DA: How to be a successful independent musician, and of course I’m writing for a magazine in which that is defined as singer/songwriter. Though I’m sure you’ve seen singer/songwriters and other kinds of musicians and their career paths have things in common. I read your biography on your website, which I really appreciate by the way. There was a time you were playing in Chuck’s Steakhouse, Elario’s, and you really began to think, hey, I can make a career out of this.
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PS: Well, I think that decision to make a career out of it was years before that. It was a little turning place for me when I got out of high school, and I was really loving music and I just see that it was right around then when I decided to not go to college, because I just visited, during the summer, the Berklee School of Music [Boston], and I got a good sense of it, but I also saw that for what I wanted to do, I just needed to go to “The Room,” and The Room, in quotations, is a phrase that I got from Ernie Watts [drummer, songwriter, bass player, guitarist, vocalist] and I loved how he described it because it was the same for me, but he says, Ernie was saying, especially in LA, everyone was always coming up during the break and saying, talking to him about gear, reeds, and who’s doing this and that, and Ernie says, “Hey man, if you want to be a player, you just need to go to the Room, and the Room means you’re just going to go into that place where you practice and just spend time.
And so I got a glimpse of that early on and I thought, “I don’t really want to go into a classroom and study arranging and this and that. I mean, that all sounds interesting to me now, but at that point, before anything else, I needed to play the way I thought that I needed to play, and the only way to get there was to sit in a practice room all day for years, getting that homed in.
So that all happened to me right out of high school, and that was also that point when it was a real turning point for me, when I said, “Yes, I’m committing to this and I think this is going to be my way. So by the time the whole Chuck’s Steakhouse thing happened, we felt―and I say “we” because there was a whole crew of us, we started out pretty young and we were in the same bands together, and we were all practicing and working toward this stuff―well, we all felt this was working and we were going to be able to make a career out of playing jazz and playing music.
So it was just a little bit before that that that really…. It was like a cliff that I was going to jump off of that had seemingly…. It could have been fraught with danger, or failure, because you see so many stories of people becoming musicians and it not working out, and the path that I took was not conventional. You know, usually your parents want you to go to college and to do that kind of thing, and I just didn’t want to do that. So there were some scary moments there. But yeah, it worked out and I’m super happy that I took that course.
DA: With the benefit of your experience, what would you tell a young musician who was facing the same cliff today? What steps should they take? As a practical handbook in order to ensure that they don’t jump off the cliff and then crash at the bottom and have to go back to school and study some horrible thing, like law or chemistry?
PS: Right! So if I went back on what were the elements that worked for me―okay, one of the elements is you want to be in alignment with your parents. You want to at least attempt that because no matter how it all plays out having the support and blessing of your parents means a lot, because even if you think that they’re wrong, and they don’t really know the scene, the parents generally have a sense that they have only the wellbeing of their kids in mind. They have a lot of worldly knowledge that younger people don’t have. They might not have the knowledge of the music business or what it means, but if they’re solid folks, they’ll understand the passion in a young person.
When I look back on that that was the real neat thing with my parents. They gave my brother and I―my brother Tripp, who’s a musician also, who has taken a very similar path to mine―they said, “Well, okay, if that’s what you want to do, you don’t have to go to college, and we’ll support you for two years, and you can do whatever you want in those two years, you can goof off, you can work hard at music, whatever, but at the end of those two years, you’re either going to go to college or you’re going to be on your own and you have to be self-supporting at the end of those two years. So that was good, I think that was a really good option that they offered, because that two years, my brother and I we just worked hard and by the end of those two years we were good enough to play little gigs around. We were living very simply but we were playing gigs around, teaching, making a small living, and living self-sufficiently.
So that checklist: The first thing is to be in alignment with your parents. The next thing is that you would really want to do it, only if your passion was really extreme. You really need to be passionate about it. Because it’s a long road. To me it seems like it requires as much as being a doctor, as much devotion, and focus and concentration, and being able to go the long haul with it as being a professional in a medical field, say―it takes that kind of work.
