Ellis Creative: PR/Marketing/Project Mgmt: Gretchen Peters

One To The Heart, One To The Head Onesheet

Contact Information

One To The Heart, One To The Head Onesheet

"The title, One To The Heart, One To The Head, could suggest, among a plethora of metaphors, a duet of beautiful deadly blows. A double-shot of love, or something other. A one-two punch. A brace of kisses. The virtue of mercy, twice-blessed. Whatever way you cut it or call it, we're talking Gretchen Peters' and Tom Russell's soulful cowboymusic universe paralleling the musical universes of, say, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, of Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler. Beyond the prowess of the vocals, however, and beyond the virtuosity--especially the keyboard artistry of Barry Walsh flashing us back like glass-plate sepia-toned photographs of piano-men sitting 16-hands-tall aboard opera house stages of the horseback 1800s--and beyond the top-shelf production work in the studio--beyond all the tangible radiant facets of this gem of a record--shines Gretchen Peters' genuine love for the emotional landscape, solace to chaos, of our contemporary West and the songs that keep it honest." - Paul Zarzyski, poet, spoken word artist and recipient of the 2005 Montana Governor’s Arts Award For Literature "

"Gretchen Peters came out of Colorado listening to Bob Dylan and Mary McCaslin – she went on to become one of the most successful writers in Nashville – yet she maintained a poetic stance among the disposable country popsters in funny hats. She’s also one of our great singers. I figured she should harken up her roots and turn toward western themes… and here it is. This record sounds like the West I long for… ancient, whispering, parched, desolate, bushwhacked, half-drunk, windswept and crazy… crazy with memorable ghosts." -Tom Russell

Multiple Grammy nominee and CMA Song of the Year winner Gretchen Peters, who grew up in Colorado, has recorded a new album about the West. The album, a collaboration with acclaimed singer-songwriter Tom Russell, is called One To The Heart, One To The Head. It will be released February 1 on Frontera/Scarlet Letter Records. The pair made the album in four whirlwind days in Austin, TX, after Russell planted the seed of an idea with an email. Peters says, "When Tom suggested this collaboration it seemed unlikely to me; now it seems inevitable. As we were sifting through the songs for this record, I began to realize the extent to which growing up in the West shaped me, musically and otherwise. Living out west taught me to appreciate a certain kind of spare beauty which I tried to transmute into songs."

Tracks:
1. North Platte
2. Prairie In The Sky
3. Billy 4
4. Blue Mountains Of Mexico
5. These Cowboys Born Out Of Their Time
6. Guadalupe
7. Sweet And Shiny Eyes
8. Wolves
9. Snowin' On Raton
10. Old Paint
11. My Last Go Round
12. North Platte (reprise)
13. If I Had A Gun
14. Prairie Melancholy

Contact:
Bill Wence Promotions
Nashville, TN
800-584-5524
billwencepro@earthlink.net

www.gretchenpeters.com
www.tomrussell.com

Download the onesheet as a pdf

Northern Lights Cut By Cut

1) Why this album at this time? How does it differ from a traditional "holiday" album?

My touring partner and coproducer, Barry Walsh, and I both love Christmas music - some of the traditional stuff, especially very old choral works, and some of the pop stuff, especially Vince Guaraldi's classic "Charlie Brown Christmas" album - but most of it has been done to death. You can see people's eyes roll back when you mention making a Christmas album - they're thinking dear God, not another version of "Santa Baby" - so we were intrigued by the challenge of making a Christmas album with none of the hidebound, obligatory sentimentality which for me, ruins a lot of holiday records.

While we were on tour in the UK in January, we sat up in our hotel room with a guitar and an accordion and worked out "Christmas Time Is Here", the Vince Guaraldi/Lee Mendelson song. We recorded a demo of it there in the hotel room, and it really set the tone for everything that followed. We wanted to keep it very simple, a record that felt like it was recorded in a living room, which in fact, it was.

Another big inspiration for this album was an Over The Rhine Christmas show we went to in 2007. OTR has released not one, but two Christmas albums - and Barry and I were quite enchanted by the music, which was not the familiar carols and pop standards redone for the thousandth time, but a very original group of songs, most of which were unfamiliar to us. The impetus to do a Christmas album seemed to come more from their sense of wonder about the time of year - and that was something I could relate to. I love the true sense of mystery and beauty that surrounds Christmas and the deepest part of winter - but I don't like the forced sentiment that so often accompanies it. I just wondered if I could write some songs and collect some other ones that would convey this sense of mystery and beauty that I feel this time of year.

