ERIC BRACE AND THOMM JUTZ: STILL A-SINGIN'
- By Alan Richard
- 2 days ago
- 21 min read
NASHVILLE — More than three years after writer and musician Peter Cooper passed away, but Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz are now able to write, sing, and talk about their late friend like they were with him yesterday.
The enormous hole that Peter left among his loved ones, in Nashville, and among his two brothers-in-music is evident on Circle and Square, the duo’s beautiful new album on Red Beet Records, a collection of gorgeous, restrained, folk-oriented songs about Peter and art and how the universe shapes itself.
Peter’s memory is also present on Jutz’s new solo record, Ring-A-Bellin’. Easily his best, it’s filled with meditative, autobiographical songwriting that at times approaches the genius of Jutz’s idol, the late great Townes Van Zandt.
Speaking of idols, Jutz and Peter became close friends of the legendary country singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall, who passed away in 2021 and is also ever-present on both new albums.
During the pandemic shutdown, Jutz (pronounced “you-tz”) was going through old files on his computer when he ran across the lyrics to Life of the Mind, which he and Cooper had written as “a meditation on the weird things Tom T. said,” Jutz said.
Jutz asked Brace to add music, making it the last song the trio would ever write together. It’s brilliant, like the luminary it’s about, and references the Carter Family Fold and the late Rev. Will Campbell, the civil rights-focused Southern minister:
A long sad summer
Green grass grows
The world ain’t for man
Every bluebird knows
It’s a shot in the dark
With an echo of crows
Living a life of the mind …
Go pull a rabbit
From your old hat…
One last question
What the hell was all that
Living a life of the mind…
“Tom T. and Peter live inside me now, ancestors of a sort. I talk to them a lot,” Jutz writes in the Ring-a-Bellin’ liner notes.
The saddest song on Circle and Square is Brace’s tribute to Peter, who died in December 2022 from a head injury suffered in a fall. “I wasn’t planning on writing a song about Peter, but it was about a year later that I started strumming my guitar and finger picking, and suddenly this tune that became Nothing Hurts started coming out,” Brace said. “Because I was angry with him, of course. Why did you leave?”
Got a chorus
For a brand new song
It’s an okay chorus
But it needs you singing along
Find the part
Where you sing way up high
Any day now
I’ll quit asking why…
No more music
No more words
No more nothing
Nothing hurts…
Brace was inspired by the old Carter Family song, There’ll Be No Distinction There, which says “there will be no more sorrow on that heavenly shore.” At the time, Brace couldn’t find any peace in Peter’s death, not yet, not from this side of the looking glass.
“I'm glad Thomm felt that it deserved to be on our new record,” he said. “There’s anger and sadness in there, there’s also love and joy inside it.”
From Europe to Nashville
I first heard Brace’s golden voice and Jutz’s fine flatpicking about 15 years ago when Peter invited me to Brace’s house in East Nashville for one of the trio’s living room concerts, broadcast online. Ever since, I’ve cherished the music these three guys have made — and especially now as a way of remembering Peter, knowing that Brace and Jutz felt his loss so deeply.
Expert songwriters with a rich knowledge of American folk, bluegrass, and the best of country music, Brace came out of Washington, D.C.’s punk-influenced, roots-rock scene, while Jutz’s journey was a bit more winding.
Jutz must be the first German I’ve met who plays bluegrass. He began learning piano at the age of 5, then flute when he was 6. His parents were teachers. He studied classical guitar, then jazz, under two different Italian music teachers.
When he was 11-and-a-half, he saw Bobby Bare perform on TV, and Nashville began calling his name. What did Bare sing? “Detroit City and (Just Pour Me Another) Tequila Sheila,” Jutz says without hesitation. (He later got to know Bare, who’s now 91.)
Jutz immediately fell in love with songwriting — the clever storytelling, the emotion, the personalness. “Seeing something bigger, the creator, the trickster,” as he puts it, referencing Hermes, the Greek orator of the gods. “From that moment on, there was just no looking back.”