So you really want driving that, this sort of passion that this is really what you want to do. And then you just work hard. You get real with what it really takes. Sometimes teachers are good for that or you do concerts or you travel or you get exposed to what level the music is. You know, you can see grownups playing incredible, but in this day and age you can see fairly young people too, playing incredible.
Now for me this element of the picture got illuminated when my last year in high school I went to Interlochen School of Music [lower Michigan] which is internationally known as an academy of music–mostly classical music but it attracts young kids from all around the world. And so I went there and realized there’s this much bigger world of music than I had previously known and yes, I was playing good, but there were some players there that were just absolute geniuses, you know, young kid geniuses, and sort of to know that that exists out there, that that’s part of what you’re striving toward, that’s sort of the touchstone of how good it can get. So that’s an important thing, too, to have a glimpse of what it really takes.
I’ve seen this with other students that have come to me, in all sorts of different capacities, and some will be, “Yeah I’m passionate about this, I really want to do this,” and then they set out on a course of doing this, doing this meaning making music their main thing and wanting to make a career out of it, and then they find out, some of them find out that, “Yes this is what I’m doing and it’s working out,” blah-blah-blah. Some of them find out that they have talent and all that, but they also find out that they don’t really want to have their life look like that. They don’t want to always have to practice so hard, or they don’t want to have to–I was going to say live super simply.
I’m living a good life now, but for so many years in the beginning I lived a very frugal lifestyle. And somehow I saw, and I’m so glad I saw this, but I saw that if you, there’s an immense amount of freedom in your life if you live simply. If your life gets complicated, complicated with fairly large bills, and if you have a family that you have to support, if all of that is in play, you have to make real money and making real money a lot of times in that early stages of music means that you’re either going to not be doing music that you love or you’re going to be doing some other job that robs away three-quarters of your life that you can’t practice, because the component, or the element that’s so important in those beginning stages is practice–you cannot get around that. You just have to spend a bunch of time doing that. So if your life is complicated and you can’t get to that, then you’re going to not progress at the level you need to progress and the whole equation’s not going to work out.
So for me, I saw that early and I lived a real frugal existence and had a lot of freedom to practice and it kinda worked out.
But back to this model of potential people like students of mine that have tried to go this path, some of them have worked out and then again some of them get through it and realize they don’t have enough passion or it isn’t important enough for them to want to do it to do this thing where you practice forever and you don’t get paid [laughs]. And that’s all fine―I think any way it works out is fine and that’s not even a waste of time. That’s actually sort of addressing the possibility at a really young age and it’s great because I’ve seen people just do that and they say, “No, I don’t want to become a professional musician. I want to have music in my life–I love music, but I want to make my living doing something else, and I want to have some of these other things and I want it to be such a struggle.”
So I think it’s all good. And then some people, they just know from the get-go that music is a neat thing to have in their life and not something to make their living at, and they have a great time with music. So I think all of the scenarios can work out and not one is better than the other, but it’s good to explore them and test them out to find out what’s going to work for you as an individual.
DA: Suppose I have my heart set on stardom―what would be the modern path to stardom? And I’m thinking of including media that weren’t available at the time you were starting out, such as the Internet. What could I do to turbocharge my assault on the Mt. Everest of fame?
PS: Yeah. Well, and this I’m speaking from not really knowing because I have not reached stardom. I’ve reached a really neat place in my life where I’m making a great, great living playing music and I’m really in love with music. I’m very inspired, I’m writing songs and performing all the time. But I’m not a star so I don’t think my path will ever be that because one of the things I haven’t done is that I haven’t made that the most important part of the equation and I’ve put this idea of the music that I want to play―I’ve put that in front of everything else. And as a result–the music that I love and choose to play will probably never be super popular because just the nature of the music―it’s kind of out there. And I wouldn’t say that also is the only reason. I wonder, David, if you know this young kid named Joey Alexander that’s playing piano now, that’s literally 13, 14 years old that’s just making headlines?
DA: Yes.
PS: So you know about him. Well, he’s a star and he’s playing absolute cutting edge music, so me saying that I will never be a star is because of the music that I choose to play is just not entirely the whole picture. The other picture is that―because if you look at him, he’s a star and he’s playing wild music, so it isn’t just that, he’s just gifted beyond belief, so there’s another element there.
