Posts Tagged ‘Gretchen Peters’

GRETCHEN PETERS – ” Wichita “

Posted: May 23, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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There’s a bittersweet beauty to the passing of time, the changes it brings are just as often heartbreaking as they are heartwarming. The inevitable tension that arises from that sway is Gretchen Peters’ most trusted muse. With melody supporting that melancholy, the songs on Peters’ new album, Dancing With The Beast, combine to lift the effort over the high artistic bar set by her last outing, 2015’s award-winning Blackbirds. Strung together and populated with strong and broken female heroines, those vignettes make up Dancing With The Beast and, indeed, Peters’ entire discography.

Dancing With The Beast puts female characters at the fore, from teenage girls to old women. And intentionally so. With the 2017 Women’s March and #MeToo Movement as bookends to her writing time, Peters knew that a feminist perspective would be the critical core of the record. She admits, “You can trace the feminist DNA in my songwriting back to ‘Independence Day’ and probably before. The thing that 2017 did is just put it front and center.”

Beauty tempered by dread, sorrow buoyed by hope, these are the ever-present tugs of war that make life worth living and songs worth writing. And they are the over-riding themes that make Gretchen Peters one of her generation’s most compelling singer/songwriters.

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Strung together and populated with strong and broken female heroines, Dancing With The Beast has a bittersweet beauty that lifts it over the high artistic bar set by her last outing, 2015’s award-winning Blackbirds”

“Beautifully defined and utterly compelling album.. Peters’ ability to give voice to believable characters is unbeatable.” –

“Right now, you would be hard-pressed to find a better songwriter than Gretchen Peters. Her willingness to sing about tough, somber subjects is a rarity in the industry, and on her new album, Dancing With The Beast (due out May 18th), she continues to prove her mastery.” – The Shotgun Seat

“50 minutes of exquisite-sounding emotional devastation, depression, murder and heartbreak” – The Tennessean

 

GRETCHEN PETERS – ” Pretty Things “

Posted: February 6, 2015 in MUSIC
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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,

GRETCHEN PETERS – ” Blackbirds “

Posted: January 30, 2015 in MUSIC
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Blackbirds, despite its dark soul is a seemingly endless trickle of loveliness… Jubilee will break your heart, sniffing and sobbing over her piano ballad, again evoking family, and what it’s like to be older. It sharpens your focus that you are now your parents, “I’m an orphan at 30”, it’s one of the saddest, yet most beautiful things I have ever heard.”

…it’s the ageing process that has us all in its grasp, yet in Gretchen Peter’s case it seems to have sharpened her pen all the more, as Blackbirds wears its dark heart on its sleeve and Gretchen draws on a grand tradition of documenting these noirish tales and the fragility of life in the most compelling