He started playing his sister’s guitar, then applied to the music conservatory in Stuttgart and began playing in rock and blues bands. “It was just more exciting to smoke cigarettes and drink beers” at the time than play classical music, he said.
Jutz met his future wife, Eva, when he was 15 and she was 14. Eva’s father was a civil engineer, and they’d lived in Maryland, where she became fluent in English and heard Springsteen and other American singer-songwriters. She brought some of that music home to Jutz.
Soon, Jutz discovered the maestro Doc Watson and other American pickers, beginning a lifelong exploration that led him to 1920s and 1930s string-band and hillbilly music, early jazz, and blues. One of Jutz’s favorite albums is Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft, partly based on minstrelsy in American music.
On his new song Sharpen Your Knife, Jutz plays an ancient-sounding 1922 Gibson guitar-banjo, a popular instrument from the 1920s used in Papa Charlie Jackson’s “hokum” music.
“The kind of music I want to make has always been Black and white,” Jutz said.
Jutz came to the U.S. for the first Townes Van Zandt Wake at the Old Quarter Acoustic Café in Galveston, Texas. There he met troubadour singer-songwriter Richard Dobson, who lived in Switzerland, became a great friend, and released several albums that Jutz produced. Dobson suggested Jutz and his wife move to Nashville, so they entered the Green Card lottery and came to Music City.
“I thought I’d play guitar on Lower Broadway, but I never did,” Jutz said. Had he known the depth of talent in Nashville, in fact, he never would’ve come to town. “Ignorance is truly bliss.”
Jutz met David Olney through the songwriter’s wife, from Germany. (I mentioned how much I love Olney’s Women Across the River, once recorded by Linda Ronstadt. “Played it many times,” Jutz said.)
After playing with Olney, who told him that 40 people at each gig means you’ve built a career, Jutz got to know Steve Young and made a record with him. At a pub gig, he met Mary Gauthier and ended up playing with her for the next three years in the era of her incredible song and album Mercy Now.
Jutz played on some studio sessions for the great Nanci Griffith, then joined her band full-time for five years, co-producing her 2009 album, The Loving Kind.
The inspiration and lessons from these great songwriters eventually led him to get more serious about his own writing. He bought a house with space for a studio and settled into a new groove. Incredibly prolific, Jutz’s songs have been recorded by Billy Strings, John Prine, The SteelDrivers, Kim Richey, Ms. Griffith, and others. He has released several solo albums and collaborations with duet partners.
Jutz was named the 2021 International Bluegrass Music Association’s Songwriter of the Year. His 2020 album, To Live in Two Worlds, Volume 1, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.
He got to know Peter, who played a leading role in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s exhibits and programming for many years, when Peter opened for Ms. Griffith at the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, Virginia.
Through Peter, a tremendous singer-songwriter, Jutz got to know Brace, a singer-songwriter and founder of the D.C.-based roots-rock band Last Train Home. They became brothers.
Ten years ago, Jutz began teaching part-time in Belmont University’s songwriting program, and during the pandemic he earned a master’s degree in Appalachian Studies from East Tennessee State University. Now he teaches songwriting and works with students in individual sessions at Belmont full time. “When I’m not there (working with others), I’m writing and recording (on my own),” Jutz said.
In April, he showed me around the old Bradley and Columbia Studios on Music Row, now home to the songwriting program at the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Industry at Belmont. Jutz’s office is only steps from the room where brothers Owen and Harold Bradley produced classics like Patsy Cline’s Crazyand I Fall to Pieces. You can stand where she did when she sang. There’s a grand piano in Studio A played on the soundtrack to Mary Poppins.
From 1962 to 1982, Studio A was also home to many recordings by Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, The Byrds (a good portion of their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album), and Charlie Rich (Behind Closed Doors and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World). The diagram of the floor setup for Rich’s sessions is framed on the wall just outside the studio.
