GRETCHEN PETERS, the Nashville based singer-songwriter plays Kelly’s, Bridge Street, on Monday July 23 at 8pm as part of the Galway Arts Festival.
On the night she will perform songs from her most recent album, Hello Cruel World, (“An affecting, beautifully measured, grown-up affair,” said Q ) as well as songs from across her 25 year career.
Gretchen grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Django Reinhardt, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and The Beatles and her music has elements of jazz as well as country.
On Hello Cruel World, Gretchen offers portraits of women who have been around the block a time or two, like the narrator of ‘Hello Cruel World’: “I haven’t done as well as I thought I would/I’m not dead but I’m damaged goods.”
“If you get far enough along in life you start to see that survival is heroism,” Peters told Charlie McBride earlier this year. “Heroism is less about daring acts than it is about enduring and keeping on. You get to a certain age and you realise that. I think of those characters in a lot of these songs, like the woman in ‘Five Minutes’, all of them really, as quiet heroes.”
Gretchen has also written songs for Randy Travis, George Jones, Trisha Yearwood, and Martina McBride.
For tickets see www.galwayartsfestival.com or the festival box office on Forster Street
