Feeling bad has rarely sounded as good as it does coming from singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters. Her latest album, “Blackbirds,” is an unflinching collection of songs meditating on mortality.

“(Death) was everywhere around me when I was writing, and it ended up coming out in the songs,” she says.

Her surviving parent is in her 90s, and, over the course of one week while Peters was writing for “Blackbirds,” she attended three memorial services. Aging and death are both rare subjects for female songwriters to address, especially as candidly as Peters does on songs such as “The Cure for the Pain,” a wrenching ballad that takes place at the end of a losing battle against illness, and “Pretty Things,” where she sings, “Pompeii crumbled and Athens fell … A girl like me ain’t got a chance in hell against ’em.”

To read this interview in its entirety, view it at The Tennessean’s website.