In neighboring Studio B, the famous Quonset Hut, Bob Dylan made Nashville Skyline and Blonde on Blonde. It was also home to sessions for Marty Robbins, Brenda Lee, and hundreds of others. Incredibly, Columbia Records later used the room for office space, Jutz said.
Jutz’s new album, recorded mostly live, is largely about the art of becoming. It’s poetic and it comes with a companion book of lyrics and liner notes, inspired in part by Peter, who wrote quite a few album notes for different artists over the years.
“As hopeless as it may seem, as pointless as it sometimes seems,” Jutz said, “I think it’s still a noble thing to do, to write poetry and write songs.”
His album title comes from the lyrics on Rag and Bone, a song about junk dealers who’d ring a bell when trapsing through Jutz’s hometown in Germany searching for castaway items they could sell. Written with Adam Wright, the song is also about making music outside the mainstream.
They tried to use “bell-a-ringing” in the song, but it didn’t rhyme, Jutz said, so the ultimate title stuck.
The leadoff song, Too Many Walls, written with Charley Stefl, is loosely about the old house where Jutz grew up:
It ain’t hard to remember
Man, I hated that house
Easy way in, narrow way out
Too many mirrors lining the halls
Not enough windows
Too many walls
Holy Mother Mountain was written with Mando Saenz after Hurricane Helene drenched many places in the South, especially parts of the Blue Ridge mountains that hadn’t seen such flooding in our lifetimes.
In the notes for Damascus Road, a song written with fiddler Tammy Rogers of The SteelDrivers, a regular collaborator, Jutz quotes authors Natah and Matt Cost in reminding us that “God is life showing up in your life, as your life.”
There are lots of great turns of phrase on Jutz’s album. On The Alchemist’s Way, also written with Wright, Jutz sings: “All they can see is sulfur and smoke. Your magnum opus is their dirty joke.”
Out Jump the Devil, written with Dean Fields, sounds derived from the haunted American South, but it’s really about the legends of the Black Forest and the Nazi era.
Settle Me Down was the last song chosen for the album. Written with Donovan McAbee, a religion professor and poet in Nashville, it’s about Peter and Tom T., recorded on one of Mr. Hall’s old microphones.
They were “the best friends a song and a man could hope for,” Jutz writes in the notes.
Banding together
In February 2023, nearly three months after Peter’s passing, Jutz and Brace stood on stage at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMA Theater, an impressive arena, mostly full. The guys had worked with their wives, with Peter’s brother Chris, and Peter’s ex-wife Charlotte, among others, to produce a tasteful, intimate, loving tribute event for Peter.
“I think it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve been involved in, and I think we did him and his life justice,” said Brace, who served alongside Jutz as the event’s co-bandleader.
They sang, and so did a long list of luminaries and friends, including Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Jim Lauderdale, Kevin Gordon, Jason Ringenberg, and others — all accompanied by an incredible band of Mark Fain on bass, Jen Gunderman on keyboards, fiddler Andrea Zonn (a great artist who has backed James Taylor and others for many years), and Lynn Williams on drums. (Read about the event here.)
After Peter died, Brace and Jutz had some decisions to make amid their grief and the heaviness of it all.
“Are we going to keep going?” Brace asked Jutz. “I love making music with you, and I want to keep going, but is it too weird? Is it just going to hover over us?”
Jutz answered wisely, as Brace recalls: “It’s OK if it does. His (Peter’s) spirit is in everything we do.”
They decided to carry on, write new songs, and tell stories about their own lives and sharing what Peter meant to them.
“We don’t want to just sing songs and wonder where Peter’s guitar and voice are, though that does happen when we sing songs like Wait a Minute,” Brace said, mentioning the Herb Peterson song so beautifully performed by the Seldom Scene, and recorded by Brace and Cooper on their album Master Sessions.
“So, I think we’ve come up with something that is distinctly ours, first with our album Simple Motion, and now with Circle and Square,” Brace said.
