Caroline Spence & Robby Hecht CD Release

Ever since the release of Blood on the Tracks in 1975, Dylan posed the challenge to every songwriter that came after him: Can life’s emotional complexities be rendered simply? Can a song be so intensely personal that it somehow manages to reach beyond itself towards something universal? With this record, Dylan turned the American Songwriter into a definite vocation, a job that’s core responsibility was the nearly impossible task of simply and honestly singing your own story, and somehow mysteriously manage to speak for all of us.

While Caroline Spence may not look like one of the road-hardened troubadours of America’s past, with the release of Spades & Roses, the young songwriter from Charlottesville, Virginia proves she is every bit as serious. Having won numerous songwriting awards from industry mainstays like the Kerrville Folk Festival and American Songwriter Magazine and garnered nods and admiration from both Miranda Lambert and her fellow writers in the Nashville underground, Caroline has delivered a record to meet the expectation. Quite simply, she has released 11 songs of gorgeous Americana that remind us of why we fell in love with the genre in the first place.

It is a rare but unmistakable authenticity and emotional resonance that can’t be faked, all delivered from a voice that somehow manages to be both ethereally pristine and yet profoundly raw and human– a disarming union of self-assuredness and vulnerability that runs throughout the record. Under the guidance of Producer Neilson Hubbard, “Spades and Roses” strips away all of the sonic barriers that might stand between Caroline and her listener, allowing her fragile melodies and first person confessionals to do their work– reaching out and empathizing, providing a soundtrack to our own hidden stories. Every song on the record, whether pop or meditative, glib or heartbreaking, asks the essential question of whether or not the listener can recognize himself.

Whether it’s a song like “Southern Accident,” a strikingly personal and heartbreaking account of the lingering effects of her parents divorce on her own search for love and commitment, or “Softball,” an extended anthemic metaphor for the all-to-real injustices of the gender gap in modern life, Spades and Roses is Caroline’s unflinching testimony and reminder as to why songs are important. It’s about paying attention. It’s about whether you can take a handful of chords and find those still points of peace and clarity and joy amidst the basic confusion, struggles, and emotional wreckage of our everyday lives. Most importantly, it’s about finding a way to make it beautiful.

So who is “Spades and Roses” for? Songwriters who need a sympathetic shoulder? Song lovers who are tired of the latest gimmick? Modern ladies who still enjoy knitting? Older men who have seen enough to not find that intimidating? In the end, it’s for all of us that demand a lot of life and love, and yet still have the grace and hope to go on loving the world in spite of what it is sometimes. It’s for all of us that still like to hear our story told in song. In Caroline’s own words, which seem to summarize the record, “It’s all love, and it’s all pain. And after all, I can’t complain.”

Robby Hecht is a modern folk musician-of-all-trades: singer, songwriter, congenial collaborator to some of the biggest up-and-coming names in the genre, celebrity to some, generally decent human.

Robby first fell in love with the emotional potential of music as an awkward pre-teen in Knoxville, lying alone on his bed and listening to “Hits 100” on the radio. He hadn’t figured out how to talk to girls, but he was so moved by the music that one night he called in to dedicate Aerosmith’s “Angel” to a crush. He used full names. They played Mariah Carey instead. Robby will be forever mortified.

A couple of decades later, Robby tries to capture that same emotional resonance he felt during those earliest interactions with music. His music blends nostalgia with unabashed honesty: 1970s golden era of folk meets personal confessions of the Facebook era. He turns a lost battle with alcohol into a powerful country duet, weaves 2,000 years of history into a sparse musing on morality, and transforms insecurities left over from broken relationships and mental illness into deceptively catchy melodies.

Motivated by both his love of songcraft and his ineptitude at competitive sports, Robby has won over judges at several major performing songwriter competitions including those held at the Kerrville Folk Festival, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival. “Eventually I had to move on from contests and be a real singer-songwriter and do booking and marketing and stuff,” he says. So he did. In 2014, his third studio album, Robby Hecht, got him featured on NPR’s Mountain Stage and was praised as “songwriting of the highest quality” by The Telegraph in a five-star review. And his 2017 single “The Ends And The Means” was recently featured in the nationally acclaimed fiction podcast Welcome To Night Vale.

Robby is also a prolific songwriter as a collaborator. His songs have been recorded by a number of other artists including Meghan Linsey, Jennifer Knapp, Nora Jane Struthers, Liz Longley, The Steel Wheels, and Amy Speace, among others. He often teams up with Nashville singer-songwriter Caroline Spence, writing and performing songs with goosebump-inducing harmonies. Their first two singles, “Two People” and “Parallel Lines,” have a combined 8 million plays on Spotify, and they plan to release a full album together this summer.

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