“There are plans, and then there’s how it all works out.” Vanessa Peters penned that line almost a decade ago, but never was it truer than in 2020. In late February 2020, Peters was in Italy, getting ready to go on a European tour with her band. She had just launched a Kickstarter to fund her latest album, Modern Age – it was fully funded within 3 days – and recording sessions were already scheduled for March. After the tour in Europe, the band planned to head to Austin, Texas for SXSW and then to record the album with her friend and old tourmate, Grammy-award winning producer Joe Reyes and engineer wunderkind Jim Vollentine.
But when Italy suddenly went into a national lockdown, Peters and her husband / bandmate Rip Rowan had to make a choice whether to stay or go. “We knew there was no way to get our Italian bandmates to America, and it was anyone’s guess when borders would open again or when it would be safe to resume international travel,” Peters said. “As weeks turned into months, it became increasingly evident that a recording session in Texas just wasn’t in the cards in 2020.” So with a busted tour and over a dozen new songs ready to record, Peters needed a new plan – preferably one that didn’t require days on end in a windowless studio with the ever-present risk of COVID infection.
Building on a series of demos recorded on the road in the Netherlands and Germany during their last tour, the band holed up in a farmhouse in Castiglion Fiorentino, the small town in Italy that Peters had once called home. Over the course of 10 days, the band worked to finish the songs they’d begun the year prior and to tackle the batch of new songs that Vanessa had written in the meantime.
Peters’s previous album of original material, Foxhole Prayers, was a successful and critically-acclaimed folk/rock endeavor that put Peters on the national stage with a glowing 4-star MOJO review plus invitations to perform at NPR’s Mountain Stage, 30A, and AmericanaFest. Foxhole Prayers focused on the perilous rise of populist politics and the seemingly incessant swirl of violence around us – a deeply introspective album, very much in line with what reviewers and fans have come to expect from Peters.
In true 2020 fashion, Modern Age (due out on Idol Records on April 23rd) turns those expectations upside-down. From the opening power chords of the title track, it’s obvious that this album is headed in a new direction; collaborating closely with her band brought a fresh, raucous energy to this collection that has rarely surfaced before outside of Peters’s live shows. “I sometimes wonder: why do people want me to make the same record over and over?” Peters mused. “It’s easy to get stuck in the idea of what others expect of me; I wanted to push back against that.”
For years it’s been too easy to casually lump Vanessa Peters into a kind of generic Americana category, when in reality her records have run the gamut from indie-pop to alt-country to experimental folk to ’70s-era throwback singer/songwriter rock. But in Modern Age, she has stripped away all songwriterly pretense to build a modern/classic rock album that reveals a steely defiance. In the midst of a truly dark year, she and the band have conspired to make an album that is simultaneously powerful but playful; intense yet sensitive; both angry and hopeful. In Modern Age, we find Peters once again writing and delivering songs of exceptional lyrical and musical power, further cementing her reputation among the new generation of American songwriters.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the video for “Crazymaker,” one of the standout tracks on the new album. Infectious acoustic strumming contrasts with driving electric guitars and a straightforward drumbeat, both of which complement Peters’ commanding yet humble vocal delivery. Peters is a rocker at heart with a pop sensibility, and this comes through in the way she balances both in a way that brings to mind the kind of 90s alt-rock and power pop. Lyrically, she vents the frustration of calling out a “crazymaker” while hitting on universal emotions, all while wandering the back alleys of an deserted Italian city. With the flourish of a synthesizer adding an extra lushness to the track, it is impossible to ignore the fact that this is the song that would be a radio hit in another era…and will hopefully and deservedly strike a nerve for today’s listeners. If things had gone differently, this song is proof that Vanessa Peters would be a major breakout with the release of her new album as this song is timelessly catchy and compels you to listen multiple times in a row. If “Crazymaker” is an indication of the what we can expect from Modern Age as a whole, then it already feels like one of the strongest releases of 2021.
Watch the video and read our chat with Vanessa Peters below…
What inspired you to write this song? What is it about?
The idea for this song stemmed from the word itself – “crazymaker” – which Rip (Rowan, producer of the album) introduced me to — apparently it’s a concept that a lot of folks have heard about via “The Artist’s Way.” A crazymaker is a person (usually a narcissistic drama-seeker) who drains you of your own energy, time, and money. The song is about calling out that person, but also recognizing your own behavior in the vicious cycle — how you find yourself sucked back into their mayhem, almost against your own will but maybe not entirely, because you feel like maybe you can change them? I think we’ve all been in that relationship, or seen it destroy someone near us, and, not to put too fine a point on it, but it was interesting for me to see how the meaning of the song morphed a bit from its roots in a dysfunctional romantic relationship to something much larger. Until very recently, our country had been living for years with a crazymaker at the helm, and it’s been fascinating to see the pull, the magnetic attraction that sort of behavior had (continues to have?) over many of us. In a world dominated by bright, shiny objects competing for our attention (look, squirrel!), sometimes it feels like crazymakers are the only ones who make their voices heard.
Because of COVID, your plans for recording this album changed a bit than you had originally planned. How was the recording process for this song?
We actually began this song during the sessions for “Foxhole Prayers” (my last album) and we were really happy with it, but we could tell that it would have been a total outlier on “Foxhole,” so we reluctantly set it aside for a future album. It was almost finished when we picked up the thread again — I had to redo to the vocals because I had changed some of the lyrics, and we tweaked a few guitars here and there during our recording session, but honestly we didn’t touch this one very much.
Do you have any favorite parts of the song — lyrically or musically or vocally?
I love the opening line, and I really love the chorus, how the rhymes kind of tumble into each other and end with that repetition of “shame on me.” The chorus really captures that feeling of mania and regret and attraction that are all kind of tangled up in loving a crazymaker.
This is the first single from your new album, “Modern Age.” How do you think this song fits in with the album overall?
We chose this one because it’s catchy and fun, even if the song topic is a little dark. I think that’s a good theme for the whole album — we focused on curating a batch of songs that were fun to listen to, that would make you want to turn up the volume and go for a drive with the windows down. There’s plenty of weight in the lyrics of these songs, but we tried to craft an album that would bring some joy to the listeners during a time when we could all use a pick-me-up.
What is coming up for Vanessa Peters in the next few months?
Oh, to have a crystal ball. It’s really hard to make plans at the moment; everything feels like it’s being built on shifting sands. We are hoping to be able to do some shows this summer with our band, but it’s still too early to say for sure. We will continue to do livestreams; in fact we’re hoping to be able to do a full-band livestream when the album drops, but that will depend on how things are going with the virus in late April. We’re just taking it one day at a time and focusing on the joy of having been able to bring this album to the light of day during a dark and difficult time.
Modern Age is out on Idol Records on April 23, 2021.
Photo credit: Rip Rowan