Andrew Peterson

Over ten years after Walk debuted to the select few who were blessed to hear it, Andrew Peterson continues to make much larger waves with his Rich Mullins-like folk charm. This season’s porch tales stand more triumphant than ever, as the Easter-themed project known as Resurrection Letters, Vol. II debuts. It’s yet another beautiful entry from Peterson, adding to an already impressive and expansive catalog.

It was a pleasure to sit down with Peterson - as it always is - to discuss everything from the renowned Christmas tour to the new album. In between, we’re able to cover quite a bit of ground, including this current season of creating deeper music and playing Catch Phrase with Andy Osenga.

Soul-Audio: We’re on the eve of the Christmas Tour and I wanted to touch base on that. Are there any changes for this year?

Andrew Peterson: No, I kind of take the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. It’s basically the same gang of people and the same band doing it for years now. Every year we try to think of a special guest or two at the Ryman and this year we have Stuart Duncan, who is one of my favorite fiddle players and he plays a lot of the violin on my CDs and for my heroes, who will sit in with us and we have Michael Card. So those are the only real changes. We do the songwriters in the round and then we do the Christmas songs.

SA: Year after year, the groundswell continues for the tour and I wondered if you felt there were particular reasons for that?

Andrew: I think there are a few reasons. Part of it is that it’s a Christmas thing and people really get excited about Christmas events in a way they don’t get excited about Easter or anything else. There’s something special about the season where people like to dress up, put on scarves and go out with their family. We’ve done it long enough now to where there are kids who come to the show who’ve been coming for most of their lives. We’ve been doing this for nine years.

So it’s done what we’ve dreamed of it becoming back when we first conjured up the idea. We wanted it to be something that would prepare people’s hearts for the season. So that’s part of it. I think the other part is that when the idea struck nine years ago, the reason it did is that I wanted there to be a concert like this. I wanted to be able to attend a concert like this and there wasn’t anything out there I could think of that I felt resembled this. There were plenty of Christmas concerts where people wear dresses and sing Bing Crosby covers or there were cantatas but there was no concert to tell the story.

I think the weirdness of the idea is what has helped it. It’s pretty unique in that when people usually think of an Americana concert, they usually think about someone saying, ‘Well, I wrote this song when my girlfriend dumped me.’ With this, it’s seamless. We try really hard to make the songs do the work of telling the story. The other thing I think is attractive is the community aspect. Some people after shows say they can tell that everyone on the stage loves each other. And it’s true. There’s this great group from Nashville that try to squeeze in lunch when we can when we’re in town, but it’s rare that we all get to hang out together at any length of time.

So the Christmas tour has been that for years. Andrew Osenga, for example, we go to church together and yet we’re not always there on the same Sundays and we try to bump into each other as often as we can but it doesn’t always work. However, we know in December that we’re gonna be on this bus for three weeks together, playing Catch Phrase and watching movies. So there’s this sweet sense of community that I think is visible from the audience. I think it’s a combination of all of those things. And ultimately, it’s not about anything but the story we’re telling. It’s hard to mess that up. It’s hard for the bare bones story of the coming of Jesus to not be emotionally resonant. It’s the very fiber of the universe that we’re singing about.

SA: Is this the highlight of the year?

Andrew: It is one of them. It’s funny because I’m always excited for it, but after that last show, I’m ready to go back and play my story songs again. It’s hard some nights to sit out there in the round and hear Jill and Andy and Bebo and whoever else on the tour singing their songs and… typically what happens is I open the round with one of my songs and then they all sing a song and then we come back and do all of my Christmas songs. We do that over and over and yet I have six albums of songs I’ve written and yet I don’t get to sing any of them. So while this is great, I can’t wait for February to go back out on the road where I’m able to tell my stories and sing my songs. So there’s a nice rhythm to it. It’s a highlight of the year and I feel like we have a good show and a gracious audience.

SA: This seems to be a good year for you and your colleagues and even lately, it just seems you guys are digging deeper and going places you weren’t going five or so years ago. Do you feel that?

Andrew: Yeah, I think everybody senses that. I like to jog, but I don’t love to jog. I do it in phases and if I haven’t done it for a while, at first I hate it. I’ll go out and jog and feel like I’m not getting any better and I’ll hate it. Then one day, all of a sudden you’re able to run three or four miles and it didn’t kill you. I feel that way with my career. There are these little thresholds that you meet. I feel like there are moments when you’ve been working really hard and you don’t see much fruit with your labor and then something happens and you look around and your music has matured and your audience has changed - they’ve gotten better and there’s more people coming to your shows.

There’s no way to quantify it but you’re thankful for it when it happens. Jill Phillips’ new record [The Good Things] is getting ready to come out and it’s just amazing. I listened to it the first time through the other day and it’s really amazing. I just can’t believe I get to hang out with these people. This is an album I would have loved… if I lived in China, I would geek out about this album. So the fact I get to share the stage with these people and get to grow with them is great. And Ben Shive as well. My brother, when he heard Ben’s record, he said it was so good that he was surprised Ben hangs out with any of us. Which is funny, but it’s true. [Laughs]

Like it or not, most of us have been living in Nashville for 10-plus years, so we’re not rookies but we’re not the old guys. We’re in this middle place and it’s nice. Sometimes we meet people who are making their first records who say, ‘When I was in junior high, I got your album and that’s what made me want to play music.’ It blows your mind a bit because you don’t feel old, but yet we’re thankful to have been able to play music for this long and see the music or the fruit that’s come from it.

