Photo of Gretchen Peters

Gretchen Peters

Gretchen Peters Radio

Music

FEATURED SONG
Hello Cruel World (radio edit)
  1. Play
  2. Play Next
  3. Add to queue
Hello Cruel World (radio edit)
Album:
Released: Jan 31, 2012
Label:

Hello Cruel World


The new album, out now.


UK and EU fans - some signed copies are still available from:

Find out more at www.gretchenpeters.com

General Info

  • Genre: Americana / Country / Folk

    Location NASHVILLE, Tennessee, US

    Profile Views: 211511

    Last Login: 4/12/2012

    Member Since 2/24/2006

    Website http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LmdyZXRjaGVucGV0ZXJzLmNvbQ==

    Record Label Scarlet Letter Records

    Type of Label Indie

  • Bio

    A Brief Autobiography I am the product of a liberal upper-middle class family of six from just outside New York City; the product of a writer-father whose life's work was about exposing social injustices and pissing off defenders of the status-quo; the product of a divorced single mom who fled to the hippie town of Boulder, Colorado to escape the stifling suburbs of Updike novels; the product of twenty years of living right smack in the buckle of the Bible belt among the good old boys and the bad old music business. First I heard Django Rheinhardt and Ella Fitzgerald mixed with the sound of ice rattling in cocktail glasses. Later I heard Bob Dylan and the Beatles mixed with the smell of marijuana wafting down from the third floor of our house. When I woke up from my childhood I found a guitar and tried to make some of these sounds. I have been in love with words all my life. They were my familiars, the things with which I felt most comfortable and competent. According to members of my family, I used them frequently and handily from an early age. Music was different. Music had to be seduced; words were easy. Music was a tall dark stranger; words were an old familiar face. I think great songs are born. They are born with all the urgency of childbirth, born out of pain, anger, joy, wit, and delivered by instinct, skill and love. I think writers are born, too. It's not a popular opinion, but I don't think you can really teach writing. You can teach an approximation of writing, but it's never real. I don't think writing is an act of self-expression as much as an act of self-discovery. I don't write to express how I feel; I write to find out. I'm usually as surprised as anybody. I never understood how the music business took people and broke them up into little pieces - the songwriter, the producer, the recording artist, the entertainer. I suppose I grew up with the idea that you made music from start to finish, and I never felt satisfied being one of the pieces. The continuum is the thing. Write a song, arrange it, record it, sing it. The most direct and honest exchange in the whole business really only happens at the end of that continuum - when one person plays and other people listen. That's what music is for, it's not content for media providers, or background for worker bees, or sonic wallpaper for elevators. It's for the people who are singing, and the ones who are listening. I often hate the music business, and sometimes I think I hate music. I'm always wrong about that. It usually takes listening to Leonard Cohen, or Samuel Barber, or Joni Mitchell, or Gram Parsons, or Jackson Browne, or Ludwig von Beethoven, or Miles Davis, or Dolly Parton to bring me back to my senses. Then I find myself with goosebumps, or unexpected tears, or joy bursting out of my chest like it's too big to be kept in there - then I remember what music is, what it does, and why I do it. Bio Gretchen Peters’ musical career has grown like a Virginia creeper: new leaves spreading in one direction first, then another, then another still. The result is lush and impressive, though it didn’t get that way all at once. Peters has the sort of creative impulse that inevitably finds the fertile spots, which is a wonderful thing from the standpoints of quality and longevity, even if it can be a little unpredictable. "Circus Girl: The Best of Gretchen Peters" is a welcome chance, then, to retrace how her songs have grown—and keep growing—from their roots in her singular storytelling gifts. In other words, it’s a chance to take in the full effect thus far. Says Peters of the collection’s 15 carefully selected songs, “What I was amazed by was that there was a continuity to them, that they hung together, all of them, from these disparate times.” Indeed, they do. Peters arrived in Nashville in the late ‘80s, a singing, songwriting product of New York, Boulder, Colorado and politically active parents. Perplexed by the