Burnt Toast And Offerings

構成数 : 1枚
合計収録時間 : 00:00:00
When it comes to articulating your own inspiration, sometimes it takes a while. Gretchen Peters is well-known in Nashville and pop circles as a top-shelf songwriter whose tunes have been woven into hits by everyone from Neil Diamond to Bonnie Raitt to Martina McBride. She has been able to dig into an aesthetic terrain in second and third persons and come up with topics and stories that are distilled archetypes for every woman and man; they offer metaphors, accidental instruction, and the direct transfer of emotion to anyone who has truly heard them. She's been making her own records for over a decade now and performing live, but she's never been able to completely deliver on tape those beautiful songs she's written. Not until now, that is. Peters' 2007 recording, Burnt Toast & Offerings, was written completely in the first person, a change for her. As a writer, she's peered down into her own well far enough to be able to see what's there, and bring out what she sees into her songs. On this set, she's simply jumped off the edge, without looking for a place of safety to grasp onto. She doesn't see around and through the emotions that come up to greet her. Instead, she's immersed herself in them. She's gotten wet and dirty in the center of that abyss and discovered a baptism, in the fountain of her own heart. In this seemingly dark and dank place, where the sunlight above is just a glimmer, she's discovered an inner guiding light, the voice of her own hunger and the answer to prayers and pleadings to earthly and heavenly powers: the revelation of love.
Burnt Toast & Offerings is a record about the messiest part of love -- the barren desert where it unravels, falls apart, and empties one out, leaving one broken and seemingly alone, in a strange land where all previously known has been spirited away. She reveals that love demands nothing less than total surrender in order to open to it fully and experience its bounty. No matter what it looks like, its promise is enough. With the help of producer/guitarist Doug Lancio, piano and keyboard wiz Barry Walsh, bassist Dave Francis, and drummer John Gardner (with guest musicians in tow), Peters delivers a set of new songs that is simply searing in its lyric honesty and accompanying melodies, sophisticated enough in musical arrangements to carry them to the listener as a gift. The songs offer an encounter with beauty in all its marred, tragic, and transformative glory. The sound of the recording is pristine; it reveals in clear, wide-open tones and abundant -- though never excessive -- atmospheric ones, the struggles and epiphanies these protagonists experience. The hunger is heard in the set's opening cut, "Ghost," as a single harmonic chord and bowed cello usher in these a cappella words: "There was a girl who used to live here/Sometimes you still can hear her laugh...but you let her beauty go unnoticed/And let her music go unheard/You should've listened when she told you/You should've hung on every word/Now I'm a ghost, I haunt this house/And wait for love to lift this shroud/Take these withered dreams and let 'em go/I'm a ghost...." The acoustic guitars swell; Lancio poignantly fills the space between Walsh's organ and synths. Peters abandons herself to the maelstrom, which is enveloping. It's one of the bravest opening tracks on a record in an age.
Lest things get too dark too quickly, "Sunday Morning (Up and Down My Street)," with its nearly nursery rhyme melody -- thanks to the counterpoint guitars creating "ding-dong" effect -- Peters paints a picture of contentment and stillness, a gratitude that embraces the moment when love is present and abundant. The listener has to wonder if this is a reminiscence of what was, or lives in the present. The temptation is toward the latter, especially as Peters' voice rings so clearly, in a way it never has before, above the Hammond B-3 swells, an emergent cello, and a glockenspiel all sewn inside the slippery guitars. "Jezebel," introdu