The Unclassifiable, Unstreamable Eighties Albums of Annette Peacock

Originally published by The New Yorker (December 5, 2018)

None of the musician Annette Peacock’s albums from the eighties are in print or available on the major streaming platforms

Annette Peacock has the name of a rock star. (It’s not an assumed name, but not her given one, either — she married the jazz bassist Gary Peacock and kept the excellent moniker after they split.) What’s more, when I meet her, she talks like a rock star: “Mick Ronson told me the air was good in Woodstock, so I moved there.” And, as all her album covers from the nineteen-seventies to the present make clear, she has the look of one, too. Even so, when I interview this elusive singer-songwriter after one of her rare concerts, she says, “I lack confidence.” I point out that her career — a series of big swerves made up of innumerable small ones — indicates the opposite. “Oh I’m brave,” she says. “I always have been. But confidence and bravery are distinct.” And what all the stars she’s known have, she continues, is “confidence.” “Sometimes that’s all they have?” I suggest, but Peacock has already moved on to another thought, just as she does in her songs.