artificial division of labor in the commercial country music industry, she concluded it would be best to seek a publishing deal first. “I didn’t understand the whole delineation between singer and songwriter,” she explains. “Everybody that I knew was a singer-songwriter, did it all. I couldn’t really conceive of myself in any other light.” And so began a season of striking commercial success. Peters got a publishing deal, and her closely observed story-songs hit a sweet spot with some of mainstream country’s finest voices of the ‘90s; “On a Bus to St. Cloud” with Trisha Yearwood, “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am” with Patty Loveless, “Chill of an Early Fall” with George Strait, “Let That Pony Run” with Pam Tillis and—most famously—“Independence Day” with Martina McBride. Culturally and critically the impact of “Independence Day”—an arresting song about an abused woman fighting back—still reverberates. It earned Peters a GRAMMY nomination and CMA Song of the Year honors. “It just seemed like getting the first olive out of the jar, they just started coming,” Peters says of her string of cuts. “And it was great, but it wasn’t really my master plan or anything. I was just as surprised as anybody.” A turning point came in the mid-‘90s, when Peters got a record deal and the chance to record her own songs exactly as she felt they ought to be done. In 1996 ("The Secret of Life") and every few years after ("Gretchen Peters" in 2001 and "Halcyon" in 2004) she offered a set of sophisticated folk-pop songs, sung in a fetching soprano that’s as sultry as it is girlish, and rendered with the sensitivity and patience to tease out the nuance in every corner of a story. If commercial country audiences didn’t quite know how to categorize Peters’ music, U.K. audiences fell in love immediately. Her shows have sold out there ever since. “From the first time I went over there to play, the audiences were so great,” she recalls. “They just didn’t hold those rigid ideas of what you were supposed to be, and to me that felt like blessed relief. It was almost as though my limitations were my blessings over there.” Midway through the 2000s, Peters’ career arrived at a series of watershed moments. Veteran folk singer-songwriter Tom Russell declared himself a fan, inviting her to sing on his recordings—and, eventually, to do an album of cowboy and Western covers together (2009’s "One to the Heart, One to the Head")—and introducing her to the lively circuit of folk clubs and festivals across the U.S. She found a welcoming home there, even though some of the older songs in her repertoire had been hits in commercial country, about as alien a world from the folk scene as is imaginable. “With a certain folk crowd, that’s not a plus,” Peters says. “But what I figured out is they’re songs. If you play them for people, especially if you play them in the context that I do—which is just me or it’s just me and [keyboardist] Barry [Walsh]—they lose the affectation of the genre, whatever that might be, and they just are.” She realized, finally, that performing her songs live at every opportunity is just as vital to her as writing and recording them: “I could see that life was short, careers are even shorter, mine is finite. I have some time, while I still feel like I want to be out there doing it. By god, I’m not going to wait anymore. And that was that.” Now she’s touring more than ever before—and relishing it. And there were more bold steps where those came from. Peters has always shown an uncanny ability to capture the stories of people—especially women—who feel trapped in hope-draining situations. With her 2007 album, "Burnt Toast & Offerings", she mined her own life—the disintegration of her twenty-year marriage and risk-taking on a new love—for just such affecting vignettes, and set a new high watermark for her songwriting. It’s only right, then, that "Circus Girl" would feature works from each of these seasons; “On a Bus to St. Cloud” and “When You Are Old” from "The Secret of Life", “In a Perfect World” and “Picasso and Me” from "Gretchen Peters", “Tomorrow Morning” and “The Aviator’s Song” from "Halcyon", “The Way You Move Me” and “This Town” from "Burnt Toast & Offerings". And it’s fitting, too, that “Circus Girl”—a personal favorite from her first album, about the circus, the music industry, and the girl inside who’s driven to entertain—would be the title track. “When you write a song like that, it could be ten years before you realize what that third level is,” Peters muses. “That’s the kind of song that has some ambiguity and some places that it will take you long, long after you first hear it.” -Jewly Hight

