Vanessa Peters has spent over two decades building a prolific career, boasting a discography of 12 full-length albums and 14 releases overall. Now based in Tuscany, the Dallas-born singer-songwriter joined host Jason English at the 2024 30A Songwriters Festival to discuss her 2024 album, Flying on Instruments. Their conversation reveals an artist who is as much a philosopher as she is a musician, navigating the complexities of the modern industry with a blend of "Ted Lasso" optimism and hard-earned realism.

Peters uses the metaphor of Mary Poppins’ bottomless bag to describe the "psychic weight" of holding onto memories and emotions. While she identifies as a "spoonful of sugar person," she notes that being over-prepared is often a "weird psycho control thing" used to ward off disaster.

The democratization of music through technology has brought unexpected obstacles. Peters shares a surreal modern horror story: AI bots scraping her unreleased tracks from SoundCloud, changing the titles, and re-releasing them, which led distributors to reject her own uploads due to "digital fingerprints" belonging to someone else. She also laments the shift from selling music to being in the "t-shirt business," noting the absurdity that fans will pay $30 for a shirt but expect music for free.

Her new album, Flying on Instruments, explores the idea of moving forward when the road ahead is obscured. Despite songs that wrestle with mortality and "blind curves," Peters insists the record isn't depressing, but introspective. She views her craft as a way to process life, ultimately finding resolution in the fact that no day is wasted as long as a lesson is learned