An Evening with Gretchen Peters Dates: February 23, 2020 Time: Doors:
5:30 PM / Show: 7 PM Admission: $15.00 - $22.00 Location: Jammin Java
Address: 227 Maple Avenue, East, Vienna, VA 22180 Details Map
There’s a bittersweet beauty to the passing of time — the changes
it brings are just as often heartbreaking as they are heartwarming.
The inevitable tension that arises from that sway is Gretchen
Peters’ most trusted muse. “The years go by like days. Sometimes
the days go by like years. And I don’t know which one I hate the
most,” she sings in “Arguing with Ghosts,” the hauntingly
wistful opening cut on her new album, Dancing with the Beast. Between
the melody and the melancholy, the song sets the tone for all that is
to come after and lifts the album over the high artistic bar set by
her last outing, 2015’s award-winning Blackbirds. Written with
Matraca Berg and Ben Glover, “Arguing with Ghosts” began, as so
many songs do, with one small grain of inspiration. “I think we were
initially talking about how Nashville is changing, and Matraca said,
‘I get lost in my hometown,’” Peters recalls. “And we went
from there. Of course, it took on much more meaning, but I think that
our starting point was just that sense of disorientation.” Whether a
single sentence or a simple setting, once planted, even the tiniest
seed can grow into a vision unto itself. Strung together and populated
with strong and broken female heroines, those vignettes make up
Dancing with the Beast and, indeed, Peters’ entire discography.
“The pictures and the details come first, and I think that’s kind
of necessary because they’re sort of like little bombs of
emotion,” she says. “It’s like when you pull out a Polaroid that
you haven’t seen in 25 years, and your heart just kind of explodes
because it brings back a whole world.” Once immersed in a world of
emotion, Peters digs underneath to see what’s fueling a particular
fire, as she does so stunningly with the overwhelming insecurities of
female adolescence in “The Boy from Rye.” Knowing very well that
most teenage girls endure objectification and sexualization, and their
ensuing loss of confidence and power, Peters put her pen to paper and
told that story. “I remember being that age — summers on Long
Island at the beach, the sense of freedom, being with friends,
encounters with boys, and the pressure of suddenly being in
competition with your best friends.” she offers. “There was a
feeling that you’d crossed some invisible line, and gone from being
the subject in your own life, to being the object. It’s a very
treacherous time of life for girls.” Dancing with the Beast puts
female characters at the fore, from teenage girls to old women. And
intentionally so. With the 2017 Women’s March and #MeToo Movement as
bookends to her writing time, Peters knew that a feminist perspective
would be the critical core of the record. “Those two events just put
everything — as so many things in 2017 — in really stark
relief,” she admits. “You can trace the feminist DNA in my
songwriting back to ‘Independence Day’ and probably before. The
thing that 2017 did is just put it front and center. It was very easy
to kind of go to sleep for a while and just not think about that stuff
because we were lulled into complacency for eight years.” Scenery,
too, played a part in inspiring several cuts on the LP, most notably
“Wichita” and “Truckstop Angel,” both sketches of women doing
whatever they have to do to stand up in a world built to hold them
down. Once she knew where the songs were set, Peters and Glover dug
into the details. “’Wichita’ was a lot like ‘Blackbirds,’
with me and Ben playing detective, like, ‘What do you think happened
here?’” she says. “I think I had the line, ’I hope I was the
last thing that you saw that night in Wichita.’ And the next
questions were, ‘What happened to this girl? How did we get
there?’” “Truckstop Angel” was an idea originally sparked
20-something years ago by a New Yorker article Peters read about
people that lived in the wide open western reaches. “They just kind
of went out there to get away from the world,” she explains. “I
read this article and I was fascinated, and one of the things in the
article was these truckstop prostitutes. And I just never got that out
of my mind.” Peters wrote around the idea a lot in those two
decades, but never got to the heart of the story until she encountered
such a character at a truckstop in Alabama. “This woman — a girl,
really, as I don’t think she was more than 17 — at 1:30 in the
afternoon, walks through the lot in five-inch platform shoes and short
shorts. And I just thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s the woman. That’s
her.’” A title — and an election — were the beginnings of
“Lowlands.” Though Peters doesn’t consider herself a political
writer, she is politically minded and, therefore, knew she had to
address the 2016 election and all that has happened since… but in
her own way. “I wrote on my chalkboard, ‘Tell one little
story,’” she says. “I just wrote it there, and I would stare at
it for a while.” Soon enough, the title came, bringing with it both
a feeling and a place. “The description of the geography gave me a
feeling inside of low clouds and general gloominess, but also the idea
of laying low and staying low.” To capture that mood, Peters crafted
a multitude of verses, whittled them down, and stitched them together.