I also wondered if I could be honest, as a writer, about the sadness or melancholy that many people feel at Christmas. We all tend to reflect at the end of the year - and our reflections quite naturally include loss and regret as well as gratitude and happiness. It seems almost taboo to write a Christmas song that makes room for that sense of loss, but that's what I was going for in the song "Northern Lights", and on the record in general. I wanted to make a Christmas record that you could listen to at night when you're all alone and not come away feeling depressed but instead feeling moved by the whole of human experience, not just the happy parts.

2) A cut-by-cut on all the tracks. Anecdotes about writing the songs or why you chose to record certain songs

1. Song For A Winter's Night - I loved this old Gordon Lightfoot song and knew I wanted some songs that were about winter, not specifically Christmas. This one just seems to capture that melancholy feeling of a snowy winter night. It was one of the first songs we cut for the album and felt absolutely effortless. At that point I think we felt we were on to something.

2. Coventry Carol (prelude) - After we had recorded Coventry Carol, with its big, lush cathedral-like sound, it occurred to me that we could do a little prelude that was sonically the opposite. I was trying to get something that sounded like what you'd hear coming out of your radio late in December in the hinterlands of England just after Winston Churchill had given a wartime speech on the BBC. David Henry, who I am convinced can play anything, did all the horn parts.

3. Coventry Carol - This has always been one of my favorite carols. It's quintessentially English, of course - the title refers to Coventry, England, where it originated as part of a play depicting the Christmas story. The song centers on The Massacre of the Innocents by Herod - the killing of all young male children in Bethlehem. It was surprisingly easy to get "inside" the medieval lyrics because the tune is so mournful and sad. Barry came up with the beautiful, and very modern, interludes between verses.

4. I Wonder As I Wander - I changed, very slightly, the melody of this Appalachian folk carol to suite the more modal arrangement I had worked out on the guitar. As with so many of the traditional carols we recorded, I was more and more impressed with the lyrics as we went. The words to this song are lovely, very earthy and their Celtic roots show in places - "if Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,.. he surely could have it 'cause he was the king"... I started with a series of guitars and mandolins - very folky and mountain-y - but when Barry added the B3, the Wurlitzer and the clavietta, it added a sort of bluesy tone which I loved.

5. December Child - I was really interested in writing the story of Christmas from the very human point of view of Mary - how she must have felt as a mother, knowing her baby would not be hers for very long. Every mother feels a pang at this part of the story, I think - we all want to protect our babies from the world and we all know that we can't. Doug Lancio added beautiful guitars to this track.

6. (Charlie's) Angels - I had this crazy idea that I wanted to try doing the traditional carol "Angels We Have Heard On High", only in 6/8 time and with a jazz feel. I don't know what got into my head but I was pretty sure about it. The only thing that didn't feel right was the "gloria's" - they just seemed superfluous. The feel was so close to the Vince Guaraldi song "Skating", from our beloved "Charlie Brown Christmas", that at some point we had the idea to put the lick from "Skating" in place of the "gloria's". It worked. We knew we had to record this whole thing live, so we called Dave Francis up and he came over and played upright bass in our hallway. It took us awhile to get it right - the transitions are tricky - but once we got it we loved it. It's also the only track we put sleighbells on - and only at the very end, after much discussion! We called it (Charlie's) Angels as a little tip of the hat to Charles Schulz and his alter-ego Charlie Brown.

7. Waitin' On Mary - This is an old song of mine from 1993. I had an old, dated demo which I hated - full of synthesizers and devoid of space or vibe - but I still loved the song. I stripped it down to its basics and played a simple electric guitar part, which immediately took it to a new, better place. We just kept working on it - layering it, adding Doug Lancio's guitar and David Henry's cello. The lovely icing on the cake was having Matraca Berg and Suzy Bogguss come in and lend their angelic background vocals. We've been singing together for a couple of years now and I knew I wanted them on the album and this was the perfect song. I've always been struck by the link between the homeless of today and the Christmas story, which is really about two poor, destitute people trying to find their way in the world without much help. It's an old story, but it's still going on today.

8. In The Bleak Midwinter - Maybe my favorite cut on the record, and certainly one of my favorite lyrics. Based on a stunning poem by Christina Rossetti. We sort of considered this a bookend to "Coventry Carol", and wanted to create a mysterious, cathedral-like sound. Barry's idea was to use organ rather than piano. Barry and I knew we had to capture this live as well, because there is no real strict sense of time in it. Since we were in separate rooms and couldn't see each other when we recorded it, we had to play off of each other's very subtle cues - my breathing and his grace notes. Once we had the right take, we sent it to Doug Lancio, who I think is in his finest hour here. Some of what he plays sounds like "angels and archangels", and some of it sounds like a Grateful Dead jam. All of it sounds wonderful to me - I was ecstatic when I heard what he'd done.