The new album is largely about “leaning into the act of creating, and (we) talk about creation and why it’s important to us,” Brace said. “Especially in the face of so much destruction taking place in the world.”
In addition, the cover of Circle and Square, which features artwork by Mary Ann Werner, Brace’s wife.
Before I discussed Circle and Square with Brace, he took a moment to brag about Jutz. Ring-a-Bellin’ is “a real personal statement about why the hell he’s doing this, why he came here, where the arc of his life is. As he says, it's just a snapshot of a moment, but it’s an important moment.”
“He’s literally the busiest man I know, and so the only time I get to talk with him for extended periods is when we when we go out on the road,” Brace said of Jutz. “You’ve talked to him, so you understand he's like a seeker, you know? He's looking for understanding.”
One recent weekend, Brace and Jutz drove to shows in Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio. “One of the first things he said was, ‘I had another dream about Peter,’” Brace said. “He still wrestles with stuff in a way that I don't think I do. I think I'm in some sort of place of acceptance about how the universe runs and how we will never understand, and how it's almost pointless to dig for answers.”
Jutz’s interest in Jung was also an impetus for the duo’s album Circle and Square, looking for patterns in life that might lead to understanding. As Jutz writes in the notes for his solo album, channeling Jung: “We don’t really heal anything. We simply let it go.”
Peter and Jutz often talked about keeping a door open for people to record who they liked and were underappreciated, like when Cowboy Jack Clement left his studio door open so that new ideas could float right in. On that note, Brace and Jutz wrote the song Wide Open:
When the good old cowboy died
We sat around and cried a while
Cause that’s what cowboys do
For a fellow buckaroo
We made a vow then and there that day
That we would always find a way
For music seldom heard
For the sacred written word
To find a door wide open
And the promise ain’t been broken…
Said I keep the window open
To let in ideas unspoken
We all know the rise and fall
Oh it took no time at all, you see
You miss it if you blink
It’s quicker than you think
Better keep your eyes wide open
Either way your heart gets broken
“It's still magic… the creation of music. … It's still amazing to me. For Circle and Square, it’s a recognition that there are patterns in the human spirit that that will repeat over and over again, and if we can see the patterns,” then you can find a way to make your own imprint, Brace mused.
Coming full circle
Brace spent his early childhood in northern California, and his first concert was Peter, Paul and Mary when he was five. His family moved to France for four years, then to Washington, D.C.
That’s where he fell in love with roots music, especially bluegrass. It wasn’t hard to do. Eddie Stubbs was on the radio all the time spinning old-school country and bluegrass. There was an active folk scene that produced Emmylou Harris, among others. (Some years later, this same scene helped me fall in love with bluegrass and country music. When I first moved to D.C. in 1999, I believe that the NPR station WAMU still played traditional music in the afternoons rather than news programs.)
The Seldom Scene played regularly at the Birchmere Music Hall, across the river from D.C., in Alexandria, Virginia.
“I was probably 15 the first time I went to the Birchmere on a Thursday night and saw the Seldom Scene. I had no idea how important they would become, either in the world or in my life. They just seemed like five guys having the best time on stage and making incredibly beautiful music,” Brace said.
He marveled at their renditions of classic songs by Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers, as well as their takes on more modern songs. They were important in spreading bluegrass to wider audiences with their approach to the music, which was reverent and irreverent at the same time, and something inside of me clicked when I saw them,” Brace said.
“It was transporting,” he said. “I think I've been looking for that feeling ever since.”
In college, Brace had played in a bluegrass band, while his brother was in a jam band, and “we both had also been listening to punk and new wave, too.” After college, Brace and his brother Alan put together a band in Washington, D.C., that combined all their influences.
“At first we played covers, but we both started writing our own songs, inspired by folks like Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, but also by people closer to home, like [the Seldom Scene’s] John Starling,” Brace said. “He wrote one of my favorite songs, ’He Rode All the Way to Texas’” (later recorded by the trio of Dolly Parton, Kinda Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris).
