ENTERTAINMENT REVIEW
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by Paul Barrow
On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota The words to On a Bus to St. Cloud--no not just the words, but her voice--spilled over me like a sense of deja vu. The sample, coming to me via my Real Audio Player, hit me like a ton of yesterdays, reminding me of a small town in south central Minnesota I had spent two and-a-half years in during the early 60's. It's a place I had long since put out of my thoughts. "To me," Gretchen Peters says in a review of her album The Secret of Life, "this may be the most grown up song I've ever written. It's got what I like best-it's sad and pretty, but there's an undercurrent of bitterness. It's very real, yet it's open to interpretation. It's about a suicide or a very tragic relationship that didn't go right. People see whatever they've experienced in the song. I saw a map and thought, 'what a great place name.' It was snowing in Nashville, and that's very unusual. So, all those things worked on me. The images came real quickly. I love to travel, and there are a lot of places which have real resonance for me. A few people picked up on the suicide thing right away. Others saw it as a failed relationship. But when someone dies-or leaves-it leaves the ultimate hole. Everywhere you go, you think you see them. You see them where they aren't, because you can't believe they're gone... "When I was a teenager living in California, there was a girl I knew who explained to me that she had had dreams of me and had seen me in many places long before I ever met her. It was a psychic kind of thing. The song brought back that same experience of someone seeing me everywhere. I had this image of someone being haunted by visions everywhere she went. Everywhere she went she saw this man disappearing into a crowd or whisking past in a car. Maybe it was only the spirit in someone's eyes as if the man there in front of her was possessed. Of course. I get it now. I'm the guy Gretchen Peters imagined when she wrote this song. I'm here, Gretchen, I'm here. I finally made it. A song that is equally grown up on Gretchen's album is I Was Looking for You. Funny how that fits in with my theme. Geoffrey Himes review in The Washington Post (see News Stories about Gretchen Peters) points out something about Gretchen Peters that the rest of us should have seen about her music. "Peters is not a country artist," he declares. "She's a pop singer in the tradition of Carole King, Petula Clark, Karla Bonoff and Natalie Merchant, singing sweet tunes about adult romance." Peters, he says, "is very good at what she does; she has a rare gift for writing memorable melodies, and she has the big voice to do them justice." However, "What she does will never be appreciated if people expect her to be the next Tammy Wynette or Reba McEntire." I would beg to differ with Himes when he says that "Peters will never bring the twangy earthiness to a rural tradition the way McEntire can, and McEntire will never negotiate a vocal line as urbane as the one on Peters' "I Was Looking for You." When you hang out with the likes of George Strait and Martina McBride and Suzy Bogguss and all the other thirty odd country artists she has penned songs for (see Gretchen's credits), that country "twang" is just going to rub off. You can hear it in Peters songs. In fact, when you listen to her album, all the preconceived ideas of her being a country singer seem to filter through a sort of folk-rock sound that better characterizes her music because something of country has hung on. And, excuse me. Reba's style can never be considered "twangy earthiness." It might have some twang all right, but Reba's choice of lyrics hasn't been earthy since her rodeo days. Songs like Read My Mind, Whoever's in New England, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Starting Over aren't exactly kicking in the corral. I'm actually more inclined to say that Reba could easily be doing Gretchen Peters material. She shares that same articulate ability to find complex and sensitive character in human experience. People who like to distance themselves from country music will inevitably fall for the stereotypes that country music acquired many years ago and tend to display an unfortunate lack of sophistication about music. It is only their own loss. Peters herself, according to the writer in the Boulder Daily Camera, has been trying to "shake off the yoke of country music." If this is true, then I can't help but feel some dismay. Having lived for much of the past 18 years in Colorado (yes, Gretchen, I was there too) I can appreciate how easily one could be persuaded to offer up such a point of view to a writer from Boulder, the arch-model of American yuppieism where in fact one sees Colorado's version of middle America trying desperately to "shake off" the image of a college cowtown. Has she "been miscast as a country singer"? Imprint marketed the album as country, and the country industry "didn't know what to do with it." "Well, it sold better than most bombs," says Peters light-heartedly. "But it didn't fit into the country radio format. Programmers loved it and would tell me, "I play it all the time in the car. But I won't play it on the radio.'" Again, I seriously question the judgments being made here not only by the Boulder writer but by Gretchen Peters as well. The problem is not with the album. Gretchen Peters will never stray very far from country music. It's like a child coloring a picture with a red crayon, then deciding to change it to blue. The red, regardless, will always be there.But country music today absorbs all kinds of music that doesn't fit some old-fashioned notion of what country is all about. It is true that when you get to the heart of Gretchen as a singer, you really have to wonder how she managed so many country hits all these years. And therein lies the real story about country music and its stereotypes. Gretchen Peters is, in a very real sense, the heart of modern country. Her pen has done much to establish the tone of what country music is today. To say that she isn't country is to talk only about her delivery as an artist, not as a writer or in discussing the content of her lyrics. But the real problem is that Peters is messing with her own stereotype. She has always been a writer, not a singer, in the minds of most of the people in the record and radio industry. You just can't go around mixing people up about what it is you do. Most people think in small frames. Life is ordered very neatly in a certain overly simplified fashion. They feel uncomfortable when that order is disturbed and, hence, doing so isn't the most ideal way to sell records. Peters has stated the case very clearly. "When I got here [to Nashville], there was this question: Are you a songwriter? Or a singer? It was baffling, because people didn't do both." My advice? Promoting to the pop stations might be more successful in the short run, but the fact is that everyone in the industry knows who Gretchen Peters is. Changing her image from writer to singer is the primary obstacle and less so the case in changing her image from country to some other genre. I suspect that when Nashville gets wind of the fact that Gretchen is trying to distance herself from country music, it will hurt her more than help her in getting airplay. If Gretchen is in it for the long haul, then that's what will serve her purposes best. The artist who has developed a talent in some other area of pursuit without question has a much greater challenge of gaining respect in a new field because most people think that its just a big ego trip. Gretchen can overcome the problem only through persistence and because people forget. Gretchen Peters, songwriter for the Nashville stars, will be replaced with Gretchen Peters, artist with some very credible talent and some killer tunes. From here in Hendersonville: Honey, I'm home.
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