Folk Alley Sessions at 30A: Gretchen Peters
For Gretchen Peters, good music is all about creating compelling characters and telling a good story. That’s how she approaches her music and that’s how, she says, she was finally able to take on some of her chaotic and confusing feelings from the past couple of years and translate them into new songs.
By focusing on creating and then giving voices to compelling characters, mostly women, Peters is able to tackle challenging and often heartbreaking subjects and ideas – political frustrations, concerns about the environment, dismay with and distrust of public power figures – and turn them into personal and meaningful reflections, reflections that we can all, somehow, understand and appreciate.
From the fears and concerns of a young girl, to the hopelessness of unrelenting poverty, to the laissez-faire attitude of a woman in the twilight of her life, Gretchen Peters creates characters that everyone can relate to. That’s a gift and it’s one displayed most prominently on her new album, Dancing with the Beast. She shared thoughts about the record and music from it during her exclusive session at this year’s 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida.
