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Grammy nominated singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters speaks to Expatsradio from Nashville about her music career and her new Christmas CD 'Northern Lights'.

This is what Gretchen has written about herself:
Brief Autobiography
I am the product of a liberal upper-middle class family of six from just outside New York City; the product of a writer-father whose life’s work was about exposing social injustices and pissing off defenders of the status-quo; the product of a divorced single mom who fled to the hippie town of Boulder, Colorado to escape the stifling suburbs of Updike novels; the product of nearly twenty years of living right smack in the buckle of the Bible belt among the good old boys and the bad old music business.
First I heard Django Rheinhardt and Ella Fitzgerald mixed with the sound of ice rattling in cocktail glasses. Later I heard Bob Dylan and the Beatles mixed with the smell of marijuana wafting down from the third floor of our house. When I woke up from my childhood I found a guitar and tried to make some of these sounds. I have been in love with words all my life. They were my familiars, the things with which I felt most comfortable and competent. According to members of my family, I used them frequently and handily from an early age.
Music was different. Music had to be seduced; words were easy. Music was a tall dark stranger; words were an old familiar face. I think great songs are born. They are born with all the urgency of childbirth, born out of pain, anger, joy, wit, and delivered by instinct, skill and love. I think writers are born, too. It’s not a popular opinion, but I don’t think you can really teach writing. You can teach

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