Gretchen Peters – bio

Gretchen Peters - bio

“I remember going on my first radio tour for my debut album and the guys at the radio stations would say, ‘So you’re a songwriter, and now you want to be an artist?’” remembers Gretchen Peters.

In hindsight, it’s a laughable distinction. Over the last three decades, Peters has proven to posses one of the most indelible voices in country and roots music in addition to wielding one the genres’ most enduring pens. But in 1996, as she crossed the invisible Music City barrier between writer and performer, few could have predicted what lay ahead.

Peters first arrived in Nashville in 1987 and quickly established herself as a songwriting force to be reckoned with, with tracks recorded by some of the biggest names in country music. She landed her first #1 with George Strait’s rendition of her “Chill Of An Early Fall,” garnered her first GRAMMY Nomination and CMA Song of the Year win with Martina McBride’s recording of “Independence Day,” and penned hits for Patty Loveless, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Trisha Yearwood, Jimmy LaFave, and Etta James among others. “If Peters never delivers another tune as achingly beautiful as ‘On A Bus To St. Cloud,’” People Magazine wrote, “she has already earned herself a spot among country’s upper echelon of contemporary composers.”

Riding the momentum from her remarkable success, Peters signed her first recording contract in 1996 with an independent label and released her debut album, The Secret Of Life. While it fared well critically, Peters fell between the cracks of an industry hungry for easy-to-categorise products to feed the machine. Marketing a nuanced, mature storyteller – one who penned songs like the album’s bittersweet title track and the stirring ‘When You Are Old’ – to mainstream country radio proved to be fruitless, and when the label later folded, Peters bought back the master recordings and vowed to maintain control for the rest of her days in the business, becoming an early adopter of the now-common process of self-releasing albums through licensing and distribution partnerships.

Despite the early commercial stumble in the US, though, Peters found a different appreciation for her songs in the UK, where she earned the admiration of early champions in radio and press, like the legendary BBC host Bob Harris.

“The first time I went over, I played four little gigs with no more than 40 or 50 people at any of them, maybe less,” she remembers. “But I immediately felt completely comfortable in my skin. I felt like those audiences didn’t expect or want me to be anything other than who I was. Everything that wasn’t working here in the States was working really well over there. It was like stepping through the looking glass.”

Over the next twenty years, Peters would self-release seven more studio albums on both sides of the pond and see her profile in the UK reach a new peak with 2015’s ‘Blackbirds,’ which debuted at number 1 on UK Official Country Artists Albums Chart. Uncut hailed her as one of Nashville’s greatest talents of the past two decades,” while The Sun called the album “an Americana tour de force.” The record led to a sold-out UK tour, as well as spots on massive European festival stages from Glastonbury to Roskilde.

All the while, the US was catching up to what they’d been missing out on in their own backyard. NPR called her 2012 release Hello Cruel World “the album of her career,” while Rolling Stone dubbed ‘Blackbirds’ “one of the most affecting murder ballads since Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska,’” and in 2014, she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Gretchen Peters is a songwriter and an artist. Both sides are essential to her identity, and one listen to this collection makes it clear that her extraordinary body of work is indeed essential listening for the rest of us.

Artist’s website: http://www.gretchenpeters.com/


We all give our spare time to run folking.com. Our aim has always been to keep folking a free service for our visitors, artists, PR agencies and tour promoters. If you wish help out and donate something (running costs currently funded by Paul Miles), please click the PayPal link below to send us a small one off payment or a monthly contribution.