  • Members

    Barry Walsh - piano, accordion, glockenspiel, vocals.

  • Influences

    joni mitchell, leonard cohen, paul simon, charlotte bront�, bob dylan, jackson browne, bruce springsteen, w.b. yeats, emmylou harris, rickie lee jones, my older sister's record collection

  • Sounds Like

Stream

  1. Gretchen Peters

    Three new Irish tour dates posted! Culdaff 22/7 Galway 23/7 and Bray 25/7 - all details at http://lnk.ms/byc0W

  2. Gretchen Peters

    Playing a show in Nashville, TN at 7:00 PM today at Loveless Barn http://lnk.ms/bxvB5

  3. Gretchen Peters

    Ghosts and Heroes http://lnk.ms/bvyrP

  4. Gretchen Peters

    Playing a show in Nahville, TN at 7:00 PM today at The Grand Ole Opry House http://lnk.ms/c0Vbp

  5. Gretchen Peters

    New shows announced in Oklahoma City, OK - Portland, ME - Nashville, TN http://lnk.ms/64tLt

Catalogue

Circus Girl SMALL

Circus Girl: The Best Of Gretchen Peters - 2009

Deluxe Numbered Limited Edition (expanded 2 disc version) out now!

Click Here to purchase the Limited Edition 2 CD set!

 OTTH small

One To The Heart, One To The Head, with Tom Russell - 2009

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!
Image hosting by Photobucket

Northern Lights Christmas CD - 2008

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!


 Image hosting by Photobucket

Burnt Toast & Offerings - 2007

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!

Image hosting by Photobucket

Trio - 2005

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!

 Image hosting by Photobucket

Halcyon - 2004

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!

Image hosting by Photobucket

The Secret Of Life (reissue with bonus track "Independence Day") - 2001

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!

 Image hosting by Photobucket

Gretchen Peters - 2000

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!

Image hosting by Photobucket

The Secret Of Life (original) - 1996

Click Here to download from iTunes!

Click Here to purchase the CD!

.

Comments

Post a comment...

Bio

The title of Gretchen Peters’ new album Hello Cruel World is a pun on the famed exit line - a joke that, like the lovely melodies and deliciously textured arrangements framing these 11 songs - sweetens this captivating music spun from a year of turmoil. The Grammy nominated singer-songwriter from Nashville calls Hello Cruel World her “most close-to-the-bone work, written at a time when I felt absolutely fearless about telling the truth.” Peters and her guest Rodney Crowell sing, “life is still a beautiful disaster,” on “Dark Angel.” But Peters keeps the accent on the “beautiful” throughout her ninth disc, with both her poetic language and the spare, evocative sounds she created in the studio to support her organic story-telling.

Ultimately Hello Cruel World details the sheer triumph of survival and of finding strength, joy and growth in everyday life despite the challenges of our increasingly complex times. Her characters, like the broken-hearted narrator of “Natural Disaster” and the human target of “Woman On the Wheel,” don’t just search for fulfillment. They take risks to find it. And none, as the album’s title implies, are ready to either surrender or, to quote the poet Dylan Thomas, “go gentle into that good night.” Peters’ warm-honey voice softens the edge of desperation in numbers like the character study “Camille,” where a gently blown muted trumpet offers shadings of cool jazz, and in “The Matador” the earthy maturity of her phrasing injects empathy - a quality that makes all of Peters’ songs ring consistently true - into a tale about the dark underbelly of love.

Explaining Hello Cruel World’s genesis, Peters says, “In 2010 the universe threw its best and its worst at me. Some of it was personal, some global. All of it seemed to demand that I redefine my ideas of permanence and reevaluate what I believe in, to literally rethink what is real.” First the Gulf of Mexico oil spill put an eco-disaster at the doorsteps of the cottage in the Florida panhandle where Peters writes much of her music. Then a friend of 30 years committed suicide in his Colorado home, followed quickly by the worst flood in the history of her adopted hometown of Nashville. Add to that a ray of light in Peters’ marriage to her longtime piano accompanist and partner Barry Walsh, which affirmed their musical and personal commitment of more than 20 years.

Eclipsing all this was the revelation by Peters’ child that he was transgender. “I see his transition as beautiful and triumphant,” Peters says. “My son’s bravery and honesty inspire me every day. But it’s profoundly disorienting to reorder your thoughts about your own child’s gender. Ultimately, it reorders your thoughts about everything.”

Peters says creating Hello Cruel World “was like coming home after a long trip, unlocking the front door and putting my baggage down. Telling these stories was part of the process of stripping myself bare of all the lies, half-truths, false selves and misguided intentions we take on in the course of living. “After the trials of the past year I felt raw, open. I wanted to write songs that hurt. I wanted to write songs that were brutally honest. I knew it would be a dark album, and I knew it might be off-putting for some. But I felt I had survived the battering of both the natural world and my own interior one for a reason.”

As Peters channeled that energy into Hello Cruel World she relied on her instincts. “I have an ability to tap into the emotions within music and words, and to empathize with people,” she says. “I also believe in singing as simply as possible — to let the song sing itself and tell its own story.” To capture her naked emotions Peters began the album’s sessions with bared-boned, mostly voice-and-guitar demos. “Usually I make very complete demos of how I want my songs to sound,” she explains. “This time I asked the musicians who played on the album to take a leap with me and open themselves up to the songs as much as I had.”

