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Andrew Peterson and Special Guests

Presented by Ryman Auditorium at Ryman Auditorium

December 18, 2011

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Nashville is a town that attracts a lot of guys with guitars. On any given afternoon you’ll see them on the sidewalks, in the clubs, wandering around music row. You can’t miss them at the downtown Greyhound station and at the airport baggage claim. You see them lugging their instruments into and out of dozens of hotel and motel parking lots, packing them into the back seats of cars with out-of-state plates and driving off somewhere in the service of a paper-thin dream. And there’s always an attendant note of sadness because somehow, the picture always seems so transient, so unrooted. It’s almost as if Woody Guthrie were the patron saint of troubadours and the cost of entry into the guild is that you first have to be willing to leave your wife and kids and light out for parts unknown in the name of some abstract notion of freedom, repeating in some form for the rest of your life the sad, weary mantra that Tom Waits first opined: It was a train that took me away from here, but a train can’t bring me home.

And maybe we’re so used to hearing that kind of story, that when we run across a guy like Centricity Music artist Andrew Peterson, a guy with a guitar, yes, but a guy-with-a-guitar who is so intentionally rooted in the stuff of life—in family, friendship, community, home and even the very plot of land he lives on—that he seems almost counter-culture. Okay, maybe Andrew Peterson is counter-culture. But it’s not his fault. It’s the culture that shifted.

Over the last ten years Andrew Peterson has quietly carved out a niche for himself as one of the most thoughtful, poetic, and lyrical songwriters of his generation. More recently he’s established himself as the grassroots facilitator of an online literary and songwriting community (www.RabbitRoom.com) and an emerging fantasy novelist as well (The Wingfeather Saga). But it’s still ultimately that sense of rootedness that listeners, readers and fans seem to respond to most deeply—because Andrew’s songs (and books) remind us again and again of simple, solid things like love and friendship and hope and redemption and beauty and how our stories were meant to be shared, and how the darkness will not always hold sway, and how we, being human, need to hear those things over and over again, because otherwise we become disconnected from the very stories we’re living in. All of which brings us, in a roundabout way, to our real starting point, because somehow, Andrew Peterson’s new, twelve-song project, Counting Stars (produced by Ben Shive, with Andy Gullahorn) manages to do all that without ever leaving home.