9. Careful How You Go - I asked my songwriter friends to send me songs that they might have that would be appropriate for this album, knowing that I wasn't going to have time to write more than a few myself, and also because I was curious to see what I'd get. I know some great songwriters. Kim sent me this song about a snowy night in London, which she wrote with Will Kimbrough. It charmed me immediately. It's got nothing to do with Christmas but everything to do with the magic in the air after a snowfall. Will was gracious enough to come over to the house and sing it with me, and put some bouzouki on it as well. I also played alto recorder on it, which gave the instrumental bridge a little English folk vibe.

10. Northern Lights - I felt this was the title song as soon as I wrote it. I've always been fascinated with the Northern Lights, though as many places as I've been where they're common I've still never seen them. But I think of them as one of the beautiful gifts nature gives us, seemingly for no other reason than to delight us. The end of the year is a reflective time, and fraught with stress and sadness for some people (maybe more than would admit it), and I was trying to get at this notion. I spent a very difficult Christmas the first year after my marriage broke up, but in some ways it was a beautiful experience, because I really had to examine what I wanted the holiday to mean. It was clearly not going to be a Hallmark/Norman Rockwell Christmas, so I had to really think about what was important to me. And it turned out that peace, and quiet, and reflection made for a lovely and meaningful, if at times melancholy Christmas Eve. Getting off the treadmill can be a huge relief. That's what I was getting at in the last verse: "we try to make up for mistakes that we've made/with presents and parties and Christmas parades".

11. Christmas Time Is Here - We worked out this song in a hotel room in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Newcastle has always been a pretty fertile place for us, creatively - I wrote "Jezebel" there from my last album. We both adored Vince Guaraldi's "Charlie Brown Christmas", and wanted to pay homage somehow. My guitar chords are quite a bit more naïve than Guaraldi's jazz chords, but they fit the arrangement, I think. We recorded this whole thing live with Barry in the living room, me in the office and Dave Francis in the hallway.

12. Silent Night - My grandmother, whose maiden name was Mohr, was fond of telling me that her ancestor, Joseph Mohr, wrote Silent Night. Mohr was an Austrian priest who presided over a small mountain church. The story goes that the organ broke on Christmas Eve, so this song, which he wrote with Franz Gruber, was first performed on the guitar. I had this idea that we could set the melody, which is very simple, to something resembling the Bach cello suite in G, which I love. It evolved and changed along the way, but the basic idea - recording it with just a voice and a solo cello, sticks pretty closely to the way Joseph Mohr performed it that Christmas Eve in 1818. Barry came up with the instrumental passage in the middle. David Henry played it, beautifully.

3) An overview of the recording process of the project:

We had been talking about making a Christmas/winter/solstice album since the fall of 2007. We thought we would try doing it at home. We live in a very old house with very high ceilings, and we knew that it was a wonderful sounding house because Barry had recorded his solo piano album here. He'd just gotten a new Yamaha grand piano and we were anxious to try recording it. In order to get separation, I set up a sort of vocal booth in another room. I also had all the recording gear in there with me, so by default I was the engineer most of the time. For many of the tracks we just recorded piano and vocal, or sometimes piano, guitar and vocal, live. We never used any click tracks or anything to keep time, other than each other. We have played together so much and for such a long time that we can anticipate each other's sense of timing, and we both prefer music that breathes a little, quickening here and pausing there in the natural places.
We also brought in all of our "toys" - a Leslie speaker cabinet for the organ (I also played guitar through it on "December Child"), assorted electric and acoustic guitars, mandolins, my alto recorder, Turkish finger cymbals, a set of bamboo chimes Barry had given me for Christmas, various percussion instruments and anything else we could find. We found the best sounding cardboard box we had and used it for a drum. We had a a couple of very good microphones and some pretty good ones. We experimented endlessly with where to put them, how to record things like Turkish finger cymbals (stereo, it turns out). It was like having a big sandbox to play in - tremendously fun, and we felt like the only rule was that there were no rules. We could really only record at night, because we live downtown and it can be noisy during the day. So after dinner most nights we'd have a glass of wine, light a few candles and sit down to try to "catch fireflies" as Barry says. People always ask us - we didn't put up any Christmas decorations. It wasn't necessary, the music put us both in the mood.
When we had done as much as we could at home, we gave a few tracks to Doug Lancio to put his guitar magic on, and then took it all to David Henry's studio so David could overdub his cello and horns and begin mixing. Being the chief engineer, I was tremendously relieved to hear the tracks we'd recorded at home in a "real" studio, sounding great and with no apparent operator error.