She even had two sets of lyrics and music for the title cut. Both were recorded, but the survivor’s anthem version won out. Her superb cast of players, which includes Barry Walsh, guitarists Will Kimbrough and Doug Lancio, bassist Viktor Krauss, trumpeter Vinnie Ciesielski and Kim Richey adding a choir of backing vocals to the test-of-faith parable “St. Francis,” delivered note-perfect performances. At times their playing is so sympathetic they seem nearly transparent under the potent magic of Peters’ tales like “Idlewild,” a story plucked from her childhood that uses her parents’ unraveling marriage to essay the loss of America’s innocence as well as her own. Yet close listening reveals a carefully tempered array of gently interlocked riffs, rhythms and colors that are entirely spellbinding.

Peters’ own voice and guitar playing have been at the core of her music since she started performing in the Boulder, Colorado folk circuit as a teenager. Inspired by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and a new generation of songwriters rising out of Nashville that included Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith and Rodney Crowell, Peters relocated to Music City in the late 1980s. Initially she found Nashville inspiring. “Being in a place where you can hear so many good songwriters perform their work on just an acoustic guitar really made me understand the anatomy of songs in a way I didn’t until I moved here,” Peters relates. “Just listening closely to other people who were good at their craft shaped me as a writer.”

The downside was a music business culture that typically perceived “singer” and “songwriter” as different jobs. “The either/or attitude was baffling, since all my favorite artists also wrote their own material,” Peters says. “My decision to pursue a publishing deal was based on wanting to be understood for who I am. I was afraid that if I got signed to a record deal as an artist, I’d never get to sing my own songs. I never had any aspirations of being a hit songwriter for other artists.” Nonetheless, Martina McBride’s 1995 recording of Peters’ “Independence Day,” the gritty story of an abused woman’s revenge, made her a songwriting sensation. The performance received a “Best Country Song” Grammy nomination and won the Country Music Association’s “Song of the Year” title. After that a string of great vocalists — Pam Tillis, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, Neil Diamond, George Strait, Etta James — began to record Peters’ songs. Peters also signed her own record deal, yielding her 1996 debut album The Secret of Life. The title track was cut by Faith Hill in 1999 and hit number five on the country charts.

Since then Peters has recorded five other solo albums: Gretchen Peters (2001), Halcyon (2004), Trio Live (2006), Burnt Toast and Offerings (2007) and Northern Lights (2008). The compilation Circus Girl was released in 2009. And that same year Peters collaborated with one of her favorite songwriters, Tom Russell, for their One To the Heart, One To the Head.

"After I'd finished recording Hello Cruel World, certain themes began to emerge… One is the idea that ‘survival is triumph,’ and that the real heroes are the ones who endure. That theme surprised me,” she continues. “The others have to do with religion and God, and the nature of art.” “Woman On the Wheel” and “The Matador” both explore the latter. “Art is like a jealous lover who keeps demanding you prove your devotion,” Peters says. In both of those songs the jealousy runs deep as it satisfies needs of the heart - bloodlust, desire, fear - that are typically kept hid. “St. Francis,” “Paradise Found” and other tracks, including her duet with Crowell, “Dark Angel,” are reflections on spirituality. Ironically, Crowell - an ordained minister who married Peters and Walsh in 2010 - plays the role of the dark angel in the song’s title, his voice twining with Peters’ as they sing, “And if there is no hereafter/And there is only here/Life is still a beautiful disaster/Ah, but we both know that my dear.” Those lines reflect Peters’ belief in seizing today, regardless of the challenges and obstacles it may bring - a philosophy reinforced by her recent life experiences.

“Since I was a child I’ve had a creative urge knocking inside me and I’ve acted on it,” Peters offers. “Early on it was poetry, sometimes art, and sometimes, as a kid, dance. Until I found the guitar I was interested in anything expressive. By then words were a friend, but music was a tall dark stranger that I’ve been in love with, or maybe stalking, ever since.”



iLike Gretchen Peters

Gretchen Peters


........

Click here to sign up for Gretchen's email list.
Band Members:

Barry Walsh - piano, accordion, glockenspiel, vocals
and occasionally others





Demand Gretchen Peters in your city!
Learn more about the Eventful Demand for Gretchen Peters

Upcoming Events by Eventful

If you would like to request a song from One To The Heart, One To The Head or one of Gretchen's other albums from your local Americana/AAA station, click on one of the links below. If your local station isn't listed here, call them (be nice!) and/or let us know.
WQBR FM - McELHATTEN, PA..
WDVL FM - DANVILLE, IN

Influences:


joni mitchell, leonard cohen, paul simon, charlotte brontë, bob dylan, jackson browne, bruce springsteen, w.b. yeats, emmylou harris, rickie lee jones, my older sister's record collection

......................................................................................................

Record Label:

Scarlet Letter Records

Login

Forgot password?

Need an account? Sign up