Petracovich’s third album, Crepusculo, out summer 2009, finds the folk-pop songstress, (Jessica Peters), emerging from her electro sheen to embrace an organic sound more spontaneous, direct, and open than any of her previous releases. And while this represents a significant stylistic shift, her artful approach is still firmly intact through a fascination with sonic textures and poetic but unadorned lyrics. The result is an artfully crafted, happy collection of songs anchored by an emotional depth and honesty that is nothing less than grand.

The immediacy of the album’s sound was born from a month of recording and mixing at Type Foundry in Portland, OR with John Askew, (the Dodos, Glenn Philips), at the helm. The Foundry’s antiquated architecture, analog equipment and large sound rooms proved the perfect match for Peter’s tactile sound-scapes. Creaking parlor pianos, wooden floors shifting with the kick drum and the whir of the harmonium bellows all become atmospheric backdrop to the piano centered arrangements. In this space, Peter’s poignant and tender vocals find their home and her delivery is all the more devastating in its reserve as she offers up vignettes about a wayward father, sundown on a traffic-filled freeway, hotels overgrown with wildflowers, arrests at gun point and a love affair with her own heart.

Musically Peters synthesizes a long list of influences – from Rick Ruben’s work with Johnny Cash, the songwriting of Leonard Cohen, Damien Jurado and Aimee Mann, and the instrumentation of Sufjan Stevens, Ray Charles and Sparklehorse, to the poetry of Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, and the Buddhist monk Thic Nhat Hahn, to the natural world she finds in her own back yard and in the state parks near her home. She is a collector of stories, images, metaphor and emotion. And Crepusculo gives use the most intimate tour of her collection to date.

Crepusculo (twilight in Spanish, pronounced Cray-poo-sku-low), is that moment between the ending of day and beginning of night when everything shifts. And for Peters this album has become just that – a marker of musical and life transitions. Recorded in 2008 while pregnant with her first child, Otto Charles, the record became imbued with his presence. And when he was born and died eight days later, everything stopped. The album was put on the shelf and loving and grieving his life became the center. Now with its release a year later, Peters steps back into the world with a bigger and wiser heart, arms open and singing.

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