NASHVILLE singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters wrote two sets of lyrics and music for the title cut of newly released ninth studio album, Hello Cruel World but which did she choose?

The survivor’s anthem version won her vote and now opens the record, setting its tone and theme.

“There were two completely different songs; the first was a more happy-sounding song, which had a couple of the same lines about being a lucky girl,” says Gretchen, who will be introducing York to her cruel world when she plays Fibbers on Thursday.

“That song was more about the break-up of a personal relationship, but I felt that’s didn’t say enough and just didn’t hit the mark…though I loved the title, which seemed to encapsulate my world view and contained what was on the album: a fairly sad set of songs but with an optimistic bent and an intent to hang in there.”

Gretchen had experienced a year of turmoil. “In 2010 the universe threw its best and its worst at me. Some of it was personal, some global. All of it seemed to demand that I re-define my ideas of permanence and re-evaluate what I believe in, to rethink what is real,” she says.

First came the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, an eco-disaster at the doorsteps of the cottage in the Florida panhandle where she writes much of her material. Then a friend of 30 years committed suicide in his Colorado home, followed soon by the worst flood in Nashville’s history.

On the home front, her son, James, revealed he was transgender, and Gretchen married her long-time piano accompanist, Barry Walsh.

What an extraordinary year, Gretchen. “It was. Extraordinary is the right word. It wasn’t a tragic year; it was an eventful, and for a songwriter it was a gift,” she says.

“In terms of sifting through all that, the fact that so much happened so quickly, as a writer I realised that the only way to approach it was to let it sink in and see what came out, so it was much more organic and subterranean than just writing a song about a flood, which would have felt wrong, telescoping it into a short line.

“It was all a huge reminder that I was not in control, and that applies as much to my son’s revelation as the flood. It’s nature.

“I think the connection I wanted to make was between nature and spirituality. Somehow we look at them as disconnected but I feel really compelled to connect them as so much of what’s happened was a force of nature, and I think it feels healing to then connect them.”

This natural world is part of our heaven and part of our hell, she suggests. “That’s why there are a few digs at organised religion on the album because of the tendency to disconnect the two and I vehemently disagree with that. The inclination of humans is to look at floods, earthquakes, and think there must be a reason, and there’s a spiritual turning that comes at that time. For me it was a clarifying process in terms of what’s really important.

“It gets your priorities straight,” says 54-year old Gretchen. “You find that things that are core to you become clear and the rest of it is bull. That’s a soul-searching experience.

“We put on a lot of facades to get on with each other and then these events make you think ‘I’m going to say what I believe’. What happened didn’t make me more religious. In fact, it turned me more against it, but it certainly opened my heart.”

Her 27-year-old son James’s transgender transition had the most impact on her. “I see it as beautiful and triumphant,” says Gretchen. “My son’s bravery and honesty inspire me every day, and to be able to help him and be an advocate was huge for me. That was the most thing heart-opening of all.

“As a songwriter, you have to have empathy to get inside a character’s head, and that really increased my empathy as James went through it – and he’s still doing it. It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Gretchen reflects upon the accumulative effect of her year of turmoil in the album’s second track, Saint Francis, where she writes of wounds and signs leading to “a stirring in your soul again ’til sweet amnesia takes a hold’. “We fall asleep thinking things are going along OK and nothing is changing, but then suddenly there are these confluences of all these rivers and you realise all these things are happening and you wake up for a little while – and my goal is to stay awake and write about it,” she says.

In her duet with Rodney Crowell, Dark Angel, Gretchen posits that “life is still a beautiful disaster”, and over the album’s span, she highlights the triumph of survival in our complex and difficult times and espouses finding strength, joy and growth in everyday life.

“I’m inspired by the courage of people who endure, and that’s the theme of this record” she says. “I’m inspired by those who are just enduring and persisting, rather than those who rescue people from buildings. It’s a quiet kind of heroism that people do not normally recognise.”

Appreciating the everyday “would seem to be a good start to change our way of looking at things,” urges Gretchen. “It’s a truism that everyone thinks the world is going to hell in a handcart, though that’s always been the case, but we are more in touch with our animal side now,” she says.

“That might sound blasphemous but I don’t mean in the sense of our base nature. We get so entrenched in these belief systems and get so involved in fighting each other because ‘my belief system is better than your belief system’, so we forget what the basic good things are.

“What I went through in those 18 months made me appreciate the basic things in life: to love each other, not judge each other.”

Gretchen believes that people judge and castigate out of fear. “But if you can put your fear aside and judge with compassion, a lot goes away. You have to have compassion for the person who decides life is not worth living and takes their life. The big message is that people are fallible and you’re not in control. You have to accept what is,” she says. “I think about animals a lot and how brilliant they are at doing that. They don’t have this belief that they’re in control of everything like we do.”

And so, Gretchen came to write the second version of Hello Cruel World that then held sway. “I did it really late on, just a couple of days before going into the recording studio,” she says. “This time it was less a me-to-you song and more of a manifesto.”

“Some folks go the easy route,” she sings. “Numb the pain or put the lights out, either way they got to go. Me, I’m gonna stick around, in for a penny, in for a pound, ’cause I hate to miss the show.”

Don’t miss Gretchen’s show at Fibbers on Thursday. Box office: 0844 477 1000.