https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tozspmHxCGM
When country singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters started thinking about writing her new album “Blackbirds,” she wondered to herself how she’d top her last outing, 2012’s “Hello Cruel World.” “It was a manifesto for me,” she says of it. “I did think in the back of my mind, ‘God, what am I going to do now?”
She answered her own question with “Blackbirds,” her eighth studio album, premiering today on Speakeasy.
“Blackbirds” was record in Nashville and features contributions from songwriter Jason Isbell, dobro master Jerry Douglas and Jimmy Lafave. The songs fluctuate between gritty, dark numbers and lush ballads that touch on death (“Blackbirds”), struggling veterans (“When All You Got Is a Hammer”), and her own childhood (“The House on Auburn Street”). While mortality seems to be one of the topics she honed in on this time around – at one point during the songwriting process, she attended three memorial services in just a week – she has a more existential way of describing this batch of songs. “The album is more about what our awareness of ourselves as temporary beings is,” she says.
Last October, Peters was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame – and for good reason. She’s flirted with mainstream success since the mid-‘90s, when she wrote songs for major acts such as Martina McBride,
The Fat Angel Sings 