Gretchen Peters – Burnt Toast & Offerings

You have to watch the quiet ones. Sometimes the loudest truths are served with a whisper. Gretchen Peters, who has written some of country’s most intelligent songs of life’s complications, offers a hushed benediction for a woman emerging from the chilled-over remains of what is truly not enough to flower into full potential. Burnt Toast & Offerings captures high suburbia, with its privilege and settling. The shimmering “Ghost” and vamping “Thirsty” speak to the vast waves of emptiness in a life gone dry, while “Jezebel” is an exhaled ponder on the one who finds love in a parched soul, suffering the blame from bringing another alive. With subdued arrangements meant to evoke and conjure, Burnt Toast is an adult album that embraces the courage it takes to be happy, the wisdom of being willing, and the strength it takes to let go. Even Sinatra s “One For My Baby” has the muted erotic charge of the freshly awakened, capturing the thrill of what can be in a world where understanding how hollow it can become raises the stakes exponentially.