It had been 19 years since Pete Droge released a solo album before his incredibly emotional and personal record, Fade Away Blue, was released on August 22.
Turns out, he’d been busy.
Droge was 40 when he decided he needed to find his birth mother.
It was Thanksgiving weekend 2009. Droge was going through some emotional challenges. It wasn’t a midlife crisis, per se, but what Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis calls “the middle passage,” Droge tells me from his home studio on Vashon Island, Washington.
“I had been doing that middle-aged thing,” he says. “I was in that zone of looking within and taking stock of my life and some of the traits I had, issues like anxiety and depression and substance abuse that I had dealt with earlier in life, and was looking for answers and trying to reconcile and settle some of that stuff.”
You might remember Droge as the rising young ‘90s artist who’s perhaps best known for his hit song, “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself),” from his 1994 debut album, Necktie Second. Maybe you saw him open for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in ‘95. Or, if you’re like me, you owned his third album, 1996’s Spacey and Shakin, and played “Beautiful Girl,” the title song he wrote and performed for the 1996 film Beautiful Girls, on repeat on your CD player.
Droge continued to work over the years—releasing six other albums, three of them with his songwriting partner and wife, Elaine Summers, and one as part of the Thorns, the supergroup he formed with Matthew Sweet and Shawn Mullins. In fact, over the next two decades, Droge worked a lot—too much, he admits to me, eventually stepping away from making solo albums to become a music producer and composer for film and television.
It was a coping mechanism to replace his original coping mechanism of drugs and alcohol (he’ll celebrate 30 years of sobriety in December, by the way).
“I was just really intensely into my work,” he says, wearing glasses, a khaki ball cap, and a faded plaid shirt with a green T-shirt peeking out from underneath. “And this manifested in a couple of ways. One, my sense of self and my ego were very tied up in my work. And so, if my mix sucked, I felt like I sucked. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions of, ‘I’m doing great’ and, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this?’”
The other facet was that once he finished a project, he would, at times, fall into a deep depression.
This led him to seek therapy and begin journaling.
Then, during that Thanksgiving weekend in 2009, he had what he describes as an “incredible epiphany,” after recording a song idea he had one night on his laptop. The computer had been glitching, and the file he had created wasn’t in the folder where he had saved it. After searching for it, he finally found the file marked with the timestamp 1969, the result of a computer error.
It was Droge’s birth year.
Then, in a flash, he experienced himself as a newborn infant.
“I can’t really say it was a memory, but it was sort of like an imagined flashback or something,” he says. “I just felt myself in that moment. And a lightbulb went off, and I was like, ‘My adoption…I should look into that.’”
Droge read a book called The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. In it, he learned about adoption trauma, a phenomenon that occurs when an infant is separated from its mother—the baby’s primary source of comfort and sustenance—resulting in a lifelong struggle with depression, anxiety, and abandonment issues. Adoptees, he explains, often grow up with a false sense of self.
“I started learning about that and really began to kind of excavate and dig and unpack, and was able to look at my life through this new lens,” he says.
Over the next few weeks, Droge obsessed over finding his birth mother, something his adoptive parents, Arnie and Jan Droge, encouraged him to do when he was in his early 20s.
“I was like, ‘Nah, not interested,’” he says of that earlier time. “But with all of this stuff coming up and a desire to kind of understand myself better, I really had a strong desire to connect with her, and built up a lot of expectation and hope about what that would mean.”
Droge knew very little about her; only that she played the violin, she was from Eugene, Oregon, and attended the University of Oregon. That was about it.
After waiting three weeks for his adoption records, he learned his birth mother’s name: Barbara Ann Thomas.
He immediately searched for her online and discovered her obituary.
“That was really heartbreaking and just emotionally wrenching, just super intense,” he says.
As he read his birth mother’s obituary, he noticed a list of surviving relatives. Later that night, he was on the phone with his grandmother, who’s now 98. They still talk every Sunday. And he’s bonded with his uncle, a fellow musician.
Shortly after the phone call with his grandmother, Droge was on a plane bound for Appalachian Ohio, where he met his mother’s family in person.
“I arrived, this middle-aged dude, who was like, ‘Tell me everything,’” he says. I wanted to know every little [piece of] family history that I could get my hands on. We were just instantly kin. They welcomed me with open arms.”
His mother’s family took him on a driving tour into the hollers where a house that his great-great-grandfather had built still stood, and to visit cemeteries where his ancestors were buried.
“I remember having this really intense feeling of connecting with a sense of place that I’d never really felt before,” Droge says. “This kind of, in a strange way, felt like home. It was just like an amazing fairytale. That whole trip was just magical.”
