Gretchen Peters Biography

Gretchen Peters Biography

Gretchen Peters is a singer-songwriter in the folk/country genre. The daughter of an author/activist father and a mother whom Peters describes as a "free spirit", she was raised in New York and Boulder, Colorado, but moved to Nashville in the late 80's "when they were still signing people like Steve Earle and Nanci Griffith". Peters claims, “I never understood how the music business took people and broke them up into little pieces - the songwriter, the producer, the recording artist, the entertainer. I suppose I grew up with the idea that you made music from start to finish, and I never felt satisfied being one of the pieces”. Rejecting the Nashville assembly-line model and eschewing what she laughingly calls “gratuitous co-writing”, she nevertheless accumulated enough accolades as a songwriter, for artists as wide-ranging as Martina McBride, Etta James, Trisha Yearwood, Bonnie Raitt, The Neville Brothers, Patty Loveless, George Strait, Neil Diamond, Bryan Adams and Faith Hill, to earn her a recording contract in 1996. That resulted in The Secret Of Life, about which Time magazine wrote, “Peters, whose choir-girl voice has a seductive hint of late nights and cigarettes, knows the tunesmith's secret: crafting a good love song... The passionately elegiac When You Are Old is a declaration of eternal devotion: "When your brave tales have all been told/ I'll ask for them when you are old." In Peters' music every tale is brave, unique, beautiful.” Similarly, Entertainment Weekly added, "she has more in common with the romantic sensibilities of Rickie Lee Jones... Peters' songs about emotional thirsts that never get quenched have a quiet power all their own..."  Gretchen Peters has said, “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 Country Music Association 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 five critically acclaimed albums. Her latest, Burnt Toast And Offerings was released in 2007 and appeared on numerous year-end "best of" lists, including AllMusic.com Editor's Year-End Top Ten.