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Having just finished a big stack of holiday music reviews, I was in the mood for something different. I've been fortunate to see so many high quality releases this fall; still, the music sometimes just begins to sound the same, and I was hankering for something fresh and creatively cool.

Gretchen Peters is oh-so-creatively-cool. Grammy-nominated Peters has a hybrid voice, marrying virginal angels with whiskey and cigarettes. Priceless! She opens with Gordon Lightfoot's Song for a Winter's Night, complete with harmonica flourishes. By the time the first track ended, I was hooked, and I knew that the rest of Northern Lights would be a blast. It is!

Coventry Carol, with its old-time-radio intro, is a careful, calculating, contemplative--and very melancholy--affair. The a cappella verse near the end is particularly affecting. I Wonder as I Wander is more exuberant, exuding a bluesy Appalachian feel. Peters includes several original numbers, including the delicate title track, which conveys the mysterious beauty associated with the northern lights. Peters also includes an achingly lovely In the Bleak Midwinter, one of the nicest versions I have ever heard.

So there you have it! I enjoyed Gretchen Peters' Northern Lights very, very much. She's a folksy phenom, and this CD will thrill those who favor alternative-country-folk music that showcases a killer voice. Absolutely excellent!

--Carol Swanson
(Reviewed in 2008)

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From the liner notes:

Gretchen Peters: vocals, background vocals, acoustic and electric guitars, alto recorder, mandolin, percussion
Barry Walsh: piano, organ, Wurlitzer electric piano, vibes, accordion, clavietta, glockenspiel, bass, percussion
Doug Lancio: electric guitar on "In the Bleak Midwinter," "Waitin' on Mary," "December Child," "Song for a Winter's Night," "I Wonder as I Wander"
David Henry: cello on "Silent Night," "Northern Lights," "I Wonder as I Wander"; trumpet and euphonium on "Coventry Carol (Prelude)"
Matraca Berg, Suzy Bogguss: harmony vocals on "Waitin' on Mary"
Will Kimbrough: bouzouki and harmony vocal on "Careful How You Go"

Produced, recorded & arranged by Gretchen Peters & Barry Walsh
Recorded at Nigel's house, Nashville, TN




From the Website:

$2.00 from every sale of Northern Lights goes to Room In The Inn, a Nashville-based homeless outreach program which provides food, shelter and clothing to the homeless during the cold winter months.

1. Song For A Winter's Night - I loved this old Gordon Lightfoot song and knew I wanted some songs that were about winter, not specifically Christmas. This one just seems to capture that melancholy feeling of a snowy winter night. It was one of the first songs we cut for the album and felt absolutely effortless. At that point I think we felt we were on to something.

2. Coventry Carol (prelude) - After we had recorded Coventry Carol, with its big, lush cathedral-like sound, it occurred to me that we could do a little prelude that was sonically the opposite. I was trying to get something that sounded like what you'd hear coming out of your radio late in December in the hinterlands of England just after Winston Churchill had given a wartime speech on the BBC. David Henry, who I am convinced can play anything, did all the horn parts.

3. Coventry Carol - This has always been one of my favorite carols. It's quintessentially English, of course - the title refers to Coventry, England, where it originated as part of a play depicting the Christmas story. The song centers on The Massacre of the Innocents by Herod - the killing of all young male children in Bethlehem. It was surprisingly easy to get "inside" the medieval lyrics because the tune is so mournful and sad. Barry came up with the beautiful, and very modern, interludes between verses.

4. I Wonder As I Wander - I changed, very slightly, the melody of this Appalachian folk carol to suite the more modal arrangement I had worked out on the guitar. As with so many of the traditional carols we recorded, I was more and more impressed with the lyrics as we went. The words to this song are lovely, very earthy and their Celtic roots show in places - "if Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,.. he surely could have it 'cause he was the king"... I started with a series of guitars and mandolins - very folky and mountain-y - but when Barry added the B3, the Wurlitzer and the clavietta, it added a sort of bluesy tone which I loved.

5. December Child - I was really interested in writing the story of Christmas from the very human point of view of Mary - how she must have felt as a mother, knowing her baby would not be hers for very long. Every mother feels a pang at this part of the story, I think - we all want to protect our babies from the world and we all know that we can't. Doug Lancio added beautiful guitars to this track.

