YOU haven’t heard of Gretchen Peters? In America, they call her the songwriter’s songwriter, newly inducted into the Nashville Hall of Fame.

Only Lucinda Williams rivals her for writing roots songs with such an understanding of the complexities of life. It all began with Gretchen attending three memorial services and a wedding in one week, a week that led her to focus on mortality and the progress to more dispatches than matches.

“Ageing seems to be a taboo subject for female singer-songwriters”, says Gretchen, who wants to “write about that stuff because it’s real”.

Real and raw, fearless and frank, this country-noir is devastating in its impact on the war veteran’s lament When All You Got Is Hammer, the murder ballad Blackbirds, the death throes of The Cure For The Pain and the lost soul’s despair of Everything Falls Away, a song in waiting for a movie soundtrack.