BRAVE TALES

By RICHARD CORLISS

A couple of decades ago, Tin Pan Alley moved to the South and changed its name to Nashville. There the division of musical labor still largely applied: singers sang and songwriters wrote. In the past few years one distinct author's voice has emerged from the throats of Martina McBride (Independence Day), Patty Loveless (You Don't Even Know Who I Am) and Trisha Yearwood (On a Bus to St. Cloud). The composer is Gretchen Peters, and her own first album, The Secret of Life (Imprint), offers 10 fresh reasons to elect her to the country songwriter's Hall of Fame.

So many pop songs inhabit emotional extremes--the juice of ecstasy, the razor on the wrist of despair--that someone writing about the middle ground most of us occupy most of the time can sound like a pioneer of the everyday. Peters extracts muted poetry from lives that might seem either prosaic, like taxi drivers (A Room with a View) and people locked in a traffic jam (Waiting for the Light to Turn Green), or dangerous (Circus Girl). Carmelita, in Border Town, leaves her own baby at home "to love somebody else's child" as a nanny: "She keeps her distance and she tows the line/ Cause she knows where it's been drawn." Peters' world holds more ifs than epiphanies. "The secret of life," promised in the title song, turns out to be "nothin' at all."

Yet Peters, whose choir-girl voice has a seductive hint of late nights and cigarettes, knows the tunesmith's secret: crafting a good love song. The catchy, uptempo Over Africa sees love as "a force of nature...the power of need." And the passionately elegiac When You Are Old is a declaration of eternal devotion: "When your brave tales have all been told/ I'll ask for them when you are old." In Peters' music every tale is brave, unique, beautiful.

--By Richard Corliss