Our co-bill tonight features Amy Speace and Jake Armerding. Possessing a commanding voice, a distinctive melodic sensibility and an uncanny knack for nailing complex emotions in song, Amy Speace makes music that’s both illuminating and effortlessly accessible. The Boston Globe calls singer-violinist Jake Armerding “the most gifted and promising songwriter to emerge from the Boston folk scene in years.”

Born in Baltimore and raised in small-town Pennsylvania, Amy Speace initially had her sights set on a career as a playwright/ actor. She graduated from Amherst College and toured with the prestigious National Shakespeare Company. After moving to New York, she had roles in various off-Broadway productions and independent films, ran her own theater company, and taught Shakespeare in the New York City school system. After teaching herself to play guitar, she began setting her poetry to music, and quickly found songwriting to be the most creatively fulfilling thing she’d ever done. She soon began performing as half of the female duo Edith O. Amy made her solo debut with the 2002 release Fable, recorded with $5000 donated by fans and released on her own Twangirl label.

Giving up her hard-won acting career to become a full-time musician, she hopped into her car and hit the road, booking herself into every club, cafe and college that would have her. After catching a performance at the SXSW music industry festival, Judy Collins’ manager brought Speace to the attention of Collins, who signed her to her Wildflower label. Her debut for the label, Songs For Bright Street, received warm praise from critics, including those in Europe, which has enabled her to build a strong touring base there.

“I kind of spilled blood all over this project,” Speace says of her new album, The Killer In Me. This CD finds the now Nashville-based singer/songwriter forging into deeper, darker lyrical and musical terrain, borne largely out of relationships gone wrong, then right and wrong again. “This is the record that I needed to make,” Speace states. “In many ways, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And in some ways, it was the easiest. Writing the songs was emotionally difficult, deep and intense — it was kind of an exorcism. But in the end, the songs flowed pretty quickly. You write the things that you’re afraid to say out loud.”

It was the early 1980s when Boston bluegrasser Taylor Armerding, co-founder of the band Northern Lights, started his 5-year-old son, Jake, on Suzuki violin. Jake studied classical violin into high school and absorbed bluegrass just by being around the house. At 13, he joined Northern Lights on fiddle and recorded three albums with the band during his high school and college years. He soon turned his attention to songwriting, and recorded his first CD, Caged Bird, while at Wheaton College (IL).

In 2003, Nashville independent label Compass released Jake Armerding, a collection of folk-pop songs written over a year living in Music City. The Washington Post lauded Armerding’s instrumental skills as “remarkable,” while the Boston Globe heralded him “a master at bending boundaries . . . his real achievement has been to break the conventions that define country music.” “This is organic music,” Armerding offers about his fifth album of originals, Her. “It’s a bunch of us playing our instruments and singing, and getting taped while we’re doing it. There’s no pitch correction, no chemicals, no nothing.” Armerding, along with some of the best players on the East Coast scene, holed up in a studio in North Reading, MA just before last Christmas, got completely snowed in, and made some beautiful, raucous, lasting music. Armerding confides, “For years I’ve been trying to get away from love songs — everybody writes them, they’re the easiest to write, all that stuff. But then I fell in love and got married, so it wasn’t really an option.”

Armerding photo by David Bazemore

If you’re in on to the newest trends in country music, you must certainly knock at the door of Amy Speace. Those looking for honest and personal work have come to the right address.” Keys & Chords

Speace knows how to make a beautifully varied CD that builds a coherent unit through a wonderful balance of pop, rock and blues, ballads and up-tempo numbers that never bore you for a minute. A truly excellent and grown-up album. Moors Magazine

. . . Speace herself defies easy characterization. She records for Judy Collins’s label, Wildflower, but she’s not a pure folkie. She recorded a bluegrass rave-up of Blondie’s “Dreaming” for her last album, Songs for Bright Street, but nobody will mistake her for Alison Krauss (or Debbie Harry, for that matter). She sounds just as comfortable rocking a fuzz pedal as she does backed by fiddles and banjos. . . . As a result, The Killer in Me is truly killer — one of the finest Americana albums to come along in years. The Popdose interview [read more]

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Armerding straddles a curious fine line between ‘new folk’ singer/songwriter, contemporary bluegrass, and a ‘swinging’ country-pop style that appears wholly organic both in its approach and execution. That he occupies each with such self-assurance and ease is a testament to his originality as a songwriter and his skills as a fiddler, mandolin player, and guitarist . . . if you’re willing to back an emerging new talent, look no further than Jake Armerding. Cleveland Country Magazine

An engaging and very pleasing album of new love songs . . . the quality of songwriting is high, and the fact that [Armerding] can pull off an entire recording of such a much-visited subject and not have it come off as trite is an accomplishment. George Graham, WVIA-FM Virginia

His vicious fiddle playing has left a long trail of dropped jaws. . . . Country Standard Time