Gretchen Peters
Flow & Storage
Nashville Style
Gretchen
Peters is a familiar name in country music yet her notoriety is somewhat
obscured by years of writing songs for other artists. She penned Independence
Day for Martina McBride and won the CMA Song of the Year in 1995. She placed
songs for such diverse artists as Neil Diamond and Blues Icon Etta James as
well as country superstars Trish Yearwood and George Strait. She spent years
honing her craft and finding her voice. She may cut against the grain of the
country establishment but she fits right in with the incendiary polemics of Tom
T. Hall, Johnny Cash and Steve Earle. Her finely honed vocal chops are compared
to Lucinda Williams yet she has a style all her own. Peters co-authored Rock
Steady with Bryan Adams increasing her street credibility and she delivered a
stoned masterpiece in 2012 entitled Hello Cruel World. It was as honest as it
was risky and it took off like a phoenix rising from the ashes, triumphant and
bold.
You’re
New York born, Colorado bred and Nashville grown. How did this upbringing and
all these different cultural influences lead to this moment in time?
That’s a great question that nobody’s ever asked. Those
are three really, really different places. I didn’t do any growing up in
Nashville but I certainly did some growing. I think all three things laid their
mark on me pretty profoundly. Growing up in the suburbs of New York in the
‘60s, certainly a lot of what I write about goes back to that era and that time
and my experiences, particularly the song I’m thinking of right now is the song
Idlewild on Hello, Cruel World. It’s essentially a transcription of my
childhood. That time of my life in the suburbs, in the northeast, gave me
enough writing material for a lifetime. It seems to be a well that I keep going
back to, especially now as I’m trying to write songs for a new album. I somehow
feel drawn to writing about that time, so for whatever reason, it seems like a
particularly fertile ground for me.
I moved to
Colorado when I was just turning 13 and I loved the live music and bands, and
just the concept of becoming a musician became real to me because there was
just so much going on and my mother was real supportive and her lifestyle took
a complete left turn. We started going out and heard the bands. She was my
greatest enabler in terms of what I was interested in doing. She made sure that
it happened. I think that planted the seed of what I really wanted to do with
my life in a way that I’m not sure would have happened had I stayed in New York
.
I got the concept of playing in front of an audience. It
just became more probable to me. It was just a very different theme, not to
mention that at that time in Colorado it was sort of hybrid country-rock thing
because it was hugely popular and that really influenced me. I had grown up on
folk music, and there was something about the country-tinged rock that I was
listening to that I really felt a kinship with. There was something about the
melodies and the stories and the words and the simplicity and everything about
it that I really liked. So that part of it, I think, in that sense Colorado was
a big influence on me.
Nashville
was the last part of the puzzle that just fit everything into place for me. I
moved to Nashville and I started really listening to songs in a way that I had
never listened before and I began to understand what it took to write a really
great song - it changed my ears in a way. It changed the way I listened to
songs. I listened much more closely, carefully with an ear to a structural
craft. I stopped trying to write things that sounded good and tried to write
songs that really were good.
All
three places really had a huge, huge influence on me. I’m a very big believer
that geography and place are so important to writers.
You
have a gritty social consciousness – you wrote about the assassination of
Megdar Evers – it doesn’t seem to fit nicely with the country music
establishment. Did you get any push back from this?
Yes and
no. You know, this idea of the country music audience and the country music
establishment, as you put it, being this ultra-conservative, you know, I’m not
sure is completely accurate because when you think about people like Johnny
Cash or Kris Kristofferson, they really don’t fit into that mold. And country
music loved its rebels. Merle Haggard, you know, I’ve always said that if Merle
Haggard had gone onward, he would’ve been John Steinbeck. Loretta Lynn wrote
about controversial subjects. When I wrote Independence Day it caused a stir in
the country music world, it was even banned on some radio stations. I said,
“You know, it really isn’t new because Loretta Lynn did that before and wrote a
song called The Pill. And they wouldn’t play that either.
When
country music and country radio, in particular, became completely corporatized
they really tried to shove anything controversial under the rug because
corporations just don’t like controversy.