“In a way, Seldom Scene was kind of like my punk rock. They showed me you could just do it if you had a mind to. Just get up on stage with your friends and have a great time while making great music. I aspired to that.”
The Brace brothers formed a new wave-ish band called B-Time, which thrived in the 1980s D.C. club scene. Brace and some friends formed Top Records and produced several records by similar bands.
Then Brace heard some music that sent him in a new direction. “I remember very vividly on WHFS (radio) specifically hearing two things: One was Lyle Lovett’s song L.A. County, off his album Pontiac, and the other was the first Chris Isaak record,” he said. “They both had that country and folk singer-songwriter thing that I loved, and my brother brought kind of a soul thing. He really loved Bobby Womack and Curtis Mayfield, and we were trying to mix things up, and then I remember hearing L.A. County, going ‘I want pedal steel.’”
“There was just so much beauty in pedal steel, and I was always surprised that that wasn't more a part of it being heard,” Brace said. “Then in the late ‘80s, there started to be that kind of country-punk movement and alt-country, and I thought all these people are doing things that I kind of want to do.
A bunch of great steel-guitar players came out of the D.C. area around this time. Buddy Charleton, who’d played with Ernest Tubb, opened a pedal-steel shop in nearby southern Maryland. Charlton mentored players like Bruce Bouton (who’d play with Garth Brooks) Pete Finney (who recently passed away, and played with Patty Loveless, Reba McIntyre and many others), and Bucky Baxter (who toured with Bob Dylan and others), and Tommy Hannum, who had played in the D.C. band the Rosslyn Mountain Boys before moving to Nashville to play with Ricky Van Shelton and others.
“There were several guys that really made a big impact on pedal steel, and they all had left D.C.,” Brace said.
Looking for someone for his band, Brace found Dave Van Allen playing pedal-steel six nights a week at a place a Virginia roadhouse for line dancers. When he approached him about playing new wave-influenced roots music, it turned out Van Allen was moving in the same direction.
They formed The Beggars with Brace’s brother and a couple of other singer-songwriters. “It was always such a pleasure to play with my brother Alan. He played harmonica, guitar, and mandolin, and I love his singing voice.”
Brace started working as a copy aide for The Washington Post, assisting reporters and editors. “At the same time, I was writing songs and starting to make good demos and playing in other bands,” he said.
Eventually, he was hired as a staff writer for The Post’s Weekend section. “At the time, there were a million readers of The Washington Post,” Brace said. “And my beat was Washington’s nightlife, which was pretty incredible. So, I would go write about an Ethiopian nightclub or a go-go festival or about the guy who repairs Mike Aldridge’s dobros or a new bar that's opening up in a different part of town. I tried to get around, and that really just opened my eyes to a lot a lot of things.”
He poured these experiences into Last Train Home, which became one of the D.C. area’s most popular bands, recording albums as recently as 2024, and is at work on the next one.
In 1996, with the Last Train Home lineup set, with Brace’s brother playing mandolin and harmonica. Van Allen was on pedal steel, Bill Williams on electric guitar, Jim Gray (formerly of Kelly Willis’ band in Texas) on bass, and Martin Lynds on drums (who still plays with Chuck Mead in Nashville).
Their first album in 1997 was simply titled Last Train Home because they weren’t sure there’d be a second one. They played regular gigs at IOTA Club & Cafe, a great little venue in the Clarendon section of Arlington, Virginia.
When the group’s second album True North came out in 1999, Brace was adding more to the band’s sound. He’d just written an article for The Post about a jazz combo featuring Kevin Cordt on trumpet, and he asked him to join the band for a song.
“If you listen to the outro on Doughnut Girl, it might be my favorite 20 seconds of anything Last Train Home has ever recorded. It’s just so, so beautiful,” Brace said of that recording. “At the record release show, Kevin played the entire night, even though he’d only
played on that one song on the record. He’s been with us ever since.”