DA: So I should be sure that I’m extremely gifted if I want to be a star.
PS: Well, if you want to be a star in that kind of music. If you want to be a star, I mean a real bona fide phenomenon, then you can’t buy that―I mean there’s pretty much nothing you can do, I mean that kid’s 13 years old or 14 or 15, I mean at that point you cannot practice enough to get where he is. There’s just a whole other system at play of being born with an incredible gift of perfect pitch, physical ability, everything, everything has come in the right picture to make that work.
So pretty much most of us should not count on that because that’s so rare, absolutely rare. So then if you’re going to be a star, a bona fide star like Sting or someone like that, I’d say things that are important in being a jazz guy like me there’s a lot of it that was important for me to get together to be where I am now that wouldn’t be as appropriate or it wouldn’t be as important if you were trying to be more of a pop star.
You know if you’re going to be a pop star, I’d say image is enormous part of it, you know to look good or to be sort of unique in a sense, unique in the way that you look and come off―that’s one thing. To have a really good sense of self, in other words to not be so egotistical that you couldn’t take any criticism or guidance. I think that would be a real mistake to not have that. I think you have to have plenty of ego, though, to be sitting up in front of an audience and really emoting and really putting yourself out there and being vulnerable and being able to withstand that.
So I think that’s a pretty big step. Music ability of course, you’ve got to be great at your playing I would say music theory, not as important, because when you’re talking about a lot of pop music, it’s not that it’s that advanced harmonically, so going to Juilliard and studying theory, it’s not as necessary.
I’d say to try to keep your head on straight, and I think this is important for anything, it’s just to, you know, the whole world of music and entertainment has been rife with people getting involved in drugs and not doing well with the effects of that. I think a person would be smart to really stay clear of that, and to keep your head on straight.
I’d say you know to be a star you’d want to live in New York or LA or Nashville. I think people want to be right in the heart of where everything is. I think you’d want to work very hard―you know maybe a lot of your hard work is not necessarily in practicing and composing but it could be an equal amount of work in social media, promoting, going and hanging out and meeting people, making connections.
And you know, and I’m not putting any of this down, too. This is not the path that I’ve necessarily taken, but I think it’s just completely valid, and you know, I look up to people like Sting, you know, John Mayer, you know, and all these great musicians that are playing up a storm and that are super famous and deserve everything that they have, because all of those elements that I’m describing, they’ve mastered and done really well with. The different music idioms, they have different requirements of what it would take to become successful at them.
DA: What I see in your career and what I admire so much, Peter, is that you have taken full advantage of all the resources available now to put together a global approach to acquiring an audience and playing to the world where big-name performers who wind up stars on television or recording stars who get millions of listeners like you say they are out after a different audience. You took a realistic look at your audience and the kind of music you wanted to make and you did absolutely everything that one could possibly do to make a world out of that, and to me that’s amazing.
As I look at your website there are all these things that you can do with your music and they include performing, you also stay in touch with the people that know your music practically on a weekly basis, you issue a newsletter, and you let them know what’s going on, you have a list of your gigs, your website has a list of all your recording credits―363 of them as I recall―and you have reviews posted on your website.
So can you tell me what you’ve learned about building a great website? I mean to me, your website is the model of a perfect website.
PS: Well, thank you! And I do enjoy it and I did learn a lot from when I had two major websites before this one and one of the things that I learned was that a website is sort of a combination of presenting all this information and so there’s informational part of it, and then the other thing is, if you want to kind of make it an enjoyable visual experience.
So one of the things that I learned and I finally got right―I didn’t really get it right on the first two websites―but the thing that I learned is that the people you want to get involved with help on it are… You could get a tech person who really knows the coding part of making a website, and have them do it, but I found that really what made sense to me is to get a graphic person that knows graphics, and I’m sure that there are people that know both, but I learned that, for my site, I got a person that knows a lot about graphics to get the visual part of it and this person that I got, she doesn’t know website coding or anything, but I could just give her simple things: I need a banner this size and this resolution, blah-blah-blah, and then she would make all those for me and then I had a coding person that helps me do the coding part, cause the coding person, I’ve seen the graphics that they do and they’re not great―they’re kind of limited, because they’re mostly focused on the coding part of it.
