Gretchen Peters: Independence Day

This song has been in the news quite a bit over the years, one way or another, most recently during the November election campaign. If you've not seen it before -- or if you have --maybe time to take a look again.
Martina McBride sings it, Gretchen Peters, whose work you've met here before, wrote it.

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Independence Day

Gretchen Peters: England Blues

Gretchen Peters is the writer behind hits for Martina McBride, George Strait, Bonnie Raitt, Etta James, and Faith Hill, to name just a few. She's also a fine singer and performer in her own right, though that's a fact better known in Europe than in the US. Peters is releasing a holiday album this year, Northern Lights, which, as you might expect from her is not your usual take on the holidays. We've not yet been able to find any videos of songs from that project, but while we're looking here is Peters having fun in a rockin' mood, on a song called England Blues, from a concert in Nashville.

Gretchen Peters: Burnt Toast & Offerings

You might know Gretchen Peters by her songs rather than her name, at first: Faith Hill's The Secret of Life, Martina McBride's Independence Day, George Strait's Chill of an Early Fall, Bonnie Raitt's Rock Steady, Trisha Yearwood's On a Bus to Saint Cloud are just a handful of the literate, thoughtful, and thought provoking songs which Peters has written. Most of them, as the best songs usually are, are experience filtered through art, but in Peters' case most of that was imaginative and narrative experience -- which, in a way, both prepared her and didn't for the subject matter of the songs on her latest solo recording, Burnt Toast and Offerings. It's the landscape of her own divorce, the ending of a long marriage.

Sunday Morning (Up and Down My Street) is a very fine example of Peters' skill at evoking place and emotion with a clarity that lingers after the song is done. It is a live performance from the CD release gig at 12th and Porter in Nashville on August 9th. The song is also a good clue that the songs on this record are more varied and complex than the idea of 'divorce record' would suggest.





In the clip below, Peters talks about the making of the record.
There's a review of the album itself here.