Alice Peacock

“I’d like to get stoned,” sings Alice Peacock over a shambling electric guitar at the beginning of her fourth album, Love Remains. It’s a startling, if tongue-in-cheek, way to kick off a set of country-tinged pop-rock tunes recorded in the heart of Nashville.

The Chicago based singer songwriter found inspiration with her collaborator and coproducer/ co-writer Danny Myrick, “It was about the vibe,” she elaborates. “Who could we put in the room? When Danny and I were writing together, just the two of us with guitars, cracking up and having a blast, the music had this Tom Petty/early Linda Ronstadt/John Mellencamp/Sheryl Crow-made-a-country-record feel to it,” Peacock reveals. “I said, ‘Pedal steel? F--- yeah! I want it on every damn song!’ I love that ’70s, California-country sound, and I’m totally unapologetic about trying to recapture it.” The players who helped sculpt the aural landscape of Love Remains include pedal-steel player Dan Dugmore (Linda Ronstadt); multi-instrumentalist Phil Madeira (Emmylou Harris); guitarists Kenny Greenberg (Willie Nelson, Brooks & Dunn, Gretchen Wilson), Rob McNelley (DelbertMcClinton) and Scott Dente (Out Of The Grey); drummer Will Denton (Steven Curtis Chapman, LeAnn Rimes); and mandolin and banjo whiz Ilya Toshinsky (Bering Strait). Myrick, living up to Peacock’s description of him as “the groovemeister,” played bass.

Love Remains is a both a timely and timeless collection of novellas that brings to mind the joy simple things and the prospect of a better world. Along with several songs she wrote on her own and a few she penned with other songwriters (such as John Paul White, with whom she crafted “All AboutMe”), this latest batch of tunes finds Peacock in a new place, both thematically and geographically. But her abiding belief in the power of music is a constant. “Can music change the world?/ Yeah, I think it can,” she sings in “Forgiveness,” and she has a story to back it up. Look for Alice on tour through-out 2009 and look for Love Remains in stores and on line March 10, 2009!