“We’re all marching in this slow parade of losses.”
Since I was a teenager, Gretchen Peters’ music has accompanied me through my life. The first album I bought was Martina McBride’s The Way That I Am, which included the Peters-penned hit Independence Day, and for the few brief years in the 90s when the UK had a CMT station, Pam Tillis’ Let That Pony Run (another one of Peters’ songs) was on constant rotation. Over the years since, mainstream country dabbled in God-bothering, disowned the Dixie Chicks and then became obsessed with trucks and binge drinking… and I became fed up with 95% of what passed for mainstream country music. Thankfully, a number of late nineties and early noughties hit country-songwriters came to the rescue and released a string of superb Americana solo albums. Peters’ 2012 album Hello Cruel World was a career high and easily one of the best albums of that year. I don’t want to roll out the old trope of it being a tough act to follow, but it kind of is really.
Blackbirds is Peters’ bleakest album to date. Never one to shy away from uncomfortable subjects in her songs, Peters tackles the effect of insufficient psychological support for war veterans (When All You Got is a Hammer), the strange blessing of death after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (Jubilee), and life-threatening illness (The Cure for the Pain). The title track is a quality murder ballad, one of multiple songs co-written with Ben Glover who opened on her tour a few years back.
This is an album that considers the many experiences and conflicting emotions of death and loss. A house fire (The House on Auburn Street), the dreaded telephone call (Everything Falls Away), and the devastation of the BP oil spill on a fisherman and his deceased wife (Black Ribbons) are harrowing and impossibly beautiful in equal measures. It’s why you don’t mind going on the journey that the album takes you on, although it’ll probably never make for something you’d want to listen to in the car. In between the tragedy, When You Comin’ Home, a duet with Jimmy La Fave, and a perfect version of David Mead’s Nashville provide a little reprieve.
Blackbirds is a perfectly crafted whole. Don’t expect a repetition of Hello Cruel World. This album is a slow burn, and I wasn’t entirely convinced at first listen, but it grows on you. There are some artists whose music makes life better. Gretchen Peters is one of those, even if she has a propensity for making her listeners cry. And if someone doesn’t use Blackbirds in some gritty cable TV show by the end of the year, I’ll be stunned.