I was lucky enough to arrive in Nashville in
the late 1980s, and I was signed to the same publishing company that signed
Steve Earle. So that kind of tells you the Nashville that I came to and when
you say Nashville, you really don’t mean the Nashville that I think we’re
talking right now about, the establishment. I don’t feel in any meaningful way connected
to that anymore. They’re making the kind of records that radio is demanding
that they make and for probably 15 to 20 years now it’s been a case of the tail
wagging the dog.
When I
first moved to Nashville publishers and record labels and artists were still
controlling what kind of music they would make. Of course, they were playing to
the market, but they were still determining what they would release. We didn’t
have focus groups defining what the record was going to sound like at that
point but now they do. I think most of us that had any sort of urge to write
honestly with some integrity and creatively got the hell out or in some cases
were forced out.
For
instance in the song Idlewild - It uses the n-word, which is a word you
absolutely cannot say. It’s certainly a lightning rod of a word. I felt that it
is important to talk about the civil rights movement, and I felt really
strongly about the use of that word. I felt like I had to use it because for
years any other language would have been to take the real thing and painting
our era inaccurately.
The
word needed to be there for shock value. It needed to be there because people
that weren’t there need to know that those were the kind of words that were
being flung around. To a child, those words are like lacerations. They burn and
they stain you.
It
makes me very uncomfortable to sing it.
The
Beau Brummels recorded Bradley’s Barn, a great album from the late ‘60s at Owen
Bradley’s studio in Nashville. It was his attempt to bring rock and roll to
country. Do you think that experiment led to modern country?
I think
that it was one of those …moments. I think that it was everything from the
Byrds, and even John Hartford, certainly the Beau Brummels. Linda Ronstadt was
experimenting with it in the late ‘60s, like ’69. I think it was in the water,
it was in the air somehow. Everybody was sort of flirting with this idea, it
was basically young rock performers recognized the richness of the songs in
that genre. They’d heard Nashville Skyline a few years earlier by Dylan and I
think that led this continuum of music that would lead a young musician to
Johnny Cash, say, and then it would lead them to maybe Kris Kristofferson. You
know one thing would lead to another and some portion of those rock musicians
became entranced with the form of the country song and that led to discovering
Merle Haggard and you know, one thing just leads to another.
As I listened to your songs and I really was
blown away by all those great lyrics, I thought of you as a cross between Bob
Dylan and Michael Nesmith.
Oh
gosh, thank you. Wow. You know I have to say Bob Dylan was my first big
influence. I was seven years old when I learned how to play the guitar and the
first thing I learned to play were Dylan songs. I had an older sister who loved
Bob Dylan and brought Dylan records home. I loved the rock music that she
played but Bob Dylan was the very first artist I thought I could probably
figure out how to play that, it was just this guy on a guitar. Even though I
loved the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, I couldn’t imagine learning how to play
those songs. But Bob Dylan, that was a different thing.
You’re a great singer. Some people describe
you as a cross between Lucinda William with the emotional feel of Tom Waits.
How would you describe your vocal chops?
My
singing has changed a lot over the years. I took a long time to find myself
vocally. It certainly took longer to find myself vocally than it did to become
confident as a songwriter. In recent years I have embraced my imperfections and
it’s made me a much better singer. I’ve learned to love the husk and the rasp
in my voice a little bit more. I tell people that when I started out, I thought
that singing was all about making a pretty sound but now I realize it’s more
about making a true sound, a sound that is authentic and real and it goes
directly to people’s emotional center - and that’s not always pretty. When I got my
first record deal. I was marketed as a country artist and people would say
things like, “Well, she doesn’t really belt. She can’t really belt a song like
Martina.” It confused me for a while because I knew that’s not what I was
trying to do but that’s part of how you are judged. It took me a while to find
my niche and as it happened it’s like the Ugly Duckling story - I finally
realized I was a swan. (Laughter)
You have this quiet flow in your songs, a
great subdued energy with a lot of storage in it that gives the impression that
there’s so much meaning in your songs underneath the timber and phrasing, that
tip of the iceberg kind of thing. Does that make sense to you?
