Songs from the heart with great Gretchen Peters

Gretchen Peters is an artist whose work really catches your ear. Her songs have been performed by the likes of Neil Diamond, Faith Hill and Etta James. The American singer – who has also received a Grammy nomination – plays Kelly’s Bar on Friday next, March 9.

Etta James was an icon of American music, whose recent passing highlighted a rare and genuine talent, and Peters was a fan. “She sang a song of mine called Love’s Been Rough on Me. It was the title song of an album that she made with the late Barry Beckett in Nashville. It’s really one of the recordings of my songs that I’m just the most proud of. “I’m so grateful that I got to see her in the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville about two or three years ago,” Gretchen says. 

 “I knew she wasn’t in the best of health but I have to say I walked away from that performance and I told my husband ‘that’s the best singer I’ve ever seen live’. She just stunned me.”

Gretchen Peters was born in New York but moved to Nashville in the late eighties. It was an inspiring time in the town known as Music City with artists like Steve Earle and Nanci Griffith emerging. They were bucking the trend of writing songs for big stars to perform – in Nashville, the roles of ‘singer’ and ‘songwriter’ are often seen as two very different things.

“It was confusing to me when I first moved there, because there was this idea that you were one or the other,” Gretchen recalls. “I think Nashville’s a little less that way [now] but there’s still that tendency to put songwriters who have had commercial success into a box.”

But having your song picked up by a mega-selling act obviously has its benefits, both financially and for the fact that record companies will take a chance on you. Gretchen Peters scored a hit when Martina McBride covered her song, Independence Day, but this kind of success is not something that motivates her when writing.''

I think that there’s a notion that if you’re a Nashville songwriter, you sit down to write a hit or a song for a particular singer – and I don’t have any of those skills. I mean, I’ve written hits, but they were complete accidents. Nobody was more surprised than me!”

Instead, Gretchen’s personal experience informs her work. This is especially the case with her latest record, Hello Cruel World. The songs were written during a tumultuous 12 months, when Gretchen’s son told her he was transgender. There were also the devastating floods that hit Nashville and the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the affects of which Gretchen could see from her cottage in Florida. And, tragically, during this period a close friend of 30 years took his life.

“If ever there was an album that was all about songs that needed to come out, it was that one,” Gretchen says. “The songs were written, for the most part, in one year in two song writing sessions. I poured it out; I had an incredibly tumultuous year in 2010 and I knew I had to write about it. Everything that happened, good and bad and in-between, had to inform all these songs.”

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.