4) Anything else you think would be good for the press to know. Hopefully, we'll be telling them that there will be some proceeds going to Room At The Inn but we'll have more on that when we meet with them.

The idea for doing something involving a Christmas charity came from my assistant, Brian Horner. Brian felt that it would be a great way to connect people to both the music and the cause and maybe foster a sense of giving where it's really needed, which always feels good. I loved the idea, and I had known Fr. Charles Strobel and the Room In The Inn program for years. On Christmases past I had played benefits for RITI a couple of times. I was always struck by the very real, practical, roll-your-shirtsleeves-up work that Charlie does with the homeless, and by the grace and dignity that is always present with him. I would guess that grace and dignity are in short supply when you're homeless. I got more excited about the collaboration when I realized that the song "Waitin' On Mary" was really a perfect fit, the story of two homeless people from centuries ago. Charlie is a friend, a neighbor and one of Nashville's brightest lights, and I'm thrilled to be involved with Room In The Inn.

Download the song by song as a pdf

Biography

Burnt Toast & Offerings
Street Date: August 7, 2007

Since she released her last record, Gretchen Peters, a Nashville hit songwriter with a seemingly charmed and easy life has been through the wringer.

"A midlife epiphany" is perhaps a better description of what Peters had one day in 2004 on a tour bus somewhere in the U.K., where she's enjoyed a thriving, decade-long career as a performer on top of her American songwriting success. It was a realization that she needed to take control of her own life, and it would turn her world upside-down and inside-out before culminating in Burnt Toast & Offerings, a deeply personal coming-to-terms record that both reveals and transcends the specifics.

It's not like the best-selling, Grammy-nominated songwriter needs drama in her life to write a song that rings true. Peters hadn't personally lived through domestic violence when she gave life to "Independence Day," one of the most powerful and empowering women's anthems ever recorded by a country artist (Martina McBride). Nor did she really know "The Secret of Life" when she took a stab at it in that feel-good Faith Hill hit. And she's certainly never been a circus girl or a Brooklyn cabbie, just a couple of the more memorable characters from her own previous four albums--songs from which, along with others she's written over the past 20 years, have been recorded by artists as diverse as Etta James, the Neville Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Diamond and Bryan Adams as well as country queens Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless.

So she didn't need drama, but drama is what she got when she divorced her husband—and manager and booking agent and producer—of 23 years.

"Professionally, I was looking at, essentially, abandonment. You can be this empowered woman, and write these empowered-woman songs, but there were a lot of times, after leaving, I could not believe how scared I felt. There was a huge wall I had to get over in terms of thinking, OK you can do this."

As always, Peters went to "the well," as she calls it. That place deep inside her where she accesses the emotions that allows her to create. But this time, that place was scarier. "Often what feels like the scariest thing is the right thing," she said. "For me, that was getting more personal."

Burnt Toast & Offerings kicks off with the frustration and anger of "Ghost": "There was a girl who used to live here…. / But you let her beauty go unnoticed/ You let her music go unheard/ You should have listened when she told you/ You should have hung on every word." And it ends with the painful reality of making a change in "To Say Goodbye": "We are dreamers slowly waking/ We are shooting stars across a midnight sky/ We are strangers in the making/ But we're not ready to say goodbye."

On the tracks in between, though, Peters not only says goodbye to her old life, she says hello to a new love, a band mate of 16 years, and to a relationship that inspired what "might be the first flat-out, unrepentantly guileless love song I've ever written." ("The Way You Move Me")

A self-described folkie and hippie chick despite her mainstream country creds, Peters co-produced the record with Doug Lancio, whose work with Patty Griffin (1000 Kisses) she admired, and whose atmospheric guitar playing and intuitive production helped her achieve the layered, mysterious, feminine sound she was looking for. Her enchanting voice is perhaps the only crystal-clear part of a record that's a bit murky by design, a complex, multi-hued sound that befits the lyrics of a woman who knows that life isn't simple and it isn't black and white.

For years, she said, "I wasn't ready to take control and say it's my life, my career. It took a huge upheaval for me to come to grips with the fact that I wanted to design my own life."

Part of her master plan now is performing more often. The problem with being a successful songwriter, Peters said, is that you don't have to tour, and in fact are discouraged from the less lucrative job of playing live in small clubs. "But going out and playing is a critical part of writing a song for me, to have it live and breathe. It's almost like they're not really done being written until you've lived in them for a while.

"There's a spiritual aspect to performing," she continued. "It's the only time you're completely in the moment. Writing is very cerebral; in the studio there are lots of choices you have to make; but when you perform, it's the only Zen moment. For me that's hugely important."

Nowadays when she performs these songs, she can even joke about it all, telling her audience, "This is my divorce album, and as such there are a lot of really happy songs on it."

