GRETCHEN PETERS

Live Review

Robin 2, Bilston, Wolverhampton (2012)

Country-folk singer and native New Yorker Gretchen Peters certainly has an impressive track record and this leg of her tour promoting her latest and eighth album Hello Cruel World went down well with the packed Robin audience.

Her songs are a little more thoughtful and imaginative than the usual country fare of failed crops, broken hearts and faithful dogs but this said she isn’t the most exciting or charismatic of performers.

There are genuinely good lyrics which stick in the mind in some of her songs such as Woman on the Wheel, a song about the circus which opens with the line “There’s a man out here who puts his head in the mouth of a crocodile…”

But at other times her songs tend to slip in to cliché with lyrics such as “We think we’re walking on the moon, when we’re just dancing in the dark” and sometimes bordering on the bizarre with lines such as “a dog with a juicy bone, a sigh from a saxophone”.

There is no denying Peters’ talent however, and at the risk of angering her army of loyal fans here in the Black Country, after a while she gets a little monotonous and you feel yourself urging her to crank at least one song up a couple of notches just to get the circulation going in your toe-tapping foot. 

Gretchen Peters is safe middle of the road country-folk and there’s nothing wrong with that especially if you happen to be a lonely trucker on a long haul.