A few years later, in 2015, Droge’s adoptive father passed away. Then his adoptive mother’s health began declining. As Droge tried his best to continue to work, he began noticing that his own health was spiraling out of control, constantly exhausted without explanation.
“When all that stuff came up, it was emotionally turbulent enough that I could barely get anything done,” he says. “And I remember it was a lot for me to keep it together and focus on work at that time.”
After months of testing, his doctors determined that he had intense chronic fatigue.
For the next several years, Droge focused on trauma therapy and strengthening his meditation practice, while also processing his emotions into songs that would eventually form the backbone of Fade Away Blue.
“I think the fatigue was a blessing in a way, because it gave me all this time and space to focus on myself and to do that work and let go of my career and my sense of self as it’s attached to that, and go, ‘Just be okay just being.’ And that brings us to the birth of this album,” he says.
In fact, after Droge and Elaine saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on their final tour in 2017, they were both inspired to start writing songs full force again.
“We came away from that show going, that body of work is so incredible, those songs,” he says. “And both Elaine and I were like, ‘We’ve got to get back to songwriting.’ It’s the most important thing there is. I didn’t have energy to keep all the plates spinning, so if I’m just going to do one thing, what’s it going to be? And it was songwriting. And so that’s when I really began writing in earnest.”
Droge’s new record is largely autobiographical, and the emotional heart of it is about discovering the identity of his late birth mother, who turns up in several songs such as “Gypsy Rose,” “Lonely Mama,” and “Song For Barbara Ann,” which is about Droge’s physical connection to his late birth mother, and coming to terms with the feelings of abandonment and unworthiness he’s experienced most of his life: “I’ve got your hazel eyes / And a streak that is blue / They say it’s uncanny / How much I remind them of you”
Droge recalls during his first trip to visit his birth family that his uncle kept looking into Droge’s eyes. “I hope it’s not weird,” his uncle told him. “I’m just looking in your eyes. And they just totally remind me of Barb.”
The title track is perhaps Droge’s most personal on the album, a song he’s hesitant to talk about in too much depth.
“It’s definitely about that process of fading away that blue streak, and recognizing that, like it says in the first verse: ‘Got the Devil’s dye through and through / Every fiber of me was dyed in the wool / But that don’t mean I won’t come clean.’”
Droge, however, says that it’s the third verse that’s the most powerful for him: “I live in the fray / And turn another new shade lighter every day / Another walk in the sun / Another hand-me-down child / Who knows I’m not the only one.”
While many of the songs on Fade Away Blue are dedicated to Droge’s birth mother, the album’s opening track and first single, the poignant “You Called Me Kid,” is one he wrote for his adoptive father after he died. Droge says when he plays it live, he always dedicates it to both of his parents.
Three days before the song’s June 12 release, Droge’s adoptive mother passed away.
“She was doing really, really well. And then I got the call that she wasn’t doing great,” Droge says. “A week after that, she was in hospice, and a week after that, she died with what the nurse called ‘as peaceful of a transition as I’d ever seen.’ In those final days I was with her, I brought my guitar and was able to play her a lot of her favorite songs, and included a tender acoustic version of ‘You Called Me Kid.’ So I was able to sing that at her bedside, which was pretty amazing. They [my adoptive parents] were incredible. That song speaks to the gratitude that I had for them.”
Droge credits Elaine with helping him make such a raw, honest album.
“I can’t overstate her impact on the record,” he says. “It wouldn’t be what it is without her.”
Not only did she co-write six of the tracks, including “Fade Away Blue” and “Song for Barbara Ann,” but as an executive producer, she helped mix and sequence the album. She also encouraged Droge to be vulnerable in his songwriting. “Just tell the story…tell the truth, and be unflinchingly honest. So she was very influential in that respect.”
Before our conversation ends, I ask him about his birth father. He tells me that on his pre-adoption birth record, the father was left blank. He’s on Ancestry.com and 23andMe, hoping to find his paternal relatives. And his birth mother’s family has been able to provide some clues about guys she had dated, but so far, Droge is still searching for him.
“Part of my hope with putting this record out and telling the story is that maybe someone will be like, ‘Hey, I went to the University of Oregon in the late ’60s, I remember Barbara Ann Thomas and the guy she was dating at the time,’” he says.
Another hope he has with Fade Away Blue is that it inspires others to help themselves, whether it’s finding a birth parent or getting therapy.
“Maybe there’s a kid out there who hears the record and is inspired to do some soul searching of their own,” he says.”I know for me, when I was 19 years old and dealing with anxiety and substance abuse, we didn’t have the language; nobody talked about it. We didn’t even know what anxiety was. It wasn’t part of the discussion. And I certainly didn’t know that adoption trauma existed. Maybe at a younger age, if I had been aware of that stuff, I could have started this path earlier.”
Leave a comment