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<br /><br />Setlist:<br />Anthropocene<br />Falling Water<br />Picture From Spain<br /><br />Indiana-born, everywhere-based singer-songwriter Peter Oren possesses a remarkable<br />singing voice, low and deep and richly textured: as solid as a glacier, as big as a<br />mountain. Similar in its baritone gravel to Bill Callahan, a hero of his, it rumbles in your<br />conscience, a righteous sound that marks him as an artist for our tumultuous times,<br />when sanity seems absent from popular discussions. His voice is ideally suited to<br />confront a topic as large and as ominous as the Anthropocene Age.<br />That term is relatively new, reportedly coined in the 1960s but popularized only in the<br />new century to designate a new epoch in the earth’s history, when man has exerted a<br />permanent—and, many would argue, an incredibly deleterious—change in the<br />environment. Sea levels are rising, plants and animals facing mass extinctions; it may be<br />humanity’s final epoch, which makes it a massive and daunting subject for a lone singer-<br />songwriter to address, let alone a young musician making his second full-length record.<br />But Oren has both the singing voice and the songwriting voice to put it all into<br />perspective. The songs on Anthropocene, his first album for Western Vinyl, are direct<br />and poetic, outraged and measured, taking in the entire fucked-up world from his fixed<br />point of view.<br />Art and activism are inseparable on these ten songs, each bolstering the other. “There’s<br />no separating art from reality,” says Oren. “The reality is that our politics are guided by<br />our emotions, and music has the capacity to demonstrate those emotions, at least on an<br />individual level. And if you can talk to someone on an individual level, you might be able<br />to have a more useful conversation than if you’re talking to a roomful of people.”<br />Oren hails from Columbus, Indiana, a city famed for its midcentury modern architecture<br />(and as the hometown of our current vice president). Yet, as he notes on the sober<br />“Falling Water,” the town is “named for a murderer and a misnomer”—not a brave<br />explorer but a greedy exploiter. “What do you do when you’re from a place that’s<br />named after a genocidal figure?” he asks, not quite rhetorically. “It’s a difficult thing to<br />come to terms with: the long history of segregation that is by a long stretch not over.”<br />He began putting his thoughts down in poetry while a high school student, later picking<br />up a guitar and setting his verses to music.
