” due Friday, September 4. Both will be featured on the forthcoming “The Cardinals: Songs, Stories & Poetry” tour beginning August 27th in Columbus, OH and continuing into 2027.
The Cardinals is a lyrical investigation of marriage, divorce, mothering, and mysticism told through poems that read like intimate conversations but evoke the complexities of love and loss through the natural world. Speace tackles the internal language of coming together and splitting apart, evoking rivers and birds, the South and the North, weather and racism and family history and it all comes together like birdsong.
The single “Days of Letting Go” was inspired by a poem titled “Bluegrass Highway” written as part of her MFA thesis. “I went to graduate school in Louisville, Kentucky and somewhere on 65 North there was a large black billboard with white writing that said, ‘Opium Kills. Jesus Saves.’ I was working on a series of ‘persona poems’ – poems where the narrator isn’t me, is a character, a specific voice – and I imagined it as a male narrator driving back home after the funeral of his father’s death. Of course, my own father had died in late 2019 and that was also a subject I was writing about in my work at the time. I wrote the poem with the repeating refrain – clearly in song form – but wanted to keep it a poem, until one of my mentors asked me why it wasn’t a song. I sang the whole thing to my friend Vance Gilbert and he said, ‘you know what would be cool? If you spoke the verse lyrics.’ And I told him it was originally a poem and he laughed.”
“Days of Letting Go” was recorded at Skinny Elephant Studio in East Nashville, TN and produced by Neilson Hubbard with Amy (vox), Doug Lancio (guitars), Lex Price (bass), Neilson Hubbard (drums) and Danny Mitchell (keys).
Amy Speace embarks on her U.S. tour August 27th in Columbus, OH. Updates and information can be found at https://www.amyspeace.com/tour
“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.”
—Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod
“The Cardinals: Songs, Stories & Poetry” Tour
AUG 27 / COLUMBUS, OH @ Natalie’s Grandview
AUG 28 / CINCINNATI, OH @ The Loon Wine Bar
AUG 31 / LEXINGTON, KY @ Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour
SEPT 2 / NASHVILLE, TN @ Parnassus Books
SEPT 3 / KNOXVILLE, TN @ Open Chord Music
SEPT 10 / OKLAHOMA CITY, OK @ The Blue Door
SEPT 11 / BARTLESVILLE, OK @ Grey Dog Listening Room
SEPT 12 / HUTCHINSON, KS @ Tall Jann’s Concerts
SEPT 23 / NEW YORK, NY @ City Winery
SEPT 24 / HOBOKEN, NJ @ Little City Books
SEPT 25 / BEACON, NY @ The Town Crier
SEPT 26 / SHIRLEY, MA @ Bull Run Restaurant
OCT 10 / SANTA MONICA, CA @ McCabe’s Guitar Shop
OCT 24 / EASTON, MD @ Stoltz Listening Room
OCT 25 / BETHLEHEM, PA @ Godfrey Daniels
OCT 29 / NASHVILLE, TN @ East Nashville Beer Works
NOV 4 / CHICAGO, IL @ Uncommon Ground
NOV 5 / FORT ATKINSON, WI @ Cafe Carpe
NOV 6 / WAYZATA, MN @ Blue Water Theatre Company
NOV 7 / DULUTH, MN @ Wussow’s Concert Cafe
NOV 18 / WINSTON-SALEM, NC @ Running with Headphones
NOV 19 / DURHAM, NC @ Seance Listening Room
NOV 20 / HONEA PATH, SC @ Fiddle & Bow Music Hall
NOV 21 / ATLANTA, GA @ Red Boots Roots Music Concerts
NOV 22 / ASHEVILLE, NC @ House Concert
DEC 3 / SEATTLE ,WA @ Third Place Books Ravenna
