About

Sixteen years ago, Pete Droge went looking for his birth mother; instead, he found her obituary. Rather than marking the end of the story, though, that discovery launched a remarkable journey of personal growth and healing, one that would find Droge reuniting with long-lost relatives, battling a mysterious illness, and finding himself in the process.

“It’s been transformational,” Droge reflects. “I learned so much about adoption trauma, grief and loss and perseverance and identity. I learned so much about myself.”

Droge explores it all with poetic grace on his captivating new album, Fade Away Blue. Recorded with Grammy-winning producer Paul Bryan (Aimee Mann), the collection is largely autobiographical, offering up a series of dreamy, cinematic snapshots from throughout Droge’s life as he reflects on the existential forces that mold and shape us. The songs are bittersweet, balancing longing and gratitude in equal measure, and the arrangements are warm and inviting to match, with a spotlight fixed firmly on Droge’s tender, comforting lyrics and understated delivery throughout. The result is an album a lifetime in the making, a rich, revelatory sonic memoir that faces down doubt and despair with love, resilience, and commitment at every turn.

“In the past, I’ve tended to be a bit more cryptic with my writing,” Droge explains, “but this time around I knew I needed to speak truthfully and honestly about my experiences. I wouldn’t call it a concept record, but the thread of my life story runs through all of these songs.”

Born in Eugene, Oregon and raised on an island outside of Seattle, Droge rocketed to early acclaim on the strength of his 1994 debut, Necktie Second, which prompted the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn to compare his songwriting to Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Breakout single “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself)” became a multi-format radio hit and landed a prominent spot in the iconic Farrelly Brothers comedy Dumb & Dumber, and within a year, Droge was on the road supporting Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. In the decades to come, he would go on to release a series of similarly well-received solo albums, appear in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (performing alongside his wife and longtime collaborator, Elaine Summers); team up with Matthew Sweet and Shawn Mullins to form the Americana supergroup The Thorns; co-produce records for Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America; record three collections with his wife as The Droge and Summers Blend; and compose a variety of works for film and television, including feature scores and commercial spots for brands like Toyota, T-Mobile, and State Farm.

“I was a workaholic,” Droge reflects. “For a long time, I attached my entire sense of self to my career, but then around my 40th birthday, I started looking within more and began meditating and journaling.”

It was while journaling one night that Droge opened up his computer to record an idea for a new song, only to encounter a glitch that somehow dated the file as originating in 1969.

“That was the year I was born,” Droge recalls. “It was a weird little coincidence, but it got me thinking about how I’d never really reckoned with my adoption and how it had affected me. The next morning, I woke up in tears and realized I’d tapped into something deep.”

After enrolling in therapy, Droge decided to submit a records request to the state of Oregon in the hope of finding his birth mother. Three weeks later, a letter arrived in the mail with the name he’d been looking for: Barbara Ann Thomas.

“I typed it into Google and found out she’d died just a few months earlier, which was devastating,” Droge explains. “But her obituary listed surviving relatives, and that night I was on the phone with my grandmother and my uncle, which started this fairytale journey of traveling to Ohio and reconnecting with my blood relatives.”

Droge put his career on hold while he processed it all.  Once he returned to work, life had other plans. First, his adoptive father passed away; then, his adoptive mother’s condition began to deteriorate; soon, Droge’s own health was spiraling.

“My system just crashed,” he says. “I was constantly exhausted without explanation, and after a few months of testing, the doctors determined that I had this perfect storm of conditions that was adding up to intense chronic fatigue.”

For the next several years, Droge focused on his physical and emotional recovery, dedicating what precious little energy he had each day to songwriting. The process wasn’t linear, and the setbacks were devastating at times, but by the time Droge had gained enough strength to get back into the studio, he’d amassed a ream of new material that would go on to form the backbone of Fade Away Blue.

When Bryan came onboard to co-produce, the pair devised a system in which Droge could record at home while Bryan and the all-star band they’d assembled—guitarist Rusty Anderson (Paul McCartney), drummer Jay Bellerose (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss), pianist Lee Pardini (Dawes, Chris Stapleton), pedal steel player Greg Liesz (Jackson Browne), and fiddler Gabe Witcher (Punch Brothers)—could contribute their parts from Los Angeles.

“We had a setup where I could hear exactly what they were hearing in the studio almost in real time,” Droge explains. “I’d tune into what they were playing and then we’d chat on the phone between takes and trade notes and ideas. Paul and I turned out to be so well matched creatively that it was just a dream.”

That natural connection is easy to hear on the album, which opens with the poignant “You Called Me Kid.” Earnest and affectionate, it’s a heartfelt ode to Droge’s adoptive parents, who helped start him on his musical journey and offered their unwavering support every step along the way. The song, like so much of the record, is spare and organic while still managing to feel lush and dynamic, with Droge’s easygoing vocals drifting out over the music as he contemplates the precious gift of unconditional love. The breezy “Sundown at Francis Nash” finds Droge reminiscing on his tumultuous, psychedelic teenage years, while the winsome “Fading Fast” looks back at the endless churn of life on the road, and the gentle “Bare Tree” pays tribute to Summers, whose steadfastness kept Droge grounded through his struggles.

“This record wouldn’t exist without Elaine,” he says. “She co-wrote six of the ten songs and executive produced the whole thing, and it would be impossible to overstate how important her vocals and creative contributions were.”

The emotional heart of the record, though, is undoubtedly Droge’s late birth mother, who turns up in several songs on Fade Away Blue. The unhurried “Gypsy Rose” paints a portrait of her as a young, free-spirited hippy in the late 1960s; the aching “Lonely Mama” laments the relationship that never was; and the stirring “Song For Barbara Ann” comes to terms with the feelings of abandonment and unworthiness that have dogged Droge for much of his life. “And all I can do is keep singing for you / Pining for someone who I never knew,” he sings. “Hard to believe it was over before it began / I just wasn’t part of your plan / Barbara Ann.”

“As a kid, I remember pushing away a faint voice in my head that said, ‘If my own mother didn’t want me, there must be something wrong with me,’” Droge recalls. “Now I understand that it didn’t have anything to do with me at all, and I’m so grateful to have been adopted by such a great couple.”

Such realizations are, in the end, what Fade Away Blue is all about.

“I chose ‘Fade Away Blue’ as the title track because it’s about coming out of depression,” Droge reflects. “It’s not something that happens all at once. It’s a slow, steady process, a journey that never really ends.”

For Pete Droge, the journey is its own reward.