Singer/songwriter
ALICE PEACOCK | SINGER/SONGWRITER | 37 | LAKE VIEW
I tour all over the world, and there's no city like Chicago. Anyplace you go, it's always built up, not accessible. In our city, the lakefront is everyone's -- it's pretty unique. Our founding fathers/planners were very progressive for the time.
I'm a singer/songwriter. I make records and tour around the country. When I lived by Oscar Mayer school in Lincoln Park, I'd go over to talk to the reading specialist and say, "Hey, I'm off tour for a while. How can I help?" I'd play for the kids, talk about song-writing process; those are the kind of things that had an impact on me.
On my second record I'd written a song with Kristen Hall of Sugarland and Emily Salier of Indigo Girls called "It Starts With Me." After railing against the government, the environment, and seeing a literacy study done for the National Endowment for the Arts we thought, "What are we going to do?" So we put on this concert with the Sun-Times Charity Trust the first year. I realized we wanted it to be a year-round thing, and I founded Rock for Reading with my husband and some friends.
I grew up spending a lot of time in the library because we didn't have a TV. I spent my days with my nose in a book. Reading made the world available to me, and music seems a natural extension of that.
We raise money for reading programs through the power of rock and roll then give it to organizations flying under the radar, those too small to apply for grants, like even if it's a little program helping 20 kids.
The Wrigleyville fire last [year] was so senseless, so sad and so random! It stuck with me for a couple of months, especially the article about the homeless woman who started it. They said she was mentally ill and her friends remembered how beautiful she was. I was in Nashville telling a friend this story, and he looked up and started singing "I am Mary, I was pretty, you may remember me from the ninth grade." We cranked out this song "I am Mary," and wrote the lyrics. It was her story -- the story of someone who just fell though the cracks.
A lot of places have gone nonsmoking already, now it's D-day. It's great for the artists -- it really wreaks havoc on my throat -- but it's a hard call. Smokers should have an option. Sometimes you want to go to a bar and feel like it's part of the experience, like you should be able to smoke.
I've sung the anthem probably a dozen times between the two baseball teams, and I'm definitely always nervous. I pick a low note to start because you have to hit that high note. I don't rush and keep it simple. People are not kind if you screw up the national anthem -- they'll remember it forever.
Walking the talk is hard to do, but you don't have to start a nonprofit -- you can start by helping at your local school or reading to your children. It's true, it sounds very corny but everybody can do a little something to change the world.