Brace asked another friend, Chris Watling of The Grandsons, to add some saxophone. Suddenly, Last Train Home had a horn section, further layering the band’s signature sound.
Before making their third album, Time and Water, Brace was approached by a booking agency that worked with Buddy Miller, Alejandro Escovedo, Steve Forbert, The Blasters, and the like.
“We started going on the road, and we went up and down the East Coast. That’s when we started coming down to Nashville with more regularity, and the Billy Block’s Western Beat shows (at the Exit/In nightclub),” Brace said. “That’s where I first met (the rock-influenced, country singer) Jon Byrd, that’s where I first met Thomm Jutz, where we first met Jen Gunderman. Jen was sitting in with tons of people, and I said, ‘Hey, you want to play with us?’ And she ended up playing in the band for about four years.”
Steve Wedemeyer from Austin became their road guitarist, and he moved to Nashville in 2005. “There were people in The Mavericks and in Nanci Griffith’s band, and people like Allison Moorer and guys in Steve Earle’s band who were very encouraging, telling us to move down here,” Brace said.
The rhythm section found additional work in Nashville immediately, and the rest of the band followed. Brace came to town in 2005 after his father passed away. He moved to then-edgy, eclectic East Nashville, which was becoming more of an artists’ enclave.
“There was a possibility that a band like ours could have some sort of success then, that it was worth fighting for. So that's when we were really going on the road hard with Marty and Jimmy and Steve Wedemeyer and Jen Gunderman, and we recorded Last Good Kiss, which had its video played on CMT,” he said.
Peter Cooper was the music writer for The Tennessean newspaper and “had written really nice reviews about our Last Train Home records and then would come to see us play. That's when I found out that he had spent his high school years in the D.C. area… and he had also gone to see the Seldom Scene on Thursdays at the Birchmere, but he was 10 years younger than me,” Brace said.
“I was hanging out with him all the time, and he was writing more and more songs. He was playing bass with Todd Snider and went out on the road with him, and his songs were kind of Snider-esque, but he was finding his own voice. And he said, ‘I've got this album in the can.’”
Brace offered to release the album on Red Beet, his own new imprint. “He said, ‘Well, if you do that, I can’t ever mention you in the newspaper again,’” Brace recalled. “I said, ‘I don't care, I'd rather be your friend and get your music out than worry about one good mention in the paper.’”
They released Mission Door, Peter’s astonishingly accomplished debut album, in 2008. “It’s such a good record, and he was turning me on to people like Eric Taylor, who I knew but I wasn’t passionate about the way he was, and he’s got two Eric Taylor songs on that record,” Brace said. “ He was always opening doors for me to walk through.”
Last Train Home was on a break, so Brace and Cooper started playing more shows together and needed a CD to sell on the road. “That's when we recorded our first album, You Don't Have to Like Them Both, which is the classic Peter Cooper title,” Brace said.
It was the first of several terrific albums, each with a crystalline sound, sweet harmonies, and a wry sense of humor, with some originals and nice covers like Kevin Gordon’s Down to the Well on their first album.
“I'm really proud of that record. I got to work with Lloyd Green, one of the greatest (steel-guitar players) of all time, and Tim O’Brien and Richard Bennett and these extraordinary musicians (who) Peter could just call up because he knew them and they were on his Rolodex,” Brace said.
A second duo album soon followed, Master Sessions, featuring steel ace Lloyd Green and Dobro master Mike Auldridge (a founding member of The Seldom Scene). And in 2011, Cooper and Brace produced a tribute album of Tom T. Hall’s children’s songs. I Love: The
Songs of Fox Hollow was nominated for a Grammy for Best Children’s Album, a thrill for
them. It features Patty Griffin, Elizabeth Cook, Buddy Miller, Fayssoux Starling McLean, and even Bobby Bare and Tom T. Hall himself.
