<\/p>\n
A rock singer is making a comeback nearly two decades after his last solo album.<\/p>\n
Pete Droge, best known for the song \u201cIf You Don\u2019t Love Me (I\u2019ll Kill Myself\u201d) featured in the 1994 movie \u201cDumb and Dumber,\u201d told Spin magazine <\/a>that he partly took time off from music to focus on finding his birth mother. He had an \u201cincredible epiphany\u201d in 2009 when he was working on a song and his computer glitched with a timestamp error showing \u201c1969,\u201d the year he was born.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t really say it was a memory, but it was sort of like an imagined flashback or something,\u201d he said. \u201cA lightbulb went off, and I was like, \u2018My adoption… I should look into that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Droge told the publication he had \u201cbeen doing that middle-aged thing\u201d and \u201ctaking stock of my life.\u201d He had been in therapy, dealing with anxiety, depression and past issues with alcohol and substance abuse.<\/p>\n Droge, encouraged by his adoptive parents Arnie and Jan Droge, got his adoption records and learned his birth mother\u2019s name. He quickly discovered her obituary, which was \u201cheartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n But the obit helped him connect with some of his birth mother\u2019s family, including his grandmother who\u2019s now 98. According to Spin, he met family members in Ohio and bonded with his uncle, a fellow musician; he also talks with his grandmother every Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember having this really intense feeling of connecting with a sense of place that I\u2019d never really felt before,\u201d Pete Droge told the magazine. \u201cThis kind of, in a strange way, felt like home.\u201d<\/p>\n Droge\u2019s adoptive father died in 2015 and then his adoptive mother\u2019s health began to decline. He struggled to work and had his own health issues, eventually getting treated for intense chronic fatigue. <\/p>\n Some of that journey inspired Droge\u2019s new album, \u201cFade Away Blue,\u201d on Aug. 22. It\u2019s his first solo release since 2006\u2019s \u201cUnder the Waves.\u201d<\/p>\n Droge told Americana UK<\/a> that two songs, \u201cSong For Barbara Ann\u201d (his birth mother\u2019s name) and \u201cLonely Mama\u201d were about missing the chance to meet her. He also wrote a biographical song about his birth mother, \u201cGypsy Rose,\u201d based on stories he gathered from friends and family. It nearly turned into a concept album about adoption \u2014 lead single \u201cYou Called Me Kid\u201d is about his adoptive father \u2014 but he instead chose to include other autobiographical songs about different periods of his life including his grueling touring schedule in the \u201890s.<\/p>\n Droge was a fast-rising star after releasing his debut album in 1994, opening for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1995. He also released \u201cBeautiful Girl,\u201d the title song from the 1996 film \u201cBeautiful Girls,\u201d and briefly formed a supergroup called The Thorns with fellow singer-songwriters Matthew Sweet and Shawn Mullins.<\/p>\n Droge also released three albums with his wife, Elaine Summers, and worked as a music producer and composer for film and television. In June, he began his first tour since performing with The Thorns in 2003.<\/p>\n Droge, whose adoptive mother died in June, told Spin he hopes the music helps others with similar experiences. But he also hopes it helps him find his own birth father, whose name was not on his birth records and hasn\u2019t been found through DNA testing platforms like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of my hope with putting this record out and telling the story is that maybe someone will be like, \u2018Hey, I went to the University of Oregon in the late \u201960s, I remember Barbara Ann Thomas and the guy she was dating at the time,\u2019\u201d he told Spin. \u201cMaybe there\u2019s a kid out there who hears the record and is inspired to do some soul searching of their own.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement<\/a> and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and\/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.syracuse.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A rock singer is making a comeback nearly two decades after his last solo album. Pete Droge, best known for the song \u201cIf You Don\u2019t Love Me (I\u2019ll Kill Myself\u201d) featured in the 1994 movie \u201cDumb and Dumber,\u201d told Spin magazine that he partly took time off from music to focus on finding his birth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2011673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2011673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2011673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2011673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2011673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2011673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}