So that’s how I brought it together, and I also learned, and it’s really worked out well for me, is that I learned enough about both of those to be able to continually make updates on my site or additions, and I think that’s super important, to have enough knowledge to do that because every time you’re wanting to change your calendar or change people that you’ve played with or a blog page, every time you’re going to want to do that and you’re going to have to involve somebody else to help you with it, that’s not a good thing, because you want to make the website alive and spontaneous and able to move and able to change, and if you have to wait for somebody else and also have to pay for somebody else to do that, that’s just going to be a good reason that it’s going to get bogged down and not grow and not evolve.
And you know, David, it’s hard to know, a lot of current musicians they just will only have a Facebook kind of presence and for some reason I like―you know, on my website I have a store, too, where people can buy sheet music and CDs and stuff like that, music books. I just felt like I wanted also a place where I could put the articles that have been written, and the CDs that I’ve played on, so the website was essential. And so, you know, most major players have websites, but they also have a strong presence on Facebook and Twitter, etc.
DA: And, um, also I got to know you because I met somebody at the Del Mar fair who told me about SpragueLand.
PS: Exactly.
DA: And that was many a year ago. So tell me what kind of a difference having your own recording studio has made.
PS: Well, it’s been incredible for me because it’s brought together a few things that were just really essential to helping me with my career and my life.
“You know, my studio is a detached building from my house, but it’s still right on the property, so I’m not sitting there commuting, I’m just walking out the door to the studio and getting right to work. And it’s turned into a source of musical experiences beyond my live playing…. I’ve gotten to meet lots of neat people and hear lots of diverse types of music, including a lot of singer/songwriters.”
One of the things is that I do love technology and I’ve always loved recording. I started recording when I was pretty young, making records, and I had a real interest not only in making the music on the record but in the whole science of how to make it sound good, and so that part of having my own recording studio has been super fun to be abreast of gear and learning about all of that―that I love―but also it’s been a great source of income too.
As you know, I used to teach a lot―I mean, I’ve really taught ever since I got out of high school―beginner guitar lessons at first and as I got better I started taking on jazz students. And then I taught at music schools, I taught at GIT (now it’s called MI), Cal Arts, and a lot of music workshops as I would tour and travel.
And then I also toured a lot and was gone a lot on the road, and one of the things that I was getting tired of is I was getting tired of was so much travel and I was getting tired of so much teaching, and also here’s this new possible profession of being a recording guy and not only recording other people but also producing for other people’s recordings, arranging for other people’s stuff, all of that, and playing on the records, all of that was a really interesting path and it enabled me to work right…
You know, my studio is a detached building from my house, but it’s still right on the property, so I’m not sitting there commuting, I’m just walking out the door to the studio and getting right to work. And it’s turned into a source of musical experiences beyond my live playing…. I’ve gotten to meet lots of neat people and hear lots of diverse types of music, including a lot of singer/songwriters, and I’m so happy with how that all turned out.
It got to be―when we moved to this new house, that was the real plan, part of buying this new house―we were living in Del Mar―part of the plan was we needed a separate building for the studio, because I’m really going to put more time into it. Yeah, it’s just been just a fantastic thing and it still continues to go well and I’ve gotten to meet lots of neat people and [listen to] lots of diverse types of music. I’ve been exposed to that. A lot of singer/songwriters―you mentioned that as the main readership of your magazine…
DA: Yes.
PS: Yeah, so I’ve learned a lot about folk music that I didn’t know before, just playing with the capo and loving all of that.
DA: Well, suppose I’m a singer/songwriter with ambition, and I’ve heard about SpragueLand, and I come in there and I cut a song or two, what’s the next step for me? I’m sort of pretending to be naive about this, but something I think you might know that I don’t know is all of the things that I could do with that recording I’d made to put it out there and start it working for me to advance my career.
