Alice Peacock Real Day CD

Alice Peacock does not believe in keeping secrets. At least not in the catchy and smart folk-pop songs that are making her one of the hottest new singer-songwriters in the country. In her music, she believes in sharing secrets. “Her songs are very outgoing,” says John Gorka, among the most respected songwriting stars in the folk-pop world, and a confirmed Peacock fan. “I think of what she does as intelligent pop; strong and plain-spoken, but there’s more to it than might meet the ear on first listen. I think she has a real bright future.” In a songwriter world awash in dour troubadours who believe that complexity is a sign of craftsmanship, brooding a sign of depth, and obscurity a symptom of great intellect, Peacock’s invitingly melodic, open-doored and open-hearted songs are hitting people like a burst of clean spring air after a chill and musty winter. Fans leave her shows feeling like they’ve met not only a real artist, but a real person; a friend whose songs they happily hum until they seem as much a part of their own lives as of hers. Peacock says she worries sometimes that her songs are “too simple, that I’m being too sophomoric.” She sighs a moment, then adds brightly, “But then I think of the Beatles 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,' and how simple that is. And that one did okay for them, huh?” It was the idea of a song as a conversation between singer and listener - a shared secret - that first drew her to music. Peacock grew up in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, in a household that was loving but religiously strict; both parents were born-again Christians. Somewhere deep inside little Alice, though, there was always a stage-loving scamp struggling to get out. Her grandmother, Gritta Albrecht Gnass, had been a cabaret star and composer in Berlin before the Second World War. Her grandfather, Fritz Gnass, was a miner-turned-actor who appeared in Fritz Lang’s classic film, “M,” and was part of Bertold Brecht’s fabled Berliner Ensemble, which produced radically populist plays as the shadow of Nazism fell over Germany. Barely knowing her grandmother, but feeling that same cabaret heart beating in her chest, Peacock retreated into music. She was so often seen hugging her little transistor radio to her ear that her father nicknamed her “Radio Free Alice.” And indeed, in many ways, she was like a refugee, huddled in her own world of singers telling their secret feelings only to her; and she dreamed of living in that land of songs someday. “I was just dipped in radio as a kid, so my melodies come from everywhere,” she recalls now. “There was a lot of music around the house when I was growing up, but it was mostly religious. My dad, who grew up in Los Angeles, had a great Latin music collection, including a lot of Afro-Cuban music that I really loved. They were not stodgy people, you know, just very religious; and we were taught in church that rock-n-roll had a bad message.” She majored in theater at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and after her freshman year, was hired to do summer-stock at the American Folklore Theater in nearby Door County. There, she came under the spell of actor-playwright Fred Alley, who passed away last year at 38, just after his musical version of the film “The Spitfire Grill” was becoming an off-Broadway hit. But it was not his acting that entranced young Peacock. “He was the first songwriter I’d ever met; you know, a person that I knew who wrote songs. There were a few people like that at the theater that summer, and it was very inspiring to see real people who wrote songs and made records on their own. For the first time, I saw songwriting as a creative possibility for me.” She soon realized that those years spent hugging that radio had done something to her brain. Strong, pure melodies came easily to her; the kinds of melodies that seem strangely familiar on first listen. She also knew how to lay lyrics on them without saggingDirty Linen (4-5/01, p.66) - "...Features crisp production and tastefully understated sprinklings of strings and brass. Highly recommended."