The Folk Project Special Concerts presents Amy Speace with Susan Cattaneo in Concert

“Amy Speace is a wonderful artist, a writer of songs, a performer who has beauty and transformation in her music and her writing. Amy Speace was one of the first people that I chose to sign to my label, Wildflower Records, and her songs have transformed my audiences as well as transformed my life.”
~ Judy Collins
As her friend, mentor and collaborator, Judy Collins, makes clear, Amy Speace is one of the most emotive and inspiring singer/songwriters who’s making music today. A listen to any of her remarkable recent albums — Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne (2019), There Used To Be Horses Here (2021), Tucson (2022), and her latest, The American Dream (2024), makes that declaration all the more conclusive. Her passion, purpose, drive, and delivery make it clear that she’s an artist that possesses both instinct and imagination. She draws on raw emotion, but she articulates it in a way that affirms both her resolve and resilience.

Mary Gauthier, a superb singer/songwriter in her own right summed things up succinctly when she said, “Amy Speace is on a roll. Each new release has brought an expansion of her voice and her art, and she has reached the level of absolute mastery. Folk music doesn’t get any better than this.”

Heralded by Rolling Stone, Billboard Magazine and The New York Times and featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition”, Amy Speace is one of the leading voices of contemporary Folk and Americana songwriters. She was discovered 2005 by Judy Collins, who signed her to her record label and has recorded her songs. Amy is the 2020 winner of the AMA UK’s International Song of the Year. Her 2025 10th release, a spare, solo acoustic album recorded in three hours, “The Blue Rock Session,” recorded at Blue Rock Studio in Wimberley, TX during a writer’s retreat, is gaining the best critical raves of her career. “The American Dream,” was released in 2024 and became the #1 record and the title track was named #1 song in the FAI Radio Charts for its first month out.

A “writer’s writer,” Amy’s debut collection of poetry, The Cardinals, will be published by Red Hen Press in September 2026. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, American Songwriter, Salon.com, The Guardian, No Depression, Working Mother, 2 River View and Eunonia. In 2025, she published To The Performer: A Singer-Songwriter’s Handbook, based on her 20 years of teaching performance. In addition to her performance career, she teaches English and Writing at Cumberland University in Lebanon, TN.

Susan Cattaneo is one of Boston’s most respected singer-songwriters. Rooted in tradition, but not bound by it, Susan blends rock, folk and blues with a healthy dose of country. Call it New England Americana with a twang. Susan has also been teaching songwriting at the Berklee College of Music for over 15 years and performed all over New England with Western Mass trio The Boxcar Lilies.
In the New England area, Susan has won over audiences at venues such as: Club Passim, the Shalin Liu Center, the Me & Thee Coffeehouse, The Iron Horse Music Hall, Tupelo Music Hall, the Calvin Theater, the South Shore Music Circus and the River Club Music Hall.
She has opened for or shared the stage with Bill Kirchen, Jon Cleary, David Wilcox, Rose Cousins, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ellis Paul, Paula Cole, David Wilcox, Huey Lewis and The News, Amy Grant, Melissa Ferrick, and The Pousette-Dart Band.
In 2018, she was nominated for Best Americana Artist in the Boston Music Awards, and she performed and won the Connecticut Folk Festival. Her latest album The Hammer and The Heart charted #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and yielded a #1 song on folk radio and a top 10 album of 2017. The album reflects her love for collaboration the record features 40 local and national artists including Mark Erelli, The Bottle Rockets, Bill Kirchen, Jennifer Kimball, Dennis Brennan and Jenee Halstead just to name a few.
Over the past three years, she was an Emerging Artist at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival and a finalist or winner at some of the country’s most prestigious songwriting and music contests including: Kerrville’s New Folk Contest (2018 and 2015), the Philadelphia Songwriters Project and at the Wildflower Festival Songwriters Contest, the International Acoustic Music Awards, the Independent Music Awards, the 5 Unsigned Only Song Contest, the USA Songwriting Competition, the Mountain Stage New Song Contest and the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest.

“Cattaneo has been playing around Boston and its environs for a while, sometimes solo and sometimes with stellar players. She rocks with the best of them and also sings ballads so sweetly and lovingly that it can bring tears to the eyes of those listening” – No Depression

“Ultimately it’s rare to find an artist so willing to invest her psyche so fully into her songs, but the return on Cattaneo’s commitment also makes for a compelling set of songs.” – American Songwriter

“She’s able to blend gritty semi-confessional bluesy sounds with poetic conversational lyrics” – Austin Daze

“Her voice is somewhere between national treasure and weapon of mass destruction” – Daily Vault