Gretchen Peters

Chart-topping country songwriter Gretchen Peters filled her own debut album, The Secret of Life, with guest performances by friends in high places such as Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, and Raul Malo. While the songs were strong, the performances only served to overshadow Peters' true strength: it lay in her own voice singing her songs. On her self-titled sophomore effort, she and producer Green Daniel play it closer to the vest in terms of personnel, while offering a far more adventurous sampling of Peters' wares. Bryan Adams makes a backing vocal appearance, but his is the only name that folks outside the Nash Vegas studio system would be familiar with. Peters stacks her band with veterans, such as longtime keyboard ace Barry Walsh, organist Steve Conn, and guitarist Michael Severs, and she and Daniel handle most of the rest aside from horns and strings. The songs range from the stellar opener, "Souvenirs," with its laid-back hand percussion and Caribbean feel, to rootsy alterna-country like "In a Better World," moody ballads like "Love and Texaco," the truly beautiful and moving "Amelia and Me," the midtempo, lushly orchestrated "Like Water into Wine," and the truly enigmatic "Picasso and Me," which could have been covered by Rickie Lee Jones in her beat days. This is a musical autobiography, a concept recording about coming of age, bittersweet memories, and the haunting of a life with old ghosts. While it didn't even grace the country Top 100, it doesn't matter. Peters, simply because of her songwriting skill (just ask Martina McBride, Patty Loveless, and Trisha Yearwood, to name three artists who've scored number ones with Peters' tunes), deserves to be taken seriously as an artist, one who helped to shape contemporary country while playing both sides of the studio system fence without making any sort of artistic compromise. Her 2007 record Burnt Toast & Offerings was the delivery of the promise on her earlier records, of which this one particularly stands out as a work of real art.