You
know, it makes a great deal of sense to me because one of the things that I
believe about writing, songwriting, or any kind of writing, really more than
almost anything else, is what Hemingway called the Iceberg Theory so it’s
really funny that you should say tip of the iceberg. Hemingway said that if you
understand your story and you understand the characters and you understand what
you’re writing about well enough, you only need to reveal one-fifth or
one-tenth of what you know in order to impart that to your listener. I’m a huge
believer in that. I think one of the best practitioners of that in songwriting
is Leonard Cohen.
If you
know the person or the situation or the story that you’re writing about very
well, the underlying mystery is a very powerful thing to leave in your song.
One of the problems I have with contemporary country music is everything is
spelled out. There are no secrets, there is no mystery, there’s no going back
to a song and thinking, “I wonder what ‘s happening here?” With a Leonard Cohen
song, for instance, there’s a great deal of that. I’ve been listening to his
song Famous Blue Raincoat for 20 to 25 years, and I still have conversations
with myself, you know, mentally about what’s going on in that song. It still
fascinates me. I still pick it up and turn it around like a Rubik’s Cube. I
think there’s much to be said for leaving a lot of the content under the water,
so to speak. I try to practice that in songwriting. I think it’s really
important but it’s becoming a bit of a lost art.
Can you talk a little bit about your stone
masterpiece Hello Cruel World?
Well,
yeah. You know when I first released the album, I said, “This is my manifesto.”
I knew that it was sort of an elemental album, and I knew that it was the best record
that I’d ever made. From this vantage point now, you know it’ll be two years
old in January, I feel more certain than ever that that’s true. It’s a little
daunting at this point right now because I’m trying to write new songs and make
another album, and it’s a hard place to come from when you realize, “Wow, I
really did make the album of my career last time out. Now what am I going to
do? I’m so grateful that all the elements came together the way that they did. I
knew I had the songs and if I just went into the studio with the right musicians
that everything would be fine - and it was. It was an album that was very
personal because I had had so much thrown at me in the year before I wrote
those songs that I felt sort of clarified in a way. I guess my attitude was if
this is the elephant in the room, all the stuff that I’ve had to deal with,
then I have no choice but to be brutally honest about all of it. It made for
some great songwriting, a good album and it made for a pretty bracing dose of
honesty which is how people reacted to it.
This was a great lesson to me because there were many times writing
those songs when I really sat there and thought, “Am I really going to say this
to the whole world? Am I going to let myself be this naked and vulnerable?
Again, the writer in me kicked in and said, “Yeah, you have to. You have to.
You have no choice.” I have to say the gift of being an older artist is that
you just don’t give a fuck. (Laughter)
One of the things that I wanted to say that I
sort of obliquely touch on in the record, and not so obliquely, is what it
feels like to be a woman who is not 20. I’ve admired so many of my male peers
for writing about being a male and aging - Rodney Crowell and Bruce Springsteen
especially. They wrote very eloquent songs about being an older man and what
they’ve seen and what that means. I thought that women need to hear that. I
would welcome that. I would relish hearing a female artist tell me what she’s learned
from the vantage point of years, unfortunately in the media business it’s such
a taboo subject.
Is it like going through a dark door to get
to the light?
Exactly,
and you know I think that the ironic thing about it that I found was that doing
all these things and saying all these things and being so brutally honest in
this album because I really was under the radar, as I said. It sort of put me
on the radar.
It’s so
strange and so funny but I’m so grateful for it because I had my greatest
success with something that was also my greatest artistic moment and I feel so
grateful for that because that is so not the case for many, many artists. I’m
lucky enough to really get more notoriety than I’ve ever had for something that
was very, very personal and real and true and authentic and I count my
blessings for that every night, really.