“It has no chorus. It’s nothing but verses. It’s very
Dylan-esque, in that way,” she says. “I just wanted it to drone on
and on. We don’t get a break. It’s relentless, which is exactly
how last year was.” To further drive the relentlessness, producer
Doug Lancio built a foundation of programmed drums and synth drones,
elements that purposely pushed Peters to the outer edges of her
artistic comfort zone. “We struggled together over how far to go
with that kind of thing,” she confesses. “I wanted ‘Lowlands’
to sound like the sound of dread. But the first mix we had going just
didn’t feel like me. It had to have some beauty in there, too.”
The final female voice on the album comes from Peters’ mother, who
passed away in late 2016. “Love That Makes a Cup of Tea” came out
of a dream Peters had of her. “I can’t remember what the rest of
the dream was, but she, in a reassuring way, held my hand and she
said, ‘You know, honey, there is love that makes a cup of tea,’”
Peters recounts. “She was the kind of person who would show you her
love by baking you a pie or knitting you a sweater. She just said that
in the dream, and I woke up and I thought, ‘Okay, there it is. I’m
going to write that.’ “I do remember feeling that I had to try to
write something with hope in it,” she continues. “It’s not my
strong suit. But I wanted that on this record, because I do think
there’s hope. I do see hope around me. I see a lot of trouble, too,
but we have to try to find some light. Those are hard songs for me to
write, but this was my mom’s gift. She brought that to me.” Beauty
tempered by dread, sorrow buoyed by hope, these are the ever-present
tugs of war that make life worth living and songs worth writing. And
they are the over-riding themes that make Gretchen Peters one of her
generation’s most compelling singer/songwriters. Venue Information:
Jammin Java 227 Maple Ave E Vienna, VA, 22180 Powered by Eventbrite
here’s a bittersweet beauty to the passing of time — the changes
it brings are just as often heartbreaking as they are heartwarming.
The inevitable tension that arises from that sway is Gretchen
Peters’ most trusted muse. “The years go by like days. Sometimes
the days go by like years. And I don’t know which one I hate the
most,” she sings in “Arguing with Ghosts,” the hauntingly
wistful opening cut on her new album, Dancing with the Beast. Between
the melody and the melancholy, the song sets the tone for all that is
to come after and lifts the album over the high artistic bar set by
her last outing, 2015’s award-winning Blackbirds. Written with
Matraca Berg and Ben Glover, “Arguing with Ghosts” began, as so
many songs do, with one small grain of inspiration. “I think we were
initially talking about how Nashville is changing, and Matraca said,
‘I get lost in my hometown,’” Peters recalls. “And we went
from there. Of course, it took on much more meaning, but I think that
our starting point was just that sense of disorientation.” Whether a
single sentence or a simple setting, once planted, even the tiniest
seed can grow into a vision unto itself. Strung together and populated
with strong and broken female heroines, those vignettes make up
Dancing with the Beast and, indeed, Peters’ entire discography.
“The pictures and the details come first, and I think that’s kind
of necessary because they’re sort of like little bombs of
emotion,” she says. “It’s like when you pull out a Polaroid that
you haven’t seen in 25 years, and your heart just kind of explodes
because it brings back a whole world.” Hav Map View Nearby
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24/02/2020 Last update