Songfacts®:

• This gentle song is a tribute to alcohol, which as Homer Simpson says, is the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. It was written by Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard, who did lots of drinking in public, especially when he performed. The song, though, is largely in character from the perspective of a guy whose entire life revolves around drinking. It's part of the 1990 album Same Place The Fly Got Smashed, which is built around this concept.
• Guided By Voices still had their day jobs (Robert Pollard as a school teacher) when they released this song on Same Place The Fly Got Smashed, their fourth album. During this time, they were releasing their material themselves with album pressings of about 500. They made their music on the cheap, using a guitar amp to distort the vocals. Many of their songs from this time are rather abrasive - what would later be described as "lo-fi," but this one is just voice and acoustic guitar, so it comes off a lot more intimate.
  
  The group was still struggling in 1992 when they decided their album Propeller would be their last, but it got the attention of a small label called Scat Records, which signed the band, so they decided to soldier on. In 1994 their album Bee Thousand became their breakthrough, earning them national press an a spot on the Lollapalooza tour. Scat took the opportunity to reissue Same Place The Fly Got Smashed, which got new life.
• Guided By Voices kept going into the 2020s, with a few breaks in between, the longest hiatus coming from 2010-2016. Robert Pollard got more prolific as a songwriter as he got older, publishing thousands of songs and often putting out multiple GBV voices in a single year. Of all those songs, though, "Drinker's Peace" has some lines he looks back on fondly:
  
  My life is dirt, but you seem to make it cleaner
  Reduce my felony to a misdemeanor
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Pollard, he said: "That's a pretty decent rhyme and it's a nice thought on a relationship."