Andrew Peterson
Over the last ten years Andrew Peterson has quietly carved out a niche for himself as one of the most thoughtful, poetic, and lyrical songwriters of his generation. More recently he’s established himself as the grassroots facilitator of an online literary and songwriting community (www.RabbitRoom.com) and an emerging fantasy novelist as well (The Wingfeather Saga). But it’s still ultimately that sense of rootedness that listeners, readers and fans seem to respond to most deeply—because Andrew’s songs (and books) remind us again and again of simple, solid things like love and friendship and hope and redemption and beauty and how our stories were meant to be shared, and how the darkness will not always hold sway, and how we, being human, need to hear those things over and over again, because otherwise we become disconnected from the very stories we’re living in.
Click here to listen to audio of Andrew Peterson speaking on Faith & the Arts in the Emmons Auditorium on February 15, 2013
Click here to listen to audio of Andrew Peterson speaking on Faith & the Arts in the Emmons Auditorium on February 15, 2013
Peterson is a founding member of the Square Peg Alliance, a group of Christian songwriters. He has toured with Steven Curtis Chapman, Caedmons's Call, Fernando Ortega, Michael Card and Bebo Norman. His regular touring band, The Captains Courageous consists of singer/songwriter/producers Andy Gullahorn and Ben Shive.
Peterson is currently writing a series of fantasy/adventure novels for young adults entitled The Wingfeather Saga published by Waterbrook Press, a subsidiary of Random House. The first novel, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, was released March 18, 2008. The second novel in the series Christie-award winning, North! Or Be Eaten was released August 18, 2009, and the third novel in the series, The Monster in the Hollows, was released in May 2011. The series will conclude in the forthcoming novel, The Warden and the Wolf King.
Peterson is currently writing a series of fantasy/adventure novels for young adults entitled The Wingfeather Saga published by Waterbrook Press, a subsidiary of Random House. The first novel, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, was released March 18, 2008. The second novel in the series Christie-award winning, North! Or Be Eaten was released August 18, 2009, and the third novel in the series, The Monster in the Hollows, was released in May 2011. The series will conclude in the forthcoming novel, The Warden and the Wolf King.
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Andrew Peterson has a fairly simple approach to songwriting: He writes the songs that he himself needs to hear, trusting that there are other people out there who might need them as well. And by the tens of thousands there have been. Peterson’s most loyal fans in fact, tend to be those who find resonance with the “glowing ache” that permeates his body of work. But it’s never been the ache of hopelessness or despair. Instead it’s the ache that comes from deeply loving something that has been lost, and from daring to hope that it will one day be restored. It’s the recognition that any pain we now feel is somehow inseparable from the joy that was intended for us from the creation of the world. And it’s the undying hope that that same pain is also a promise, a forward longing, a deposit of the redemption and restoration of the greater joy that is yet to come.
The songs on Peterson’s new Centricity Music release Light for the Lost Boy are deeply rooted in such paradoxes of the human condition, reflecting a grief permeated with light and hope and beauty and love. Andrew, perhaps better than any other songwriter today, recognizes the echoes of Eden and eternity that fill our daily lives for what they are.
“As I was reading over the lyrics,” Andrew says, “I realized that several of the songs had the image of this lost little boy haunting the woods. Sometimes he was on a happy adventure, other times brokenhearted and lost. Tolkien wrote ‘We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature…is still soaked with the sense of exile.’ We sense that something has been lost, but at the same time we have this fierce hope that heaven is breaking into our lives, and that a day is coming when all things will be made right again.”
The songs on Peterson’s new Centricity Music release Light for the Lost Boy are deeply rooted in such paradoxes of the human condition, reflecting a grief permeated with light and hope and beauty and love. Andrew, perhaps better than any other songwriter today, recognizes the echoes of Eden and eternity that fill our daily lives for what they are.
“As I was reading over the lyrics,” Andrew says, “I realized that several of the songs had the image of this lost little boy haunting the woods. Sometimes he was on a happy adventure, other times brokenhearted and lost. Tolkien wrote ‘We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature…is still soaked with the sense of exile.’ We sense that something has been lost, but at the same time we have this fierce hope that heaven is breaking into our lives, and that a day is coming when all things will be made right again.”
