Andrew Peterson

Andrew Peterson has long commanded respect as a songwriter within Christian music circles. His professional path opened in the mid-'90s when he issued his debut independent project, the eight-song EP Walk. While traveling nationwide alongside his wife Jamie, he received an early opportunity when Caedmon's Call added him to their 1998 tour itinerary. The resulting visibility secured a contract with Watershed/Essential Records and yielded his first full-length album, Carried Along, in 2000. Born in Illinois and raised in Florida as the son of a pastor, Peterson infused his rootsy folk-rock approach with explicit Christian themes, drawing inspiration from veteran singer-songwriter Rich Mullins. Subsequent releases reinforced his standing, among them Love & Thunder in 2003, The Far Country in 2005, and Resurrection Letters, Vol. 2 in 2008; the last of these appeared on Centricity and peaked at number nine on Billboard's Top Christian Albums chart. Frequent partnerships with artists both inside and beyond the Christian sphere further highlighted his inventive range. In 2006 Peterson joined several similarly inclined songwriters to establish the collective known as the Square Peg Alliance. The following year he entered publishing with the children's title The Ballad of Matthew's Begats. He simultaneously advanced his literary work by releasing the opening volume of the four-part fantasy series The Wingfeather Saga in 2008. By 2012 his recordings routinely occupied the upper reaches of Billboard's Christian chart and periodically crossed into the pop rankings. He also founded the publishing imprint and online writing community The Rabbit Room while completing two additional Wingfeather novels. Centricity marked his catalog with the 2014 retrospective After All These Years: A Collection, and his eleventh studio effort, The Burning Edge of Dawn, arrived in late 2015 to reach number three on the Christian chart—his strongest commercial showing at that point. Peterson revisited an earlier undertaking in 2018. Having released Resurrection Letters, Vol. 2 a decade before, he chose to realize its intended predecessor, beginning with the EP Resurrection Letters: Prologue and finishing the sequence with Resurrection Letters, Vol. 1 several months afterward. The completed Vol. 1 entered the Billboard Top Rock Albums chart at number 12, and 2019 brought a reissue of his 2004 holiday recording Behold the Lamb of God.