6. (Charlie's) Angels - I had this crazy idea that I wanted to try doing the traditional carol "Angels We Have Heard On High", only in 6/8 time and with a jazz feel. I don't know what got into my head but I was pretty sure about it. The only thing that didn't feel right was the "gloria's" - they just seemed superfluous. The feel was so close to the Vince Guaraldi song "Skating", from our beloved "Charlie Brown Christmas", that at some point we had the idea to put the lick from "Skating" in place of the "gloria's". It worked. We knew we had to record this whole thing live, so we called Dave Francis up and he came over and played upright bass in our hallway. It took us awhile to get it right - the transitions are tricky - but once we got it we loved it. It's also the only track we put sleighbells on - and only at the very end, after much discussion! We called it (Charlie's) Angels as a little tip of the hat to Charles Schulz and his alter-ego Charlie Brown.

7. Waitin' On Mary - This is an old song of mine from 1993. I had an old, dated demo which I hated - full of synthesizers and devoid of space or vibe - but I still loved the song. I stripped it down to its basics and played a simple electric guitar part, which immediately took it to a new, better place. We just kept working on it - layering it, adding Doug Lancio's guitar and David Henry's cello. The lovely icing on the cake was having Matraca Berg and Suzy Bogguss come in and lend their angelic background vocals. We've been singing together for a couple of years now and I knew I wanted them on the album and this was the perfect song. I've always been struck by the link between the homeless of today and the Christmas story, which is really about two poor, destitute people trying to find their way in the world without much help. It's an old story, but it's still going on today.

8. In The Bleak Midwinter - Maybe my favorite cut on the record, and certainly one of my favorite lyrics. Based on a stunning poem by Christina Rossetti. We sort of considered this a bookend to "Coventry Carol", and wanted to create a mysterious, cathedral-like sound. Barry's idea was to use organ rather than piano. Barry and I knew we had to capture this live as well, because there is no real strict sense of time in it. Since we were in separate rooms and couldn't see each other when we recorded it, we had to play off of each other's very subtle cues - my breathing and his grace notes. Once we had the right take, we sent it to Doug Lancio, who I think is in his finest hour here. Some of what he plays sounds like "angels and archangels", and some of it sounds like a Grateful Dead jam. All of it sounds wonderful to me - I was ecstatic when I heard what he'd done.

9. Careful How You Go - I asked my songwriter friends to send me songs that they might have that would be appropriate for this album, knowing that I wasn't going to have time to write more than a few myself, and also because I was curious to see what I'd get. I know some great songwriters. Kim sent me this song about a snowy night in London, which she wrote with Will Kimbrough. It charmed me immediately. It's got nothing to do with Christmas but everything to do with the magic in the air after a snowfall. Will was gracious enough to come over to the house and sing it with me, and put some bouzouki on it as well. I also played alto recorder on it, which gave the instrumental bridge a little English folk vibe.

10. Northern Lights - I felt this was the title song as soon as I wrote it. I've always been fascinated with the Northern Lights, though as many places as I've been where they're common I've still never seen them. But I think of them as one of the beautiful gifts nature gives us, seemingly for no other reason than to delight us. The end of the year is a reflective time, and fraught with stress and sadness for some people (maybe more than would admit it), and I was trying to get at this notion. I spent a very difficult Christmas the first year after my marriage broke up, but in some ways it was a beautiful experience, because I really had to examine what I wanted the holiday to mean. It was clearly not going to be a Hallmark/Norman Rockwell Christmas, so I had to really think about what was important to me. And it turned out that peace, and quiet, and reflection made for a lovely and meaningful, if at times melancholy Christmas Eve. Getting off the treadmill can be a huge relief. That's what I was getting at in the last verse: "we try to make up for mistakes that we've made/with presents and parties and Christmas parades".

11. Christmas Time Is Here - We worked out this song in a hotel room in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Newcastle has always been a pretty fertile place for us, creatively - I wrote "Jezebel" there from my last album. We both adored Vince Guaraldi's "Charlie Brown Christmas", and wanted to pay homage somehow. My guitar chords are quite a bit more naïve than Guaraldi's jazz chords, but they fit the arrangement, I think. We recorded this whole thing live with Barry in the living room, me in the office and Dave Francis in the hallway.

12. Silent Night - My grandmother, whose maiden name was Mohr, was fond of telling me that her ancestor, Joseph Mohr, wrote Silent Night. Mohr was an Austrian priest who presided over a small mountain church. The story goes that the organ broke on Christmas Eve, so this song, which he wrote with Franz Gruber, was first performed on the guitar. I had this idea that we could set the melody, which is very simple, to something resembling the Bach cello suite in G, which I love. It evolved and changed along the way, but the basic idea - recording it with just a voice and a solo cello, sticks pretty closely to the way Joseph Mohr performed it that Christmas Eve in 1818. Barry came up with the instrumental passage in the middle. David Henry played it, beautifully.

Gretchen Peters

Northern Lights

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Track List