HIT THE ROAD, GRETCHEN

SHE'S ONE of the most successful of the new breed of Nashville women songwriters. Her songs have been recorded by a host of country stars including George Jones, Patty Loveless and George Strait. Her best known song on this side of the Atlantic - Martina McBride's version of 'Independence Day' - not only enjoyed the status of being the most requested song on Country Music TV a few years back, but has also become something of a feminist anthem.
Why, then, with such a comfortable existence and a steady flow of royalty cheques streaming in, would Gretchen Peters pack her guitar and take to the road to establish a performing career in her own right?
"It's like going back to my roots," she explains, shortly before her Dublin appearance at the DA Club. "I started out as a musician and it's something that I really missed since I became a full-time writer. You don't get too many opportunities to play in Nashville but I originally went there with the idea of making records and performing for myself. I had to establish myself as a writer in order to have the freedom to make the kind of record I wanted to make."
With the release of her solo debut, Secret Of Life, Peters has finally made that record. And with guest appearances from Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle, not to mention a duet with The Mavericks' Raul Malo, it confirms her as an even more able performer than a writer. Still, making an album is one thing but getting up before audiences four thousand miles away from home is quite another.
"All my songwriter friends said to me, 'You're going to hate being on the road," she smiles. "They think writing is such a great lifestyle, so why make life tough for yourself. But I really didn't get into songwriting for the easy life. If there's any downside to touring it's being away from my daughter, but I bring her on the road sometimes, and I've even got her trained to change my guitar strings!"
"I kinda like the idea of getting up and performing the songs for audiences that haven't heard them before," she continues. "I opened for Huey Lewis late last year and I had to re-think everything. Most of the audience hadn't a clue who I was so it was very liberating for me."
fervent competition
Peters grew up in Westchester County in New York, moving to Boulder, Colorado later on, when her parents divorced. "I was much more of a folkie as a teenager," she explains. "I discovered country music through Gram Parsons. I'd look at the songwriting credits on his albums and I bought every album I could get by people like George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton and Mickey Newbury.
She met her husband in Boulder, they married, had a baby and ten years ago decided to move to Nashville. "I'd done everything by then," she says. "Played in bands, been in duos, performed solo. I figured it was time to have a go at being a songwriter. I signed with a publisher within three months and the very first song I had cut was done by George Jones. It was almost like a dream come through. Then George Strait had a big hit with one of my songs. After that, I had a rude awakening when some of them didn't do that well."
The fervent competition between songwriters in Nashville is legendary, with up to 2,000 songs at a time being pitched at the major names like Garth Brooks and Reba McIntyre. In that context, Peters reckons she's been hugely fortunate in hitting it big when she did.
"It's much tougher now," she confirms. "There are so much more people writing songs in Nashville now than there were back then. A lot of people come for the money alone and the music has definitely suffered. They think 'I can do this, it's just three chords and a few words'. A lot of the songs sound the same, written in a calculating way to get played on the radio.
"In some ways the dignity has gone out of the music," she concludes. "The way I write is to remember what I responded to when I was a teenager. It has to be real and from the heart. Simple, but not simplistic."