Local artist follows musical dream

Back when Renee Ruth Peckham was in grade school, her musical tastes were very different from those of her peers.

Once, during a classroom exercise, a teacher asked students to name their favorite bands.

While her classmates singled out the likes of Guns N’ Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Peckham went old school with The Beach Boys.

"I was mortified," says the 32-year-old Canadian, who still cringes at the memory of her less-than-hip admission.

Her musical tastes have certainly evolved since then, as she has become a musician in her own right, playing both guitar and piano in addition to singing.

Peckham, who now calls Lynchburg home, describes herself as a singer/songwriter in the vein of Joni Mitchell or Sarah McLachlan. But her influences range from the ’50s and ’60s tunes she listened to growing up to the electronic music she fell in love with in college.

She even wrote some of the songs that appeared on her six-song EP, which came out in November and is available on iTunes and Amazon.com, with remixes already in mind.

For Peckham, recording her music has been a long time coming.

She comes from a family full of musicians who often sang with their church choir, and Peckham began playing the piano when she was 5 years old.

"We’re like the Von Trapp Family," she says, "but there were only four of us."

Her family’s love of music took a hit when her mother died of cancer in 1996, when Peckham was just 17. The family that always sang together suddenly stopped, and her father’s collection of guitars sat untouched.

Throughout her mother’s illness, Peckham found solace in writing, but still wasn’t sure about pursuing music as career.

She came to Lynchburg to attend Liberty University, originally planning to study piano performance.

But, looking for something a little more stable, she eventually switched her major to psychology. She now teaches public speaking and counseling classes at Randolph College and online through Liberty and the University of Phoenix.

Peckham continued singing in her spare time, mostly with the Thomas Road Baptist Church choir.

But she didn’t perform by herself until two years ago, when she auditioned for Lynch’s Landing’s Lynchburg Star competition. She didn’t win but it got her back in that musical mindset.

With a friend’s encouragement, Peckham began writing music again and performed her first solo show at Bull Branch in 2009.

"Chasing Butterflies," which appears on the EP, was one of the first ones she wrote.

"I took it to the guitar, and it just came into being," she says.

It’s about "how am I 32, and I’m just doing this now? This is a dream I had as a kid. (But) I had people saying it doesn’t make money, and your chances of making it are slim to none."

"You have these dreams as a kid," Peckham says, and — as she sings in the song — "life gets in the way."

Leslie Kozera, one of her most vocal fans, says the song usually makes her cry.

"There’s something about (Renee) that I find so endearing, so genuine and so natural," Kozera says. "Her music is just touching."

Peckham says most of her songs are fueled by her experiences. "What I Need," the EP’s title track, is about angst she was feeling over a friendship, and "If I Go" was inspired by her mother.

"It’s her talking to me, and saying ‘I will always love you.’

"I write because it frees my soul from the things in life that cage it, and I play in the hopes of freeing other people," she adds. "When you say you love my music, it means you get me. Which in turn means I get you. I want that interaction with people."

Kozera says the appeal of Peckham’s music is in its subject matter.

"Everyone has someone they’ve lost, or a relationship that has gone bust. It hits that chord," she says. "She’s not just singing a little ditty."