On Grant Peeple’s tenth album, Bad Wife, the longstanding singer-songwriter pays homage to woman singer-songwriters and rightfully so. 2020 will mark the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment when American women wrestled their right to vote from a Constitution historically reticent to grant equality it precisely extolled. Research shows this album might be the first effort by a male artist to record a collection of women’s songs. Though its intent was not to earn that distinction. Instead, this record, Grant’s 10th, was made in recognition of the courage and fortitude of those brave women, as well as the continuing struggle for women’s equal protection under the law.
The songwriters: Carrie Elkin, Telisha Williams, Eliza Gilkyson, Caroline Spence, Dayna Kurtz, Phoebe Bloom, Alicia McGovern, SarahMac, Rebekah Pulley, Myshkin, Ali Holder
Grant: “I unknowingly gathered these songs for years. I’ve worked with all these women in some aspect of the business; they are all friends. I heard all the songs for the first time in a live setting, where they entered me, worked me over, and never left. As I began the project, I didn’t have to go looking for songs. They had already found me. My learning and recording them was an exercise of re-discovery, a search for those original nerves the songs had struck.
A woman produced three of the records I have made. And all my records have been studded with women players. But this one, by design, has none. This is all guys trying, as it were, to carry the mail. Nor did I rewrite any storylines or change any pronouns in order to square with my gender; i.e., first line of the first song is: “When the lights are off, I need a man to touch…”
Glide is thrilled to premiere “Bad Wife” from Grant Peeples a courageous in the pocket number with a stinging guitar solo that carries a mysterious undertone reminiscent of Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt. Peeples remains one of our country’s most underrated artists, a treasure that ears deserve to absorb.
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the late John Conquest of 3rd Coast Magazine, and my favorite music critic of all time, said ”Peeples is unusually honest, unusually literate. He’s the only songwriter I have ever thought to call “ruthless”….