Gretchen Peters's new album Blackbirds features a who's who of modern American roots music: Jerry Douglas, Jason Isbell, Jimmy LaFave, Will Kimbrough, Kim Richey, Suzy Bogguss and more.

The album tackles the subject of getting older and death. Peters's started work on the album In the summer of 2013. During this time there was one week where she went to three memorial services and a wedding and she realise that the older you get the more the memorial services start coming with alarming frequency and the weddings are infrequent.

For inspiration she was drawn to artists who had faced their own aging and mortality in their work (Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Lowe), but these were all tackling the subject from a male perspective.

Geographically, the album tours America, with stops in southern Louisiana at the scene of a crime ('Blackbirds'), Pelham, New York, where Peters probes the hidden darkness of the leafy suburbia in which she grew up ('The House On Auburn Street'), and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where a fisherman lays his wife to rest after losing everything in the BP oil spill ('Black Ribbons'). '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, and 'Nashville' brings us back to Peters's adopted hometown.

It's a beautiful album with plenty of tracks here to suit all tastes. There's also a deluxe edition which includes an additional four tracks ('If Heaven' ,'The Secret of Life', 'On a Bus to St. Cloud' and 'Independence Day'). It's a beautiful album, just make sure you check which edition you're buying.

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Nick Smithson