You
know, I can go out and sing those songs and feel great about it and I see that
people respond to the honesty. I see that I have that moment, that moment that
is the most precious moment in all of it which is that moment that we have in
the dark with those songs, talking about what really matters to us
I recall a comment by that seems apropos - the
natural state for a thoughtful person is that of melancholia – as you learn the
truth about the world. It’s not that you’re walking around depressed but you
aware of this lost promise.
That is
so brilliant. I’m going to remember that because, you know, when people,
because there are people in the world who feel that sad or melancholy songs are
depressing, and I’m not obviously one of them. I find them incredibly
cathartic.
I think
that everybody who comes to see me certainly feels that way or they wouldn’t be
there, you know. When people come up to me after a show and they say, “You made
me cry,” I think, “Okay, I did my job” because catharsis is so important to us.
I mean we write and we read and we go see movies and we experience art and
music and other stuff to know that we’re not alone. That’s absolutely
brilliant. I think that melancholia is, well I can’t imagine life without it.
Paradise
Found is a stone masterpiece – it has a natural spiritual theme evoking an image
of Eden in the beginning and goin’ back to the garden, sow our seed in the good
sweet ground. It evokes a George Harrison vibe – how do you see it?
You
know, there were a lot of themes converging with this album. It sounds like
you’ve read the background of what was going on in my life before I wrote this,
but there were a lot of themes converging, and they included things like
ecological disasters, they included things like personal, huge personal
challenges, personal disasters. Not all disasters, but certainly cataclysmic
events I would say. So the thing was “How do you make a whole out of these
things?” It could seem like they’re
disparate, and I think the key there was they all provoked a huge amount of
growth, painful growth, but personal growth because they were challenges, and
we really don’t grow any other way except through challenges. They involved for
me a deep questioning of what I believed up to and including the question “Does
it matter that I figure out what I believe?” I think the most honest response
is to say “let the mystery be.”
You
really covered a lot of personal ground here. You came up after swimming
underwater and breathed in the air. You survived it all.
Like I
said, I feel like in a great and very profound sense, clarified. You get up out
of your own little world when big things happen, you know. The biggest
challenge to me in that year before I wrote the songs for this album was what I
went through with my son, his transitioning, the revelation to me that he was
transgender and that completely rattled my entire foundation. It’s hard to
overstate how much the earth shifts when a child that you’ve had for 25 years
reveals to you that they’re not the gender that you thought they were for 25
years. That shakes all your foundations.
I think
every other thing that happened, my friend’s suicide, the oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico, the flood in Nashville, all of it, it was like the universe was
saying to me, “Things are not what you think they are, and none of its
permanent. There’s nothing that can’t change on a dime.”
The
line from Five Minutes – “In five minutes your whole life can change.” What it
means specifically is that the woman is talking about her daughter, and her
daughter becoming pregnant, and how that in five minutes your whole life can
change. Truly, you know, that’s the subtext for the whole album because
everything that happens that I’m writing about and dealing with is that in five
minutes your whole life can change. I think when you realize the impermanence
of everything in a profound individual way, it clarifies you in a sense, and
you can really get a perspective on things that are obscure and hidden from
your view.
Gretchen, are you the woman on the wheel?
I am.
(Laughter) I am indeed. I wrote a song that was on my very first album that
came out in 1996 called Circus Girl and I always profoundly identified with the
character in that song. Woman on the Wheel is the mature equivalent of the “Circus
Girl.” It’s “Circus Girl” 17 years later. I felt a great kinship with both
characters because of what it means to try to live your life out in this world
at the crossroads of art and entertainment and Woman On The Wheel has a lot of
subtext about trying to be an artist when people are really looking for
entertainment more than art. I’m proud of that song because I felt like it
expressed what I feel. I’m not complaining. I’m every day grateful for the life
that I get to live but it sometimes feels a little bit dangerous revealing some
pretty dismal parts of yourself in the quest for what ultimately is the
entertainment business. It’s a little rocky. It’s a little crazy
Gretchen
Peters is performing at the legendary State Theatre 913 Washington Street in
Bay City Michigan on November 14th 6:30pm. Tickets are $15. You can
contact the State Theatre @ 989-892-2660
