Cellar Sessions: Peter Oren - Anthropocene August 31st, 2017 City Winery New York

Peter Oren sits down for a One On One Session at City Winery New York on August 31st, 2017. Watch the full session here: https://youtu.be/0uZrOqoVo18 For more info visit: http://peteroren.com Audio & Video by: Ehud Lazin

Setlist:

Anthropocene

Falling Water

Picture From Spain

Indiana-born, everywhere-based singer-songwriter Peter Oren possesses a remarkable

singing voice, low and deep and richly textured: as solid as a glacier, as big as a

mountain. Similar in its baritone gravel to Bill Callahan, a hero of his, it rumbles in your

conscience, a righteous sound that marks him as an artist for our tumultuous times,

when sanity seems absent from popular discussions. His voice is ideally suited to

confront a topic as large and as ominous as the Anthropocene Age.

That term is relatively new, reportedly coined in the 1960s but popularized only in the

new century to designate a new epoch in the earth’s history, when man has exerted a

permanent—and, many would argue, an incredibly deleterious—change in the

environment. Sea levels are rising, plants and animals facing mass extinctions; it may be

humanity’s final epoch, which makes it a massive and daunting subject for a lone singer-

songwriter to address, let alone a young musician making his second full-length record.

But Oren has both the singing voice and the songwriting voice to put it all into

perspective. The songs on Anthropocene, his first album for Western Vinyl, are direct

and poetic, outraged and measured, taking in the entire fucked-up world from his fixed

point of view.

Art and activism are inseparable on these ten songs, each bolstering the other. “There’s

no separating art from reality,” says Oren. “The reality is that our politics are guided by

our emotions, and music has the capacity to demonstrate those emotions, at least on an

individual level. And if you can talk to someone on an individual level, you might be able

to have a more useful conversation than if you’re talking to a roomful of people.”

Oren hails from Columbus, Indiana, a city famed for its midcentury modern architecture

(and as the hometown of our current vice president). Yet, as he notes on the sober

“Falling Water,” the town is “named for a murderer and a misnomer”—not a brave

explorer but a greedy exploiter. “What do you do when you’re from a place that’s

named after a genocidal figure?” he asks, not quite rhetorically. “It’s a difficult thing to

come to terms with: the long history of segregation that is by a long stretch not over.”

He began putting his thoughts down in poetry while a high school student, later picking

up a guitar and setting his verses to music.