Vanessa Peters-The Burden of Unshakeable Proof

In the last ten years, Vanessa has played over 1000 shows in 11 countries, receiving accolades from abroad and in her hometown of Dallas, where she was recently nominated as “Best Folk Artist” by The Dallas Observer. She continues to tour the US and in Europe, where she has a strong fan base thanks to the albums she made with her former Italian band, Ice Cream on Mondays, and the hundreds of shows she has played in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Denmark. On March 1, 2016, she will release her latest album, “The Burden of Unshakeable Proof,” and will follow its release with touring in the US and Europe.

After the critical and commercial success of her Kickstarter-financed 2012 album “The Burn The Truth The Lies” and the recent success in Europe of “With The Sentimentals,” recorded in Denmark with the band of the same name, Vanessa Peters will release her latest full-length album, “The Burden of Unshakeable Proof” on March 1, 2016 in the US (European release date TBD).

“The Burden of Unshakeable Proof” is already being called “fully realized, written with elegance and imagination.” Recorded by producer Rip Rowan (Old 97s, Rhett Miller) at their home studio in Dallas, the album was a long-time coming, in part because their studio was built from the ground up over the last two years. Rather than pay for studio time elsewhere, Vanessa waited patiently while the studio took shape and finally came to life last summer. “It was a labor of love in the truest sense,” she says. “Rip was out there everyday, in full-on carpenter and engineer mode. He worked like a dog, but I think there were moments both of us feared it would never end. We were both so ready to get started on recording, but we just had to wait. However,  in some respects it was good that it took so long, because I just kept writing and editing.”
                              
Vanessa and Rip called into their good friends to join them in the studio, and the band  ended up tracking nearly 25 songs. Culling the batch down to 10 songs wasn’t easy; at one point they even considered releasing a double album. But ultimately, Vanessa chose 10 songs that were tied together by a common thread: determination in the face of despair, and the willingness to shed the shackles of the past in order to move forward.  Both “Delicate” and “Mending Fences” deal with feelings of being overwhelmed by the crush of  today’s fast-paced life; “Cage” is the story of modern relationships that play out on the screen for all the world to see, and “Paralysis Bug” is a song that anyone who has ever struggled to get out of bed will understand. But there are moments of hope, too; “Let’s Do This” is a buoyant, energetic pop gem about courage and chutzpah, and “Atmosphere” is a soft, gauzy love song held up in the sky by the underpinnings of a gorgeous, swelling guitar line.

There’s a distinct side A and side B to the album – all the more fitting since this is the first album that Vanessa will release on vinyl. “The Burden of Unshakeable Proof” will be released on March 1, 2016 and on vinyl on Palo Santo Records later this year.
On stage, Vanessa and Rip often play shows as a duo, with Rip playing the drums and keyboard simultaneously and Vanessa taking the lead on acoustic and the very-occasional electric guitar. They are fortunate to be joined from time to time on electric guitar by Grammy-winning guitar player Joe Reyes, excellent Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Markham, the fantastic Daniele Fiaschi from Rome, or uber-talented Dallas guitarist Nick Earl. 2016 will find the band playing a number of shows in the US and in Europe in support of the new album’s release.