But of course it wasn't always that easy. At first she asked herself, how am I going to write about this? How am I going to talk about it? "But I thought of other writers," she said, "like Joan Didion, and the book she just put out. How incredibly personal it was. She put her whole thing out there. And I thought, Yeah, that's what writers do. Showing your humanity is probably the bravest and best thing you can do artistically."

Burnt Toast & Offerings is proof of that.

- Taylor Holliday

Download the bio as a pdf

Quotes

Praise for Burnt Toast & Offerings:

"...a wondrous, wrenching personal reflection on love...Deep and deeply beautiful, Burnt Toast & Offerings is a fully realized work of art." - David McGee, BN.com

"This is Gretchen Peters' finest moment as a recording artist, and perhaps her finest as a song-lyric poet as well." - Thom Jurek, allmusic.com

"[Peters] documents her journey from unhappy wife to rapturous armorist." - Holly George Warren, More

"This album isn't about hits; it's about art. And by that measure it may be Peters' biggest success." - Steven Stone, Vintage Guitar

"Peters is not composing confessional tales as therapy. She's reflecting on the conflicting impulses of her life and writing pop songs. This leads to some real interesting observations that resonate on a number of levels. Beware—even the simple songs have hidden depths." - Steve Horowicz, Popmatters.com

"With rich, distanced sonics from co-producer Doug Lancio, it's far more adventurous than her four previous records, but works as a classically self-involved singer-songwriter statement." - Edd Hurt, Nashville Scene

...an album of middle-age regret, broken relationships and faded dreams wrapped in a classy production...bright, articulate and insightful, reflecting broadly on the withering of hope and expectation and its replacement with routine emotions. Peters's performance and that of her band impressively mixes the sassy and the subtle. - The Irish Times

Praise for Trio:

it is a major treat that one year on from Gretchen's third studio release, we have these songs stripped bare in concert interpretations, since Peters possesses an edgy singing voice that will break your heart as easily as her stories and lyrics. Trio would be a sort of greatest hits collection, except that to do Gretchen's song catalogue justice the reality would have been a multi-disc set. - Folkwax magazine

...her songwriting is better than 99% of writers working in this or any other genre. Not only that, but she has a serious voice too, one of those effortlessly pure instruments that clutches at your heart and guts and twists them out of shape. So, for those who’ve missed out so far "Trio" is the perfect place to begin. A live album, recorded with a pianist and bassist as accompanists, hence the title, it cherrypicks the best bits from her previous studio recordings and presents them in a stripped down form. Virtually without exception they work better in this style, as it allows concentration on Peters voice and superlative songs. - Americana-UK.com

..."Like Water Into Wine" is a carnal piece simmering with just the right amounts of hope and desperation. (Barry) Walsh and (Dave) Francis shade the song in all the right places and provide a soft place for Peters’ crystalline vocals to fall. The lump-in-the-throat "This Used To Be My Town," from last year’s Halcyon album, has Gretchen climbing into the skin of a departed girl who hovers over her lifeless body, the people, and the town that defined who she was when she was alive. The haunting track is one of the best songs Peters has ever written. - Countryreview.com

...some singers were born to perform and Gretchen Peters is definitely one of them. Trio, on which she and her guitar are sparsely supplemented by piano and acoustic bass, is a startling record - her voice arrestingly beautiful, her delivery perfect and the songs divine. - HMV magazine (UK)

...her songs are like micro-novels: they have settings, plots and are inhabited by utterly believable characters, such as the lonely performer in Circus Girl. Indeed, her evocation of a murdered girl's return to her home, This Used To Be My Town, brings to mind Alice Sebold's recent bestselling novel, The Lovely Bones. Peters brings almost as many heart-rending details and almost as profound a sense of lost promise as most writers could manage in a novel. - Country Music People (UK)

...this whole CD sees the incisive singer-songwriter at a peak of melodic, immaculately-crafted brilliance. Tracks such as the Patty Loveless hit Like Water Into Wine, the poignantly reflective Main Street and This Used To Be My Town are fine-cut gems of contemporary rootsy songcraft. - Maverick magazine (UK)

Praise for Halcyon:
...Like Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams and the great Emmylou Harris, Gretchen Peters is a precocious talent. The tag for her work is alternative country but with a voice as haunting and controlled as this, she could sing anything put in front of her. Halcyon is jam-packed with gorgeous musical moments, particularly the beautiful Aviator's Song and If Heaven. - Belfast (UK) Telegraph

...unlike the competition she regularly approaches the subject from an oblique angle lyrically and in the process draws you inexorably into her world. Halcyon is a solid contender in the "Best of 2004" stakes... - Folkwax Magazine