It was Peter who suggested to Brace that for their third duo album they enlist the help of Thomm Jutz. “We had opened up for Nanci Griffith and had seen Thomm playing guitar with her, and Peter knew him also because Thomm had played with David Olney,” he continued. Jutz had a home studio they could use.
Peter and Jutz collaborated on a comeback album for bluegrass great Mac Wiseman. Working with Jutz, Peter and Brace made The Comeback Album, full of good-humored songs like Ancient History, their hilarious alt-roots-rock classic: “It is what it is, not how it’s gotta be, from my point of obstructed view,” they sing in harmony. “We are who we are, not who we’re gonna be, every passing moment is ancient history.”
Their next album together was C&O Canal, a tribute to the Washington, D.C. music scene, also recorded at Thomm’s studio and including some covers of Seldom Scene songs.
“At that point, we said to Thomm, ‘Why don’t you come and play some shows with us and see if you want to be in a trio with us?’ And that was that. We all got along so well,” Brace said.
In 2017, they finished their first album as a threesome. Peter offered the quirky title, Profiles in Courage, Frailty, and Discomfort, and it stuck.
Peter moved from The Tennessean to the Hall of Fame and began teaching at Vanderbilt University. Thomm began teaching at Belmont. “I was starting to get Last Train Home back together, and so we were we were fitting in the trio wherever we could,” Brace said.
In 2019, the trio recorded and released its second album, Riverland, all about the Mississippi River, the state of Mississippi, the history and myths of both. But before they could do much performing in support of the album, they found their world changing.
“There was already some fragmenting in Peter’s life, and I knew that he was wrestling with things,” Brace recalled. “I talked to him about ways of helping him through these issues, and then all of a sudden COVID hit and there was the lockdown in March 2020 and everything changed.”
“I kind of withdrew at that point, and I didn't really talk much with Peter after that. Thomm did a lot more. And in fact, I didn't really talk with Thomm much at that point. I was just concerned with keeping things going in my life and being careful,” Brace said.
Brace had recorded a new Last Train Home album in 2019 called Daytime Highs and Overnight Lows, followed by another during the heart of the pandemic, Everything Will Be.
“In 2022, we knew that Peter was pretty ill and not doing well, and when he fell in November, I was out of the country traveling on the first trip that my wife and I had taken (since the pandemic),” Brace said. When they landed in Nashville, “I turned on my phone, and it was just full of condolences, and it was just one of the most awful days of my life.”
Brace and his wife gathered with Jutz, friend Lindsay Hayes, Peter’s brother Chris Cooper, and Peter’s ex-wife, Charlotte. “We all just got together and grieved and talked about what to do.”
While their friendship and music was special, Brace points out that Peter was a gifted journalist as much as anything else.
“He really was one of the best newspaper writers and columnists I've ever read, and I think he doesn't get enough credit for that. He wrote so instinctively,” Brace said. “On the road, he would pull out his little keyboard and start writing, and he would just write off the top of his head and it would come out in this perfectly formed narrative arc.”
In fact, Peter’s 2017 book, Johnny’s Cash and Charley’s Pride is a great read for anyone interested in country music, or splendid writing, or both.
Part of Peter’s legacy for Brace and Jutz is the reminder to simply keep the songs flowing. When they’re writing, “we often look at each other and say, ‘Yeah, Peter would cut that’ or something along those lines,’” Brace said.
“It reminds me of something Peter used to say a lot when I would express some sort of fatigue or cynicism about music. He would say, ‘You know what I do when I'm tired of music? I listen to music, I go see music, I put on a record and I say, you know, John Prine makes the world a better place,’” Brace continued. “And he was right. There is joy and inspiration and energy to be found in people who are creating, and if you’re feeling exhausted or cynical or frustrated by it you’re kind of getting your ego involved. It’s time to step back and remember why you love music in the first place.”
Maybe that’s the Tao of Peter Cooper. His spirit is somehow with us. His songs live with Jutz and Brace most of all.
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