Grant Peeples
Everybody’s favorite Left-Neck singer/songwriter, Grant Peeples, is bringing his Bob Dylan tribute show to our area for the first time. Grant and five other bands will be doing more than two hours worth of Bob tunes at the Palladium on Friday, Oct. 12 at 8 p.m.
These shows – Bob Night: All Bob Dylan, All Night Long– have played to packed houses in cities around Florida, so don’t miss this one – especially since Grant says he’s hanging up his guitar for a while.
To find out more about the show and what’s happening with this rising star of the Americana music scene, I called Grant this week to catch up. Hope you enjoy the interview. I know you will enjoy the show. Here we go:
I know you’ve organized Bob Dylan tributes in other cities in Florida. What got you started with these Dylan shows?
Staying up too late at the Florida Folk Festival. It started with one of those campfire things when somebody plays a song and somebody else plays one based on a thread from the song. In this case it was a Dylan songs. We started just after midnight and at sunrise we were still going and nobody had repeated a song. My friend Carrie Hamby said, ‘We ought to take this to a stage sometime.” That was four years ago. Ten cities and maybe thirty shows.
How much of an influence is Dylan on your songwriting?
When I heard the words: “With your mercury mouth and you missionary eyes, and your eyes like smoke and your voice like rhymes, who among them do you think could bury you?” I knew that nobody had ever written a song like that. Ever. And that was how I wanted to use words.
Do you have a favorite Dylan era? The ‘60s? Blood on the Tracks era? The Time Out of Mind period? Or his resurgence in the new millennium?
I don’t look at him in terms or eras, I don’t think. But my three favorite albums are Blood on the Tracks, Blonde on Blonde and Street Legal.
Favorite song and why?
I think it would have to be “Things Have Changed,” which he wrote when he was 50. It is reflective without being preachy. It is both comedic and deadly dramatic. It is the story of his life in full circle, lyrical and passionate and groovy, a chorus that ramps up in the listeners head like boiling pot. “Been a lotta water under the bridge, and a lotta other stuff, too.” Who else could have written that?
Tell me about some of the other acts and musicians on the bill:
Free Hugs, whose center piece is Aaron O’Rourke, hands down the world’s best dulcimer player. He’s joined by Australian fiddle master, Mark Russell, and Erik Alvar, who is—ask anybody on the Florida folk scene—the best stand-up bass player within 1000 miles of the Palladium.
There’s Radio Free Carmela, who has played several Bob Night’s, and who will finish off the show with a rendition of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues that is worth the price of the ticket. We have Waking Giants, formerly Elysian Sex Drive (an unfortunate name change if there ever was one) who are an all-girl burn-down-the-house sorta band.
And then there is Sarah Mac Band. There is nobody like Sarah Mac. We’ve done quite a bit of singing together, and to stand next to her on the stage is like standing next to a steel furnace; and the people in the back of the room feel it, too. She’s a monster.
You recently announced that you were taking a break from touring. First, thanks for not cancelling your Palladium show. What prompted that decision and what’s next for Grant?
I ran out of gas. The taste for it all left my mouth. I had been running like a fool for over four years, trying to make a name for myself, and all of a sudden—-after a two month, 35-state summer tour–the taste for it all left my mouth. I have basically retired to my library, where I read about three or four hours a day, everything from Joyce to Jung to the Bible, Joseph Campbell, Shakespeare, a lucid Buddhist monk named Pema Chodron, poetry by these great poets that really speak to me, guys like Robinson Jeffers, Harvey Mudd, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
And then for about four or five hours a day I’ve been writing: some songs, a lot of poetry, and two plays. The poems are working for me, I’m breathing better in the creative process, I’m able to access concepts and ideas and rhythms that I just couldn’t do with songs. What’s next for me is about all of this, and where all this is going to lead. But there won’t be any picking up where I left off, I don’t think. That trail is cold. Maybe I’ll go around and read my poems.
Your latest album, Prior Convictions, is charting all over the place. Tell us a little about the album:
I didn’t realize it when I recorded it earlier this year that I was essentially making a record that defined and mapped out the causes and conditions that were centered in this change I was just speaking of. The ambiguity in the title itself frames the situation as it stands. I put Dylan’s “Things Have Changed” on the record, not really even cognizant of the personal symbolism that might be at play. There’s a song called Gunning For The Buddha which is about danger of belief. Every song is connected by a thread that ties back to the vulnerability of a conviction, a belief, a chosen path and the cliffs that lie beyond. I understand the record better today than I did early this summer.
When do we get a full Grant Peeples show back at the Palladium?
When’s your next poetry night?
For tickets and information on Bob Night, visit www.mypalladium.org. You can reach the Palladium box office by calling 727 822-3590.
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