A lifetime of music and faith

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Friday, February 7th.

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Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Charlie Peacock is a musician and music producer based in Nashville. He’s a 40 year veteran of the music industry—working with a variety of musical styles. But few artists have wrestled with the intersection of faith and art as he has. WORLD Reporter Steve West had an opportunity to talk with him late last year about his memoir titled Roots and Rhythm, released earlier this week.

MUSIC: [EVERY HEARTBEAT]

STEVE WEST: Some listeners may remember this Grammy winning, 1991 chart-topping song sung by Amy Grant. But less known is that Charlie Peacock co-wrote “Every Heartbeat” with Grant and Wayne Kirkpatrick, arranged the track, and played keyboards on it.

It’s just one of the many recordings Peacock issued, produced, or appeared on during his decades of work in the music industry. From 1989 to 1999 alone—Peacock’s Nashville Christian music decade—he produced more than 70 recordings, had over 1,000 credits on albums and singles, and garnered six Grammy Awards. Christian music artists like Sara Groves and Switchfoot and mainstream artists The Civil Wars and Holly Williams saw projects come to fruition under his direction.

As he explains in his memoir, his story didn’t begin in Nashville but in the Northern California farming country of Yorba City. It’s a place and time he credits with making him the kind of artist he became as he spent time with grandparents who were subsistence farmers.

CHARLIE PEACOCK: I think it made me one kind of artist and not another, because I think it stimulated my imagination in ways that they wouldn't have been ….[T]hey didn't have the kind of … intellectual verbal prowess that comes often with people that are intellectuals, but they had an intelligence that was off the charts in terms of survival and in terms of imagination, and I think growing up in that kind of place made me a particular kind of artist.

Music, particularly jazz, became an early obsession. Peacock performed regular gigs in the Sacramento and Bay areas, both as a supporting musician and with the Charlie Peacock Group.

MUSIC: [NO MAGAZINES]

But alcohol, drugs, and Beat writer Jack Keroauc were also influential. He writes in Roots and Rhythm that “there was a nonconformist artist just starting inside my teenage self, and Keroauc put language to it.” He later realized that the Dharma Bum was a poor surrogate parent.

After marrying his high school sweetheart Andi at the age of 18, and with their home lives unraveling, he faced the hardscrabble existence of a musician with responsibilities. It was a time he describes as “seven years of youthful fails, uncertainty, chaos, blood-dripping wounds, and deep trauma and pain undealt with.”

It was a fellow musician, jazz saxophonist Mike Butera, who supplied the missing piece: the Gospel.

MUSIC: [THE WAY OF LOVE]

PEACOCK: [T]here was like a line drawn in the sand of my life. And you know, I knew that if I stepped over it into this life with Jesus, life truly would never be the same .… And that just infused my life with meaning and purpose and direction in such a phenomenal way …. I really met my match in Jesus in terms of the interconnectedness and … just seamless integrity of his message and invitation, and then how it worked with everything that I had seen in creation and how I had adopted that as an artist. So it was kind of like just the lights came on.

By the early ’8os, Peacock was spending less time with the Sacramento art crowd. He joined a thriving alternative Christian music scene fostered by Sacramento-based Warehouse Christian Ministries, releasing his own records and producing others.

MUSIC: [WATCHING ETERNITY]

But it was after parting ways with Warehouse in the late ’80s that his career took off. He moved to Nashville with Andi and began a full stable of music production work. Among the artists he worked with were Margaret Becker, Out of the Grey, and Twila Paris. And yet after a decade of work in the Contemporary Christian Music genre, he took a hiatus.

PEACOCK: When I came here, I realized, oh my gosh. You know, I love that I'm around all these brothers and sisters. But also, I didn't realize, “Oh, they've created this genre of music, right?” And they think it's the highest and best use of music, and they're monetizing it and focusing all of this branding and marketing energy on it.

That’s when he decided that working exclusively in the contemporary Christian music business was not where God would have him be.

PEACOCK: You know, that's not my calling. My calling is to be God's musical person everywhere and in everything, in as much as he calls me to that which was a completely different model for following Christ and artistry than this mechanism of what was called contemporary Christian music …. [E]ven though I was delighted to be there, working with the people and making music and all of that, but just systematically, … incrementally, year after year, it just became like, I just can't do this anymore. And that … was a big turning point.

What came next was a year’s stint in seminary, heading up a commercial music program at Lipscomb University, and a series of jazz albums that harkened back to his roots in music. In short: more feverish work, more striving to succeed.

MUSIC: [FRANK THE MARXIST MEMORIAL GONG BLUES]

He writes: “In my early 60s, I began to accept the life I had lived: five decades of festering anger, exhausting hypervigilance, a fierce survival instinct, and the unrelenting need to protect and provide for my family, no matter the cost.”

It took an eight-year neurological disorder called “central sensitization”, manifesting in a 24/7 headache, to help bring Peacock to a place of peace. He says the reduced endurance and energy he’s left with has allowed him to put his “empire-building and -maintaining” behind him.

PEACOCK: I've changed so much …. [I]t created space and time … for reflection, put me in the place of many great teachers and people whom God has … appointed for healing …. [I]t caused me to work on things like generational trauma and anger and to put those things before God in prayer.

Like his memoir, last August’s album release of the rootsy, faith-filled Every Kind of Uh-Oh was its own looking back, and a suggestion of what was to come. The lead cut recounts his first date with wife Andi at the age of 15.

MUSIC: [TURTLE IN A CHINESE FOOD BOX]

You wouldn’t know Peacock’s dialed back, and he’s certainly not retired. Since August last year, he released three projects: Every Kind of Uh-Oh, an album of hooky, pop songs titled Big Hope, Big Love, Big Everything—as well as the EP Mad Funky and Some Chill. Not to mention his career-capping memoir.

MUSIC: [GET YOURSELF SOME]

There’s a confessional nature to Every Kind of Uh-Oh. Writing a memoir is a way of reminding yourself who you are as well as a summing up of one’s life, of saying what matters. So perhaps it’s natural that the songs on the album echo that as well.

PEACOCK: It's a yielding to wanting to make a statement at this time of life, after having done a lot of music outside the realm of explicit profession, to just say again … at 68 years of age … I've always been following. This is who I am, you know ….[I]n the song, “Get Yourself Some,” that's very evident.

I’m Steve West.

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