It’s much riskier for women than men to write about ageing and mortality. Nashville singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters opens up to CHARLES HUTCHINSON on time slipping away.

SO much for Four Weddings And A Funeral. Nashville singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters could feel the sands of time slipping through her fingers when she went to three memorials and a wedding in one week.

“It was during the summer of 2013, when I began writing songs for Blackbirds,” says the 57-year-old new inductee to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

“It dawned on me that this is the way it goes as you get older: the memorial services start coming with alarming frequency and the weddings are infrequent and thus somehow more moving.”

Released last month, Blackbirds faces down death on 11 tracks of dark grit and delicate beauty, as can be witnessed in concert at Harrogate Royal Hall tomorrow night on Gretchen’s 16-date British tour.

She had found herself drawn to artists courageous enough to face their own ageing and mortality in their work – Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Lowe – but noticed that all the material was coming from a male perspective.

“As brave an artistic risk as it may be for a man, it’s much riskier for a woman to speak about it,” says Gretchen. “Ageing seems to be a taboo subject for female singer-songwriters, in part because our value has depended so much on our youth and sexuality. I want to write about that stuff because it’s real, it’s there, and so few women seem to be talking about it.”

Co-produced with Doug Lancio and Barry Walsh and recorded in Nashville, Blackbirds features a who’s who of modern American roots music: Jerry Douglas, Jason Isbell, Jimmy LaFave, Will Kimbrough, Kim Richey, Suzy Bogguss, the list goes on; all testament to why Gretchen Peters, the songwriters’ songwriter was inducted into Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

“When you read the names in that hall of fame, I think, ‘what am I doing there?’ It’s overwhelming in the best possible way as I have spent so much of my time in a room writing; so much of my work has been solitary,” says Gretchen.

“So to have that acknowledgement by those who weren’t even my co-writers, it’s such a public pat on the back. Having said that, I did go my own way in Nashville [she moved there from Boulder, Colorado in the late-1980s], but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important to be part of that Nashville community.”

Not only Nashville has had an impact on her songwriting. “I was born just outside New York City and lived there until I was 13, then spent the rest of my growing-up years in Colorado, so my experiences were sort of equally split between the two and both were influential,” says Gretchen.

At 57, Grammy nominee Gretchen’s songwriting captures the complex, conflicting, and overwhelming emotional adult moments we might otherwise try to hide and instead shines a light of truth and understanding on them.

“I’m working perhaps as hard as I ever have done to become a better writer,” she says. “Writers in general have the luxury over other artists of being able to improve into old age, as you can intrinsically get better and that’s a wonderful thing. In my assessment, I think I’ve done the best writing of my career in the past five years.

“I’m very attentive; I’m doing it for its own sake, not that I didn’t do that before, but I think they were commercially driven songs, and as much as I fought being in the belly of the beast, it had an effect on me. It was only when I took a left turn ten years ago on the Burnt Offerings album that I took a step forward, because it was a step away from the Nashville songwriting factory.”

This time she co-write several tunes with frequent tour compadre Ben Glover, evoking the Seventies folk rock of Neil Young, David Crosby, and Joni Mitchell on which she grew up, but now with a more haunted, country-noir vibe simmering below the surface.

Blackbirds takes heart-rending stops in southern Louisiana at the scene of a crime on the title track; at Pelham, New York, on The House On Auburn Street, where Peters probes the hidden darkness of the leafy suburbia of her childhood; and in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, on Black Ribbons, where a fisherman lays his wife to rest after losing everything in the BP oil spill.

When All You Got Is A Hammer is the story of a veteran struggling to adjust to life at home after fighting overseas, while The Cure For The Pain takes place in the waning days of illness in a hospital.

“If there’s an overall theme to Blackbirds, I think it would be our mortality. That was in my mind when I was writing it. I’m in my mid-50s; my mum’s in her 90s; my father died in 2007. There’s a coming-to-terms with it that has to happen, and that’s a lot of what this album is about. There are all manner of thoughts on it, some of them darker than others, but always picking up rocks and looking underneath to see what’s there.

“I learnt from the last album [2012’s Hello Cruel World] that if I wrote just a little from the edge, or sometimes beyond that, those were the songs that really cut it with people. I wanted to go further on this one, though who knows what will happen with the next one...”

• Gretchen Peters plays Harrogate Royal Hall tomorrow, 7.30pm. Box office: 01423 502116 or at harrogatetheatre.co.uk