SA: Let’s talk about Resurrection Letters, Vol. II. You already have a Christmas album, so was this a purposeful effort to write about Easter?

Andrew: Yeah, kind of. I resisted the idea to do an Easter project because I didn’t want to seem opportunistic or like I was trying to replicate what happened with Behold the Lamb of God. People would ask me if I would ever consider doing an Easter project and I feel Behold the Lamb is an Easter project in some ways. You can’t talk about the birth of Jesus without talking about the death and resurrection. So Behold the Lamb covers that ground in my mind.

But after The Far Country, this album about heaven and death and the reality of the afterlife and what it is we have to look forward to, for whatever reason, the songs I had written had all leaned to focusing even more so on resurrection and this aspect. It’s a continuation of The Far Country. I didn’t plan that, it just happened that way. I wrote a whole album about heaven and death and so it made me think about Resurrection for a few years. I was talking to Ben and Andy and we all sensed this compulsion that we would try to make a record that would zero in specifically on the Passion of Christ and that story.

Out of the whole Bible, that’s the most jarring part of Scripture. The gospels meander and then when it comes to the triumphal entry up to the crucifixion,there’s a ton in there. I remember thinking that if I zoom out and look at the world from the birds-eye view and I see these guys making a record in Nashville and they are Christians and they are storytellers by trade and making music, what higher calling could there be than for these guys to put their heads together and do their best to retell the story of the Passion. So we all feel a little inadequate to the task. It’s a very dark story and there’s a lot going on, but we just put our heads down to do what it takes to tell this story.

I have a friend, Russ Ramsey, who’s a pastor and a contributor at the Rabbit Room and he’s to blame for a lot of this. There’s a sermon series he preached and God has gifted him with this ability to have a lot of insight into that story. There’s a lot he has said that I had never heard before. He’s actually working on a book that will be a companion to it when it comes out and he’s been telling us Scriptures and notes. So we wanted to use every gift at our disposal to tell this story the best way we know how. And I think Resurrection Letters is the precursor to that.

SA: You mentioned being able to go out in February, so is that the plan?

Andrew: Most years I try really hard to take January off. I miss out on a lot of cool stuff in December, a lot of family stuff. So we’ve made it a tradition in our house that January is the time we make up for that. So in February I go on the road with Andy and Ben and do normal concerts again. We’re also doing an Easter tour. Last year was the first Resurrection Letters tour. It’s similar to Behold the Lamb of God in that we sing songs at first and then we sing songs specifically about the resurrection. The difference is now that we’re doing meditations and readings. There’s no talking about the songs at all. We tie it with those readings. The goal is to do the same as the Christmas tour does, which is provide an evening to sink into the story and not miss it for all the Easter Egg hunts and the like.

SA: I wanted to ask about “The Good Confession” real quickly, because it seems the perfect ending to an album that runs such a wide array of emotions. It goes from brokenness to the ultimate glory of God. Was that intended to be the exclamation point?

Andrew: Yes it did. Almost from the first production meeting with Ben where we played through all the songs and talked about which ones would fit, that was the last song on the album and we knew it. We had the idea to bring in the choir for the end on that song. For the sake of the readers not familiar, we put out an email to my mailing list that the first 40 people who responded could come to Nashville and form this choir. We didn’t want it to be professional. I remember Rich Mullins saying is that one of the things he loves most about church is that it’s the only place you hear old men singing. They sing out of tune, but it’s beautiful in that way. So we invited a bunch of old men. [Laughs]

That’s not true. But we did want it to sound like the church and that’s the significance. The song itself paints a snapshot of my spiritual journey from when I was baptized to screwing around a lot in high school to giving my gifts to God and His kingdom. So I did my best to cover that ground to say that, like it or not, I do believe He is the Christ, Son of the Living God. Everything in my life points to that. So we felt that was the exclamation point on the record. No matter how much darkness you sing about on the album, at the end, He is the Christ.

• www.andrew-peterson.com
• www.myspace.com/andrewpetersonmusic

↓ 4 comments

#1 The Rabbit Room on December 2nd, 2008 at 8:36 pm

[...] Hey guys, just wanted to pass along the latest interview over at Soul-Audio with the Proprietor himself, Andrew Peterson. We had a chance to get some honest reflections about the upcoming Christmas tour, the new album and a lot of other topics I haven’t heard Andrew speak on before. Here’s part of the interview: [...]

#2 Chris S. on December 2nd, 2008 at 10:03 pm

Great interview. Andrew answered some questions that I would’ve asked. Am I foolish to romanticize life on a bus playing Catchphrase and watching movies with fellow art lovers?
Still trying to figure out what this means:
“This is an album I would have loved… if I lived in China”

#3 s.d. smith on December 3rd, 2008 at 1:11 am

Great interview, Matt. I know it must be hard to draw AP out, but somehow you did it.

Seriously, thanks for the great stuff.

#4 Andrew Peterson on December 3rd, 2008 at 5:08 am

Hey, folks. Thanks for posting the interview, Matt. The “china” comment was supposed to mean, “If I lived in China and didn’t know who any of these folks were, I’d still love their music.” I remember I struck a lot of that answer from the record and asked Matt if I could start over. That may account for the non sequitur.

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