Gretchen Peters CD

Chart-topping country songwriter Gretchen Peters filled her own debut album, The Secret of Life, with guest performances by friends in high places such as Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, and Raul Malo. While the songs were strong, the performances only served to overshadow Peters' true strength: it lay in her own voice singing her songs. On her self-titled sophomore effort, she and producer Green Daniel play it closer to the vest in terms of personnel, while offering a far more adventurous sampling of Peters' wares. Bryan Adams makes a backing vocal appearance, but his is the only name that folks outside the Nash Vegas studio system would be familiar with. Peters stacks her band with veterans, such as longtime keyboard ace Barry Walsh, organist Steve Conn, and guitarist Michael Severs, and she and Daniel handle most of the rest aside from horns and strings. The songs range from the stellar opener, "Souvenirs," with its laid-back hand percussion and Caribbean feel, to rootsy alterna-country like "In a Better World," moody ballads like "Love and Texaco," the truly beautiful and moving "Amelia and Me," the midtempo, lushly orchestrated "Like Water into Wine," and the truly enigmatic "Picasso and Me," which could have been covered by Rickie Lee Jones in her beat days. This is a musical autobiography, a concept recording about coming of age, bittersweet memories, and the haunting of a life with old ghosts. While it didn't even grace the country Top 100, it doesn't matter. Peters, simply because of her songwriting skill (just ask Martina McBride, Patty Loveless, and Trisha Yearwood, to name three artists who've scored number ones with Peters' tunes), deserves to be taken seriously as an artist, one who helped to shape contemporary country while playing both sides of the studio system fence without making any sort of artistic compromise. Her 2007 record Burnt Toast & Offerings was the delivery of the promise on her earlier records, of which this one particularly stands out as a work of real art. ~ Thom Jurek

In a brief essay on her website, Gretchen Peters says, “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.” It is this passion for the song that fuels all facets of a career that has brought her to the Grammys twice as a songwriter, won her a CMA Song Of The Year award for the groundbreaking Independence Day, taken her on repeated sold-out tours across the UK and Ireland, and seen the release of seven critically acclaimed albums. Of her 2007 release, Thom Jurek of Allmusic.com says, “This is Gretchen Peters' finest moment as a recording artist, and perhaps her finest as a song-lyric poet as well… Burnt Toast & Offerings is the most sophisticated and truthful recording about love since Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call. It's not the next step for this contemporary singer and songwriter, but a giant leap, an aesthetic milestone that sets the bar higher not only for her but for anyone wishing to write songs honestly about the inside of a life in the process of being lived, a life that holds love as its zenith...”Burnt Toast & Offerings was born out of the emotional remnants of what Peters calls a “mid-life epiphany” which culminated in the end of her 23 year marriage; it’s a deeply personal coming-to-terms record that both reveals and transcends the specifics. As David McGee, reviewing for Barnes & Noble puts it, “a wondrous, wrenching personal reflection on love… Deep and deeply beautiful, Burnt Toast & Offerings is a fully realized work of art.”Critical acclaim for Peters’ songs is nearly universal. In a review of her 2000 eponymous album, the Associated Press states, “This is not jukebox music - the stuff that exists to fill in the pauses in conversation. This IS the conversation”. People Magazine says, “If Peters never delivers another tuneEntertainment Weekly (3/16/01, p.69) - "...The edgier follow-up to her '96 debut THE SECRET OF LIFE...[is] mostly about how to navigate rough emotional terrain....Peters brings the pop sensibility of Sheryl Crow to meditations on Amelia Earhart and Picasso's cat..." - Rating: B+