Gretchen Peters
The Show: Live from the UK
Proper Records
2022
Variously recorded at St. George’s, Bristol, The De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill-On-Sea and The Apex, Bury St. Edmunds, over three concerts at the end of April 2019 during the Strings Attached tour, The Show is Gretchen Peters’ third live album and, featuring the core band of Barry Walsh on piano, electric guitarist Colm McClean and bass player Conor McCreanor augmented by Scotland’s female Southern Fried String Quartet, also serves as a pithy retrospect of her career.
Spanning two discs and presented in a hardback cover with a collection of photographs documenting the concerts, the first disc features ten numbers with the band and quartet, opening in low key chiming guitar mood with the Arguing With Ghosts, the balladeering opener from the previous year’s Dancing With The Beast, a co-write with Ben Glover and Matraca Berg about growing old and times changing as she plaintively sings “I get lost in my hometown, since they tore the Drive-In down”.
The strings put in an appearance with slurred cello, viola and violin on the strummed, moody Southern Gothic title track off Hello Cruel World, a survivor’s anthem about not just rolling with the punches but realising that whatever the pain, it means you’re still out there. A second title track follows with the heavy piano notes and semi-spoken reverie off her 1996 debut, The Secret Of Life, the piano taking the level down for the backwoods gospel of Revival before it strips everything back to acoustic guitar and quiet string caresses for Love That Makes A Cup of Tea from Beast, a song born of a dream about her late mother that celebrates how, for all life’s big dramatic moments, sometimes the most minor and simplest human moment can be the most profound.
The centrepiece of the first disc is, inevitably, her award-winning Blackbirds, here a seven-minute arrangement with the quartet adding an even thicker dimension to its darkness. That’s followed by When You Love Someone, originally a slow waltzing duet with Bryan Adams that’s only previously featured on the Essential collection, here beautifully and achingly rearranged for more prominent piano and strings.
She returns to her debut for an early classic and show staple, piano notes and violin introducing On A Bus To St. Cloud to audience applause, the song having lost none of its power to take your heart in its hand, dipping into an extended nine-minute plus take on the bittersweet opening farewell of Say Goodbye from Burnt Toast & Offerings where the string section again adds a luminous glow to proceedings, before closing this part of the set with another from her debut, the reflective piano ballad When You Are Old that, her voice now more seasoned and weathered, underscores her ability to capture the core of what it means to be human.
The second CD is, for the most part, just her and the band, the focus being on more recent material, opening up with the bluesy potency of When All You Got Is A Hammer from Blackbirds, her portrait of a veteran who “came home from the desert with a medal on his chest”, ill-equipped to fit back into civilian life and left to fend for himself, highlighted in the line “when all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. The theme and musical groove continue with Disappearing Act from Dancing With The Beast (“He did two tours of duty out in Iraq/He came home but he didn’t come back”, the same album yielding the swampy Southern Gothic blues Wichita, a narrative murder ballad cousin to Blackbirds in which a 12-year-old girl takes a gun to protect herself, her divorced mother and little sister from an abusive man.
From the same source comes the simple fingerpicked Say Grace, a heartrending song about taking refuge in faith or friends as the lost, the despairing, the bruised and the broken are welcomed to share in prayer at a shelter by the bus station; the lesson being “Forgive yourself for all of your mistakes You can start all over if that’s what it takes… You are not a loser, you are not a hopeless case”.
It’s back to Blackbirds for a piano and strings arranged six-minute version of Everything Falls Away with the tides serving as metaphors for loss and then returns to Hello Cruel World for the final three numbers, first up with violinist Seonaid Aitken in the haunting spotlight for the simply fingerpicked The Matador, a Townes Van Zandt-like ballad which, the narrator drawn to both fighter and the bull, underscores the theme of how a life without risk is no life at all and how that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Following this, with Alice Allen on cello, comes the achingly sad Five Minutes, which hinges on history repeating itself in the finely detailed story of a working single mother wary of entering into another relationship while her heart’s still owned by her ex and whose teenage daughter’s making the same mistakes. Finally, extended to almost seven minutes, is the profoundly moving Idlewild, where, reminiscent of Janis Ian, she takes a childhood memory of the night of Kennedy’s assassination, sitting in the back seat of the car and overhearing the cracks in her parents’ unravelling marriage and moves on to reflect on America’s loss of innocence in the late 60s (“we shoot our presidents, we shoot the commies and the niggers and the Viet Cong“), concluding “we think we’re walking on the moon but we are dancing in the dark“.
The Show captures a singular artist at the peak of her powers, the songs embellished for the live setting but never gratuitously so, the setlist covering a 22-year spectrum of outstanding songs and an irresistible enticement (should you be so foolish as not yet to have bought tickets) to catch her on the upcoming dates (marking her 25th anniversary of playing in the UK) where, not having released any new original material in four years (her last album was the Mickey Newbury tribute), she might hopefully drop in a taster or two for that long-awaited follow-up.
The album is released via Proper Music on 19th August 2022.
Pre-Order: https://gretchen-peters.lnk.to/TheShow
Gretchen Peters UK Tour Dates
Gretchen will play two series of tour dates in the UK during 2022 and 2023 with shows as follows:
2022
24-Aug-22 LONDON – KINGS PLACE
25-Aug-22 BRISTOL – ST GEORGES
26-Aug-22 WIMBORNE – TIVOLI THEATRE
28-Aug-22 STANFORD HALL, LEICESTERSHIRE – LONG ROAD FESTIVAL
29-Aug-22 LEEDS – CITY VARIETIES
30-Aug-22 EDINBURGH – QUEENS HALL
31-Aug-22 GLASGOW – COMMUNITY CENTRAL HALL
01-Sep-22 MILTON KEYNES – THE STABLES
02-Sep-22 LONDON – KINGS PLACE
2023
03-May-23 BELFAST – THE MAC
04-May-23 LYTHAM ST ANNES – LOWTHER PAVILION
05-May-23 GATESHEAD – THE SAGE 2
06-May-23 LIVERPOOL – THE PHILHARMONIC
17-May-23 BURY ST EDMUNDS – THE APEX
19-May-23 BUXTON – OPERA HOUSE
20-May-23 BIRMINGHAM – TOWN HALL
21-May-23 BEXHILL-ON-SEA – DE LA WARR PAVILION
23-May-23 CARDIFF – LEVEL 3 / ST DAVIDS HALL
24-May-23 SWINDON – WYVERN THEATRE
25-May-23 EXETER – CORN EXCHANGE
27-May-23 LONDON – CADOGAN HALL
Tickets on sale: Shows | (gretchenpeters.com)