There’s No Business Like Show Business

I’ve been touring and playing shows for a living for over 20 years now. My first tour was October 2001, soon after 9/11, when Fred Gillen, Jr., a songwriter from Albany, invited me to join a tour he’d booked for a week or so to the Midwest and back. We slept on a lot of couches, played for tips in cafes and bookstores, played for real money at some colleges where nobody listened but we got hotel rooms and a few thousand dollars. He taught me the ropes and I was sold. I’d always been a journeyer in my dreams. My heroines were explorer girls like Laura Ingalls and Nancy Drew. Girls who didn’t need boys. Girls who didn’t spend their days dreaming of wedding dresses and babies. Later, I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay and Greta Garbo. And Madonna. I wanted to travel the world and write things. In 2001, I found my calling driving a stick shift across country with a guitar and some CD’s in a box and a small suitcase of black clothes. I wanted to be a Broadway actress. Then I started writing my own songs and I wanted to be a touring songwriter.

I have kept files of all of my set lists for decades. I change my show based on what album I’m working and now, because I have 10 of them, which songs from all the records tell the story I want to continue telling. And what IS that story? It changes. I was just talking to my friend Katie about that tonight, as she is working on putting her own solo 2 set show together. What songs of our own do we play and what stories do we tell and which do we NOT tell. How important is absolute fact. Can there be wiggle room in truth for entertainment?

I’m fascinated by the art and craft of performance. I think about these things very carefully. I have two or three possible opening songs and two or three possible closing songs. It depends upon what narrative I’m telling. Am I singing the funny songs, the old songs. Is there a piano at the venue and if so, where do I place those songs? My stories are like the songs, I’ve been singing them and telling them now for years, changing them over time, rearranging the punch lines, maybe re-casting them. I have the hit songs. The hit stories. I tell and tell and sing and sing again. And then, because I love improv, sometimes I just let myself go on tangents, telling something new, following a new thread. Take big swings. I can tell when I miss and I can feel it when I’m going too long, talking too much. But sometimes I come off stage and feel like I’ve just been completely scattered and “off” and a friend in the audience will tell me afterward that it was the best show ever. My friend Angela told me this the other day. She said she loves it when I’m unhinged. My old manager John used to call it “11pm Amy.” He told me I should always let 11pm Amy run the show.

I have a month and a half before I start the new show. The Cardinals Tour: Songs and Stories and Poems. I personally haven’t seen anyone do this before although I know it’s been done and even by my peers. I haven’t seen a Patti Smith show yet. I’ve heard other folk artists add poetry to their shows. I loved both Bruce Springsteen and Loudon Wainwright’s stage shows that incorporated songs and stories on the stage. I’m trying to envision a bit of that. As much as I can. If I could, I’d bring an antique rug, small tables with antique lamps stacked with books I love and journals. There would be an old upright piano. Maybe I’d wear a clip mic. Maybe not. I’d love to craft it for a one-woman show of sorts. I’m creating it in my head right now, taking notes. And adapting that ideal stage set to what I can pack in my suitcase realistically and what I can ask for from venues I know don’t have anything more elaborate than great mics and sometimes even a keyboard or a piano. I ain’t gonna get that rug or those cool lights with antique books stacked. Save that for when I do it on a theater run. If…

I have a poem in my collection called “She Taught Me How To Read” and that feels like a beautiful centerpiece to a show like that. It’s about my grandmother, Roro, to whom I dedicate The Cardinals. Rosalie Davis. We called her Roro. She lived to 103. She was my soul mate. She taught me how to read road signs from her lap in the car (in the front seat!) when I was 3, so I went to kindergarten already reading. We would wear red and blue checked aprons and play Alice In Wonderland in her yard, or among the ferns in the woods near our cabin in Deep Creek Lake Maryland. She had little painted pots of African Violets on the bay window in her living room, the big window that looked to Mrs. Phile’s house next door. She’d been a widow since my mother was 14. She saw me as an artist, read my little girl poems, it was her piano I started playing at age 3. She bought me my first guitar. We read books together. Roro scratched my back with rubbing alcohol and talcum powder at night. She smelled like rosewater and Jean Nate.

I’ll bet some of her story gets into my show.

I have a poem called “The Fifth of July,” about the day Huck, as a blastocyte, was inserted into my body. There are so many birds in my poems. My song “One Year” from There Used To Be Horses Here is about me nursing Huck on my screened in porch while a mother bird used to hop under the door and build her nest in the window every morning at dawn.

I have a song called “The Reckoning” = my response to the death of Renee Goode and how I’m still trying to uphold the beauty and goodness of this world to my son. I have poems called “Covenant” and “Carousel” that address school shootings.

I have a poem called “On the day after the Insurrection,” that ends with an image of a hawk circling the sky above my house and I have a song I have not yet played out called “The Dream of a Hawk.”

I think my song “Father’s Day” would work well paired with one of my poems about my father, especially “The Gift.”

Knowing I wanted an opening song for the show, something new, that metaphorically opened the curtain on the play, I wrote a new song called “The Cardinal.” I envision I’ll open the show with that and then go directly into the opening poem called “The Cardinal.”

I don’t think poetry and lyric are the same. It was the subject of my MFA graduate teaching class. But certainly, they speak to each other and that’s the story I’m crafting right now. The themes I write about in song are no different than the themes I write about in poetry. They are the things that obsess me, that I dream of. I see the same themes in my favorite writers, artists, filmmakers.

Over the years, it’s been easy to just reshuffle old set lists, learn the new songs from the new albums, sometimes add ‘deep cuts.’ Test out new covers. But I haven’t really strayed too much in my solo show. It’s a different show when I add a band, certainly, but these days that’s rare. It’s mostly me, my guitar and the piano.

I’m dreaming of a time when I might play small theaters, be able to create the lighting, the set decoration. Make it really a theatrical piece like Spalding Grey’s “Swimming to Cambodia.” I know Jonatha Brooke created hers. Jill Sobule (miss her) had “F&*$ 7^th Grade.” I wish I’d have seen that. In time, maybe what I’m creating right now in my head could become that. For now, I’m trying to imagine how many poems vs how many songs and in which order and which songs speak to which poems and what to wear. And I’m trying to not stress out that the ideal tour didn’t come together because of many factors, most of which are just that I can only tour every other weekend and many venues couldn’t match our timing with theirs. And that I have holes in the tour I need to fill. And time is getting close.

I’m trying to not to stress out too much as well about wanting to memorize these poems. I know the work I have in front of me. I’ll take an hour or so a day to work on the show, to memorize the poems.

In the meantime, on my porch the other morning, I wrote the opening song, “The Cardinal” as one came to sit on my porch railing to just look at me for a while. As they do. I had started to play, just for myself, one of my favorite Neil Diamond songs “Play Me,” as that’s a song we used to play and sing along to as a family. From there, this came… maybe I’ll do both. Call in the birds. Call in my grandmother. Call in my father. Into the sacred circle of performance. Invoke the spirits. Isn’t that what performance does? Move us into a communication with something beyond ourselves. Being fully ourselves?

Amy Speace is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.

The Cardinals, coming Sept 1st with Red Hen Press , is her debut poetry collection.