...No flowery prose, no false sentiment, no artificial anger or angst, just simple messages of life, love and loss wrapped up in elegant, organic arrangements. Peters has something of the same potent sincerity which makes Bruce Springsteen an enduringly fascinating songwriter...a masterly lesson in the art of effortless, fluid writing - with pared down arrangements and a lightness of touch that oozes confidence...more restrained then her previous outings, Halcyon still packs an emotional punch, with the bittersweet 'Imogene' and 'Tomorrow Morning', both as intelligent as we've come to expect from this introspective mistress of rootsy, lo-fi country...A brave and beautiful collection. - Manchester (UK) Online

...absolutely essential listening. - Shakenstir.co.uk

... In a word, superb. Gretchen is one of USA's best singer-songwriters, and this ranks as her finest moment. Refreshingly frank, even caustic. - Leicester (UK) Mercury

Praise for Gretchen Peters:

... If Peters' '96 debut, The Secret of Life, had the answers, her edgier follow-up poses the questions, mostly about how to navigate rough emotional terrain. Full of surprises - "Eddie's First Wife" has a randy lesbian at its center - Peters brings the pop sensibility of Sheryl Crow to meditations on Amelia Earhart and Picasso's cat. Easy to see why she's already captured the Brits. B+ - Entertainment Weekly

This is not jukebox music - the stuff that exists to fill in the pauses in conversation. This IS the conversation. - AP Wire

Rarely has a singer-songwriter had a better showcase than "Gretchen Peters," and she has mostly herself to thank for it. The lovely, leisurely paced album finds Peters co-producing; singing all the harmonies; and playing many of the instruments, including electric sitar and six-string bass. Peters displays a keen, off hand observational sense - she's a Sheryl Crow worth, well, crowing about - on the likes of "Love and Texaco" and the sly tale of "Eddie's First Wife," who takes up with someone just like the girl who married dear old dad. Even more remarkable, her singing is so winning, she manages to top even Patty Loveless' earlier version of her exquisite "Like Water Into Wine." - San Diego Tribune

...her own girlish Alice-In-Wonderland instrument provides an ideal guide for exploring her picturesque scenarios and exotic characters. There's no filler or empty cliches here. Peters' every line seems weighed and considered with a master jeweler's squinting precision, her best songs imbuing the sweat and confusion of everyday lives with the serenity of the blessed. - Music Row Magazine

...the genre hardly matters when you have such penetrating material. From the soulfully romantic "Like Water Into Wine" to the jazzy, provocative "Eddie's First Wife," Ms. Peters' musical vignettes explore life's gray areas with honest eloquence. - Dallas Morning News

...Peters' voice , sweet with a hint of weariness, is front and center, making the honesty of her words all the more sharp. These are unforgettable songs that deserve as much attention as the chart-toppers that Peters created for other artists. - Boulder (CO) Daily Camera

Praise for The Secret Of Life:

"offers 10 fresh reasons to elect her to the country songwriter's Hall of Fame."

"Peters, whose choir-girl voice has a seductive hint of late nights and cigarettes, knows the tunesmith's secret: crafting a good love song... The passionately elegiac When You Are Old is a declaration of eternal devotion: "When your brave tales have all been told/ I'll ask for them when you are old." In Peters' music every tale is brave, unique, beautiful." - Time Magazine

"If Peters never delivers another tune as achingly beautiful as "On a Bus to St. Cloud,"... she has already earned herself a spot among country's upper echelon of contemporary composers." - People Magazine

"she has more in common with the romantic sensibilities of Rickie Lee Jones... Peters' songs about emotional thirsts that never get quenched have a quiet power all their own..." - Entertainment Weekly

Praise for Gretchen’s live shows:

...a night of many stunning songs with strumming and fingerpicking acoustic guitar, backed by pianist Barry Walsh. As he played exquisite chords, and rhythmic and melodic embellishments, Peters took a sold-out house on a tour through the terrain of her musical imagination. ...Peters, who is a major Nashville tunesmith but has a large cult following in Europe as a singer, has a lovely voice that's haunting in the upper register, where she likes to take her lyrics. ...While most of Nashville is in thrall to formulaic hits, Peters pushes the envelope. She sings duets with Texas troubadour Tom Russell and raves about her favorite poets (Yeats), songs (Leonard Cohen's Joan of Arc ) and authors (Zora Neale Hurston). - Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, OH)

