18) “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.” This was the first thing that Peter said when I asked him about essentials for success.
Videos by American Songwriter
19) Study and emulate petersprague.com, one of the finest examples of a user-friendly, easy-on-the-eye website you will find. These are a few of my favorite things: Peter puts out a newsy update on his general activities and upcoming concerts every week, and I always look forward to seeing it in my inbox because his style is humorous and congenial; it’s like getting a letter from a close friend. He’s never trying to sell you anything; he seems more interested in sharing a musical experience with you. The links at the top of the page are atmospheric: Home, The Sky, Propaganda, Gigs, Store, SpragueLand, Media, The Loop. Instead of “blog posts,” he has “Fresh News.” Unless he’s on the road, Peter never fails to answer his email within 24 hours. If there was only one lesson to be learned from the website it would be accessibility. He uses the web to build relationships with fans. And another thing, I know I will never see the phrase “One weird trick…” anywhere, anytime.
20) Persevere! Sure it’s a cliché, but whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
The Interview
I decided to kick things off by talking about something we have in common: surfing. I thought the conversation might segue smoothly into some comparisons with music:
PS: There are times when you get a wave, and it’s a great wave and you can make choices about how you interpret it and it is like jazz because you do one thing and you have to react to that. So it’s super fun as you know and it’s very creative and it’s also a nice balance from the rest of how my life goes, which is there’s a lot of technology in my life and there are a lot of details to address and it’s a very nice place where you don’t have any technology except the ocean and the surfboard which is pretty low-tech, pretty analog, and just this open space, so even when you’re just waiting for a wave it’s a good time.
DA: What are some of the circumstances that trigger your most creative moods?
PS: In terms of just playing music, when I get into just playing music I prepare myself, I do a lot of preparation so that when I do that performance it has a good chance of going well. And that separation I do is I practice and I kind of get out of the equation or maybe I add into the equation so that I’ve done as much preparation as I can and that alone frees me up from having stage fright and feeling unprepared. I’ve learned that a long time ago that my way of having an assured good performance and just not to be worried is just to be really prepared with the music. So that’s how I set that up.
In the composing capacity, I know I need to have a lot of free time. When you take on a new song you don’t do it in a day where you just have an hour―I mean sometimes stuff just lands in your lap and you have no choice except to try to see it through as you can. But I do a fair amount of where I’m consciously setting out to write something, so I set the stage on those days where I have lots of free time, and unencumbered time where I can do that because what happens if you start on a track of putting something together and it might take a really long time just to get something started or you get something started and it’s cool, but then there’s something that’s not right and you need a lot of time to try a bunch of different angles on it.
So setting the stage to get the…. This is the same when you perform, it’s just to try to get the details of the world and get out of that so you’re kind of in a meditation where you’re in the moment, you’re not dragging along with the past, you’re not projecting into the future, you’re just in the moment with the sound, and so performing and composing have similar requirements to be creative and to be in that space.
DA: You and I have in common a deep affection for The Beatles, I’ve listened to you just pour out a twenty or thirty-minute essay in tonal color on a single Beatles song and to me that’s an amazing achievement. But behind it all is this sense that the Beatles accomplished something that’s at the very summit of songwriting beauty. And I wondered if you wanted to comment on that what is the source of that beauty? And how would other songwriters benefit from studying it?
PS: I grew up with The Beatles, as a lot of us have, and the main component to me is that the melodies are so incredible. A lot of the songs, the way the chords are is pretty advanced for pop music. I mean they go to pretty cool places. For instance, the chord progression on “Got To Get You Into My Life”―I mean that’s a really beautiful chord progression that has the suspended chords, and out of the blue it goes to the III minor with the suspending bassline in half steps, and it’s just a great, put-together song.
Part of my success in more recent times has been this sort of embracing a body of songs that people of my generation and luckily it extends to younger generations, too, and that’s in part because The Beatles, their music is so strong that even younger kids dig ’em. But part of the thing that has worked for me is that jazz in general is pretty abstract and not everyone can relate to it because their ear’s not trained to understand all the improvising that’s going on.
So something that I’ve been doing is taking these songs and it would have been similar, David, in earlier times, and it’s like what Miles Davis and everybody was doing. They were playing pop songs somewhat of the day and so they’re playing what we know as jazz standards, but at the time they were first playing them, those songs had come just a little bit before them.
So to update that, now we’re living in this time and songs that came a little bit before our era would be the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, some of these rock bands. At least that’s the stuff I and a bunch of people I know grew up with. So I find it’s kind of neat to have that as a starting point: these beautiful songs that invite new interpretations, I think.
And you know you can’t do that with… I mean you take a Rolling Stones song―or if you’re trying to do an instrumental version of “Wild Thing,” it’s not that strong of a melody. It’s more about the groove and sort of the attitude of the song that carries it. It’s not as much about a gentle song like “Here There and Everywhere,” where there’s a strong, put-together song. So you take a song like that, and it invites new interpretations.
And I think for me, and it seems to hit on other people, you can take a song and do some pretty inventive things with it and as long as you don’t destroy the melody and as long as you keep the spirit of The Beatles’ original version you can take people on a ride and they have a connection with it because they know the song, yet look at all this new stuff that’s happening. And it been fun for me, and it’s been successful. Like I can throw a couple of these Beatle songs into the set and folks just really respond and I love that.
