The first album that I listened to today has been on the iPhone for about a week now and this is really the first time that I listened to it all the way through. It’s the latest release from Grant Peeples & the Peeples Republik, Punishing the Myth This is Peeples’ fourth studio release and the third in s row produced by Gurf Morlix. I caught onto Peeples music at Prior Convictions the second Morlix produced album.
Grant’s first release has one of the best album names ever Okra and Ecclesiastes! So what kinda’ 
person gives their album titles like that, the kind of songwriter that writes songs like “Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns” and Gay and Lesbian Sons and Daughters of the Southern Confederacy”. That’s right ‘a great one!! And with Punishing the Myth he has hit it out of the park again. What does Punishing the Myth contain? I’ll let Grant answer that one – from his website:
A Greg Brown song, trumpets, B-3 organs
An execution duet with Eliza Gilkyson
A vehement poem: “High Octane Generation”
A love song to a long-dead lesbian aunt
A Texas diatribe: “It’s Too Late to Live in Austin”
A ‘who-the-hell-is-that?’ chick singer: it’s Sarah Mac
A Buddhist’s epiphany and a patriot’s lament
A soft stab at romance with an M-1 carbine
Born in Tallahassee in 1957 Peeples had a normal childhood in his biography he says it was in Tallahassee that he…
…..learned to crawl and walk and talk and ride a bike, tie my shoes. I went to school and learned to read and spell badly, to crawl under the desk when Khrushchev fired a missile at us. I hunted, fished, rode horses, read books about Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln. By the time I was twelve I had learned the Racing. words to every Roger Miller song Continue Reading
I let him tell it because he can do it better, than I can paraphrase it! Hey, he learned to crawl under his desk too!!
Peeples had two major epiphanies in his life. The first was in 1972 was when his friend High Roche came over and played Dylan’s “Desolation Row”, “Just Like a Woman” and :Girl from the North Country” on his guitar for Grant. At that point, Grant says:
…. I was forever and irrevocably changed. After that, everything—I mean every God damned thing—was different. Especially me. That whole sensible linear cosmology I had embraced so naturally was transformed into a metaphoric island hub, where I stood with a thousand roads before me, spoking and forking and forking again into infinite space, challenging and confounding the grasp of my newly hatched imagination. The colors, the textures, the meanings of words were all now immediately subjective….
Then years later after being in Nashville for a while, having a career which ended in failure, as the owner of a night club, and spending some time working with a band he ended up spending some time with his old friends in the Wakulla Band. Snorri, Susan and William Solburg, who had a recording studio in Sopchoppy called the Possum Club.They recorded some songs Grant had written …I’ll let Grant tell you the story again
….William, a metaphysical bass player with a possum grin, was very encouraging to me. “You got something,” he told me “You need to just go on and a make a record.”He offered the studio and the time of the band, but shortly after that I moved to a remote island in the Caribbean off the Coast of Nicaragua.
After spending ten years of non-song writing on that island, Grant got the itch to start songwriting again. He called William and asked about those old tapes and well Grant says……
…..A week later, when I was back on the island, I got an email telling me that William was gone. Killed by a drunk driver on the way home from the Possum Club. When Snorri wrote, he said that before his brother had gotten in his truck to leave that night, they had dug up the tape that had The Well on it and played it!
and from that point on Grant’s been writing, and singing his songs and he has no plans to stop and that’s a good thing for all of us!!!
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Here’s the opening track from Punishing the Myth – “You’re a Slave to Your Imagination” Hey, who is that chick singer! oh yeah it’s Sarah Mac….