...from the aching lament of "Germantown" to the exotic romance encapsulated within "Over Africa," Peters scoured the depths of lyrical discord. And backed by Barry Walsh's exquisite piano playing, the elocution of the emotional truth set forth was only intensified by its execution. Nowhere was this more apparent than within their poignant performance of the Sinatra-propelled classic "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)." During her set, Peters observed that there are two types of people in this world-those who think sad songs are depressing and those who find them cathartic. Gretchen Peters irrefutably belongs to the latter. - Santa Barbara Independent (Santa Barbara, CA)

...in front of an audience that could not have been more reverent had the ghost of Johnny Cash just drifted into the room, she proceeded to produce an epic set.
The first thing that strikes you about Peters is her voice. The vast array of singers she has written for obviously have their own appeal but it is hard to imagine how her own crystalline vocals could ever be bettered. Reminiscent of both Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, yet maintaining a jazzy edge that sets it apart from standard C&W, Peters' high register vocal style gives her material an extra push that overcomes the inevitable cliches that songs of lovelorn heartache throw up. With exemplary backing on stand-up bass and electric piano, the early part of Peters' performance set the tone for the rest of the evening. Kicking off with three exercises in effortless minor-chord melancholia, it didn't take long before the audience were entranced. - The Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland)

...Double headliner Peters was the show stealer however, providing lush contrast to Russell's sometimes spare and hard-driving delivery. This ex-Coloradoan with the sultry voice and beautiful face had the audience spellbound, offering the best of Nashville today - solid musicianship, effortless delivery, vivid and penetrating lyrics and captivating presence. Accompanied by keyboard artist Barry Walsh, (also on accordion and xylophone), every song was enriched by the rare magic of piano and guitar. Peters nailed the audience from her opening with "Circus Girl," followed by "If Heaven" (off her recent "Halcyon" album.) Her riveting "Independence Day," made famous by Martina McBride, exposes domestic abuse and her one cover, Paul Simon's "American Tune," offered hope in a troubled world, even more meaningful now than when it was first written. - Country Standard Time (November 2006)

Download the quote sheet as a pdf

Press Releases

Gretchen Peters looks to winter with Northern Lights
First holiday album to be released October 21
$2.00 from each CD to benefit Nashville’s Room In The Inn

September 18, 2008 - Nashville, TN

If a holiday album is usually little more than an occasion for tossing together a dozen cheery, well-known songs and a few shakes of the jingle bells just to have another product to sell at the prime shopping time of year, then Gretchen Peters’ latest recording, Northern Lights, is of an entirely different breed.

The CD, her sixth, will release October 21 on Scarlet Letter Records, and marks the first time Peters—an acclaimed artist and hit songwriter, whose 2007 set, Burnt Toast & Offerings, is an introspective tour de force—has captured the essence of a wintry season all on one disc.

Peters and her longtime collaborator Barry Walsh took no shortcuts in making the album. As a result, it comes off not as a disposable Christmas-themed compilation, but a deeply satisfying retreat that does justice to the rich range of emotion that winter inspires—not just the joy, but the awe and sadness too.

Northern Lights is built around three Peters originals: “December Child,” a meditative, gracefully-strummed waltz that imagines Mary’s motherly anxiousness for her baby’s future, the ethereally gliding “Waitin’ On Mary”—which features the divine harmonies of Matraca Berg and Suzy Bogguss—and the title track, an aching piano and cello ballad.

“I wondered if I could be honest, as a writer, about the melancholy that many people feel at Christmas,” Peters says. “We all tend to reflect at the end of the year—and our reflections quite naturally include loss and regret, as well as gratitude and happiness. It seems almost taboo to write a Christmas song that makes room for that sense of loss, but that’s what I was going for in the song ‘Northern Lights’ and on the record in general. I wanted to make a Christmas record that you could listen to at night when you’re all alone and not come away feeling depressed, but instead feeling moved by the whole of human experience—not just the happy parts.”

Peters handpicked masterfully written songs by Gordon Lightfoot (“Song For a Winter’s Night”) and by Kim Richey and Will Kimbrough (“Careful How You Go”). Kimbrough lent his voice and bouzouki playing to the latter. Instead of doing typical carols and Christmas songs in warmed-over ways, Peters carefully selected songs with an air of mystery, and, with Walsh, set about giving them new life.

Peters and Walsh gave “I Wonder As I Wander” a unique modal blues tint, and, in an especially imaginative move, they set the austere elegance of the medieval “Coventry Carol” against the more modern sounds of the prelude (reminiscent of trumpets over 1940s radio airwaves) and instrumental interludes (the lapping and receding of Walsh’s B-3 organ). “I was trying to get something that sounded like what you’d hear coming out of your radio late in December in the hinterlands of England, just after Winston Churchill had given a wartime speech on the BBC,” Peters offers.