I love playing no matter what, but most of us performers, we want to have a connection with the audience. We want to have it feel like we are all enjoying the experience and we’re relating to each other, rather than it being an esoteric thing where some people feel alienated or they’re not connecting to… I’ve taken a couple of Jimi Hendrix songs that are iconic, and they too have that nice harmonic wealth, and good melodies, and they do that same thing. There are a bunch of rock heads that are my age that just love hearing Hendrix that sort of a new way.
I do a lot of solo guitar gigs and that effect plays into those performances. Because even more esoteric is solo jazz guitar where you even have a little bit less reference where the song is, because it’s just the nature of one instrument playing. So I’ve had a really good time and success with playing solo stuff that incorporates songs that people might know and then going on these wild adventures and returning back home.
DA: That brings up another question on my list. You can go on developing musical skills for a lifetime and not hit the bottom of the ocean there. Let’s suppose that I’m a young songwriter and I want to be a success: I want to write good songs but I’m not sure how much musical skill I really need. What are the musical skills you must have in order to have a career in music? Do I need to go Juilliard and then begin my career, or just exactly what is it that’s going to help me launch a career in music?
PS: If you’re talking about songwriting, because songwriting’s different than being a performer. So in songwriting you’ve got all day, all week, all month, all year to figure out how you’re going to navigate a few bars and where the song’s going. You have time on your hands because you’re not being an improviser or a jazz player, say, in the moment where, or even as a performer―it doesn’t even have to be jazz. It could be classical rock or any type of music when you’re a performer that thing that you do has to be super-polished and super-automatic and sort of virtuosic to be competing with what’s going on now.
But composing’s different, so let’s just talk about composing. So for composing you know, really, David, it’s funny but we can bring up The Beatles … here’s one thing: I have this older man, he’s recording in my studio and he has done other things his whole life. I mean he must be 70 to 73 years old he’s done other things in his life, I think it had been real estate or something, but he’s always loved music. He really likes piano. He doesn’t know much about… I don’t think he can read a piano score, he doesn’t know much about music theory, but he’s got good ears and he’s actually very good at composing. He writes melodies that are beautiful and they’re very well-orchestrated.
So that is one example―The Beatles would be another example. As far as I know they couldn’t read music, they might have known the names of the chords but they didn’t know what’s “supposed to work.” Because once you know music theory you know “That’s a II-V-I, that’s supposed to work, that’ll work.” It seemed like the Beatles in an instinctual way really knew what would work for a song and for lyrics and for melody―they knew those things.
In terms of making a living, if you were a composer and you were going to try to make a living on it, I mean, I think there couldn’t be a harder career than being a composer to make a living because even as a performer there’s always going to be a $200 gig that you can do if you get good enough. But as a composer, it’s sort of a different world than when Carole King and everyone was writing songs, and there were a bunch of known artists that needed songs.
Now that’s changed, so that known artists, they’re not using other people’s songs. They’re writing the songs themselves, whether they’re good or bad. That whole dynamic has changed. I can’t think of a harder career to do than trying to make a living being a composer. But if you’re just in the raw sense trying to write music, I think you don’t need Juilliard. You just need to do it, and you need to have a gift for it. I would say that even more than playing an instrument, I would say that as a composer it’s even more about the gift that you’re born with of being creative and composing.
Like here’s another example, there’s a dude, I’m not going to mention any names, but he’s a composer from the East coast, and I’ve listened to a couple of his pieces, and he writes in sort of a contemporary classical style, and he’s trained in a university, but to me, the compositions are not―yeah, they work on paper, but there’s nothing harmonically that’s interesting for me. You know, it all works out in the mathematical way, but it’s not an inspired―it just doesn’t feel like a gifted thing, like there’s anything there at least that touches me. [Peter wrote a twenty-minute piece
Then here’s this other dude that I’m recording, and I say, “What chord is that?” and he has no idea. He couldn’t write the music out, he can’t do any of that, but he’s writing pretty great melodies with good harmony.
So that’s my take on it. And you can certainly get better at composing. I sort of felt like I have a gift for writing―I mean I look at some of my early songs and I think that “They’re all right,” you know, and I certainly have studied composition a lot since then, and part of my success is that I do know music theory and I do know how to write songs out and I know how to arrange and I’ve really thought a lot about that but I think at the core you could have all of that and you could be kind of a workaday composer, but be one that’s writing these supercool memorable songs, there’s a lot of gifts that have to figure into that equation.
And then on the performing side of it, yes, I think it’s a different thing. I think that the more trained you can be the better off you are because the level of technology and learning these days in music is just… I mean I’m 60 years old and my time from when I was really practicing and formulating my abilities, it was like when I was 18, 19, 20 years old, and what has come along since then in terms of ways to learn, it’s just a huge leap that’s changed. And so to be a contender, or to be a person who wants to make their living, you have to be knowledgeable, you have to be skilled in so many things, great technique, knowledge of music… I think you need to have a sense of self-promotion, the website, doing a little bit of video, having an understanding of recording, how that works. I think you have to have all of those skills in play, and it’s all attainable because technology is there to help.
