WINONA LAKE – Amy Speace will perform at Cerulean Restaurant, Winona Lake, as part of the Cerulean Garden Summer Concert Series. Her performance is Aug. 9 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online at www.ceruleanrestaurant.com/garden or from restaurant hosts during open hours. Children 14 and under are free. Speace has a new album out, “How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat.” According to Speace’s official website, www.amyspeace.com, “As the tides of one’s life rise and ebb, grief becomes a more constant companion: grief for lost years and lost loves, grief in facing the mortality of parents, grief for wounds inflicted and wounds received as we become more sentient. In the past year, Amy Speace had more than her share of living with grief, as well as health challenges that temporarily robbed her of the golden voice that provides her livelihood. As the storms of life raged, songwriting was her ballast and salvation, and the songs she wrote comprise this document to living gracefully with grief. It is ‘How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat.’” More than anything, this is an album of grief over lost love. “When people go through things that are beyond comprehension, a trauma or loss, we turn to music or we turn to poetry to make sense of our deep pain. We grieve alone. We used to grieve in community. We used to turn to theater,” Speace says on her website. She came to songwriting a little later than most in her craft. She started out in her artistic career as a stage actress and director, working mostly in Shakespearean repertory companies, and so deeply is she immersed in the work of Shakespeare that it was natural for her to think about her pain through the framework of the Bard’s words. “I actually thought about putting some of his words to music to express what I was going through, but these other songs kept coming, and I gave way to my own words,” she says. “I went back to read the plays and found this very modern lamenting of love, lust, longing, denial, betrayal, rage, sorrow – everything I was wrestling with myself, feeling isolated and lost: the madness of the dream. And for the first time these plays weren’t just these ancient texts to study at arm’s length but seemed like necessary balm. Like a conversation between worlds and even between different parts of myself.” The title track was chosen as the title of the album with purpose. “It’s the vessel that is stormy here, not the sky, not the storm, not the water,” says Speace. It’s a prayer for peace during emotional tumult (“Show me how to fly in a starless sky/Help me to hold on when there’s no guiding light/Teach me how to sleep in a stormy boat”). “I was thinking about King Lear a lot while writing this song,” she says. “His storms were internal – his most beloved (his daughters) were turning against him, and he was going mad, and he ends up desperately raging against a literal storm. There were times in the past year I could totally relate. Something drives you to your knees, and no amount of bartering with the gods is going to get you through until you surrender to powerlessness.” Speace was in a restaurant with a friend in 2011 when she started to lose her voice. Thinking it was allergies, she went home put herself to bed, and when she awoke, her voice was gone. After several days, it had not come back. Panic set in, and she gave into tears, “which is the last thing you want to do when you have acute laryngitis, which is what it turned out to be,” she says. Without her voice and in need of something drastic, she enrolled in a Vipassana meditation course, which required 10 days of commitment to Noble Silence, which involves not only abstaining from verbal communication, but non-verbal communication as well. The depth of the silence was overwhelming and terrifying but in the end life changing and healing. The discipline’s focus on impermanence and equanimity were essential in helping her frame her grief and gain understanding of her own struggles. By the end of the experience, her voice, both literal and artistic, had returned. Speace recorded this album in Nashville with her friend and producer Neilson Hubbard. “I’m always open to new ideas about potential collaborators, but when I heard these songs in my head, it was his textural sensibilities that I was hearing.” In addition to Fullbright, Mary Gauthier guests, both on background vocals and as the co-writer of the song “Left Me Hanging.” Ben Sollee also added cello to a couple of tracks.