The stately traditional carol “Angels We Have Heard on High” became “(Charlie’s) Angels,” a swinging, 6/8 jazz number, interwoven with a jaunty “Skating” riff from Vince Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown Christmas.” Notes Peters, “We called it ‘(Charlie’s) Angels’ as a little tip of the hat to Charles Schulz and his alter-ego Charlie Brown.” The whole album-making journey began with an impromptu session in a U.K. hotel room that yielded a luxurious, accordion-sweetened take on another Guaraldi tune, “Christmas Time Is Here.”

The entire 12-track affair has an organic, living room sort of intimacy, and for good reason—Peters and Walsh recorded in their 1870s era Victorian shotgun style row house— originally built as a worker’s cottage—at night, after the city noise had quieted down for the day and they’d enjoyed a glass of wine—and without a single time-keeping device to speak of. Adding to the gorgeous textures they got from instruments as varied as Turkish finger cymbals, bamboo chimes and an upturned liquor box are Doug Lancio’s silvery guitar touch, Dave Francis’ smooth upright bass playing and David Henry’s moody cello and trumpet.

Yet another thing that sets Northern Lights apart from a run-of-the-mill holiday album is the fact that $2 from every sale will go to the Nashville-based homeless outreach program, Room In The Inn. After Peters revived “Waitin’ on Mary” from a 1993 demo, she realized that it only made sense to give toward the same need echoed in the song.

From November to March each year, Room In The Inn partners with more than 150 local faith communities and other volunteers to offer clean beds, warm meals, hot showers, and medicine in these houses of worship to more than 1000 homeless men and women during the cold months when they need it most, and thus seeks to reverse that ancient story’s ending by providing Room In The Inn. During the daytime, Room In The Inn operates the Campus for Human Development, Nashville’s only comprehensive site of services, offering literacy and computer classes, addiction treatment, respite care and other essential care to more than 4000 homeless men and women throughout the year.

“On Christmases past I had played benefits for Room In The Inn a couple of times,” Peters says. “I got more excited about the collaboration when I realized that the song “Waitin’ On Mary” was really a perfect fit, the story of two homeless people from centuries ago.”

For information on Room In The Inn – chd-nashville.org

Download the press release as a pdf

Gretchen Peters Survives & Thrives with Burnt Toast & Offerings
Post-Divorce Epiphany Collection Available August 7

Since she released her last record, Gretchen Peters, a Nashville hit songwriter with a seemingly charmed and easy life, has been through the wringer.

Accused at one point of having a midlife crisis, she thought about it a little while and then, despite the negative connotation, said, "Hell yes, I'm having a midlife crisis. Midlife is when people should be reassessing. By the time you've reached that age you've realized that it ain't endless. It's going to end. And it's going by faster and faster. So, by god, make the most of it!"

"A midlife epiphany" is perhaps a better description of what Peters had one day in 2004 on a tour bus somewhere in the U.K., where she's enjoyed a thriving, decade-long career as a performer on top of her American songwriting success. It was a realization that she needed to take control of her own life, and it would turn her world upside-down and inside-out before culminating in Burnt Toast & Offerings, a deeply personal coming-to-terms record that both reveals and transcends the specifics.

It's not like the best-selling, Grammy-nominated songwriter needs drama in her life to write a song that rings true. Peters hadn't personally lived through domestic violence when she gave life to "Independence Day," one of the most powerful and empowering women's anthems ever recorded by a country artist (Martina McBride). Nor did she really know "The Secret of Life" when she took a stab at it in that feel-good Faith Hill hit.

And she's certainly never been a circus girl or a Brooklyn cabbie, just a couple of the more memorable characters from her own previous four albums--songs from which, along with others she's written over the past 20 years, have been recorded by artists as diverse as Etta James, the Neville Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Diamond and Bryan Adams as well as country queens Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless.

So she didn't need drama, but drama is what she got when she divorced her husband--and manager and booking agent and producer--of 23 years.

Burnt Toast & Offerings kicks off with the frustration and anger of "Ghost": "There was a girl who used to live here.... / But you let her beauty go unnoticed/ You let her music go unheard/ You should have listened when she told you/ You should have hung on every word." And it ends with the painful reality of making a change in "To Say Goodbye": "We are dreamers slowly waking/ We are shooting stars across a midnight sky/ We are strangers in the making/ But we're not ready to say goodbye."

For years, she said, "I wasn't ready to take control and say it's my life, my career. It took a huge upheaval for me to come to grips with the fact that I wanted to design my own life."

Nowadays when she performs these songs, she can even joke about it all, telling her audience, "This is my divorce album, and as such there are a lot of really happy songs on it."

Burnt Toast & Offerings is proof of that.

Download the press release as a pdf