Gretchen Peters New Album

Gretchen Peters New Album

On The Essential Gretchen Peters, this very special Nashville-based singer-songwriter  combines career-defining tracks with rare outtakes, demos, and B-sides to provide a two-disc snapshot of her remarkable journey as a singularly fearless and creative talent.  The album is released to coincide with her latest UK tour.

“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 and tracks recorded by some of the biggest names in country music. She landed her first number 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.”

All the while, though, she had bigger plans for herself.

“Performing my own material was always in my sights from the time I moved to Nashville,” Peters explains. “I didn’t separate the writing from the performing from the recording in my mind. I always saw myself as a singer-songwriter, and that was all part of the job.”

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-categorize 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’ (both of which appear on ‘The Essential’ Disc 1)—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.”

Artist’s website: www.gretchenpeters.com

‘On A Bus To St. Cloud’:


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