A Conversation with Peter Himmelman – HuffPost 6.7.13
Mike Ragogna: Hey Peter, how are you?
Peter Himmelman: Hi Mike, how are you doing?
MR: I’m doing okay, thanks. So what is all this about you working with corporations these days?
PH: Well, it’s something that has been long in the hatching. I’ve been thinking about this idea for years and I’ve finally found some traction with it. The concept in general is to take my life experience and those of my team members as “creatives” (that is, people for whom making things like art, music or poetry is a way of life) and to share those experiences with organizations and corporations like McDonald’s, Banana Republic, GAP–we’ve been doing work with them, also for the Wounded Warrior organization, which we just did a few weeks ago in Breckenridge, Colorado–to get people to open up to new ways of looking at communication and problem solving. It’s a methodology based on the rigid structures of songwriting. The paradox is that the structures are so dogmatic, so narrow and so rigid, yet through them, one gets to a new level of creative freedom, freedom to communicate, a freedom to think about life and relationships in new ways.
MR: Peter, how do you get people who are not particularly musical or even used to being articulate or writing down phrases on board for this?
PH: First of all, it’s not music per se because I’m not using chords or harmony unless somebody’s into that–that’s a whole other skillset–The challenge is really in the lyrics. How do you make something that’s structured? How do you make something that’s really succinct and still very unique? There’s a great thing I read in the L.A. Times not long ago about Woody Guthrie, it was a piece celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Woody’s birthday. Apparently, John Steinbeck had just finished writing The Grapes Of Wrath. At the same time he had a chance to hear a recording of Woody Guthrie’s song “Tom Joad. The Times article quoted a letter from Steinbeck to Woody in which he wrote: “You son of a bitch, you said in four stanzas what it’s taken me three years to write in this book!” There’s something about song structure, the narrowness of the form that makes it both doable and damnable. You can finish it in a short time and that’s the blessing that curses; it’s hard to fit in those lines, to get them just right and that to me is metaphoric of everything we have to deal with in our lives, all the structures in our business life, our creative lives, and our relational lives. How I get people to accomplish fitting all this creativity into such a rigid structure is that I help them shut off the selectivity of their brains. It’s a weird part of neuroscience. The misconception that people have of the brain is that it’s the organ that takes in all sorts of information for us when, in fact, much of the brain’s function is to select out only the information that we want at a particular time. Otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with input.
MR: Yeah, it’s multi-functioned, it’s not just a depository.
PH: Right. Certainly, our right brain, which is looked at as the creative mind, is tempered by our left brain. Otherwise, we couldn’t buy a can of peas at the store. We would be engrossed in the greenness of them for hours and never get anything done.
MR: You just defined how I lived my life.
PH: (Laughs) Most of us, are very strongly rooted in the left brain and obviously, you need a blend, you can’t just have one or the other. But part of the process I take people through is to temporarily quiet the left brain a bit so that ideas that are latent or unexpressed can then emerge in this short and safe period. Those are the things that one doesn’t need to be particularly articulate about, they’re just ideas that you might not find on the screen of your consciousness very often. It’s almost like taking a dream-state and making it known, giving it expression. And then we also have the idea of fear, our fear of being embarrassed or rejected keeps those ideas from being expressed, to ourselves as well as others. It’s not like we have these ideas and we’re not sharing them. We’ve become so oppressed through our fear of being rejected for new ideas that we won’t even play them out in our conscious minds.
MR: Do you think it’s fear that stops a lot of people from being able to access their full potential?
PH: There’s no question about it. Obviously fear is a great thing, too. If you’re in a seriously dangerous situation, if you’re jumping out of a plane and you just stuffed your own parachute and don’t know the first thing about how that stuff works, fear would be great. But the great majority of the time, fear is overused. I give the fear in my Big Muse method a name; I just picked a name out of a hat one day, I call it Marv.
MR: Love it. Marv. [laughs]
PH: I’ll show you a picture of it. He’s this guy I drew and he’s not this fearsome devil or anything, he’s just like a little nebbish-y guy who’s afraid and he’s trying to protect us. We all have Marv inside us, and Marv really means no harm at all. I think that his function was best served when we were infants and we were truly vulnerable. We were absolutely dependent on our parents for our literal survival and he gave us this idea that were we separated from the herd somehow, separated from our families through our actions or otherwise, we would literally die. Marv, in that sense, provided us with this life-saving mortal fear. The problem is that our lives are very infrequently in that kind of jeopardy. We can survive at least for a while on our own and most of our work is not to banish Marv or kill him, because he is in a very real sense our will to live, but just to say, “Hey, look Marv, I’m going to undertake this idea, a business proposal, a love letter to my wife, a new song, maybe I need to write a joke to tell at my comedy show,” whatever it is you want to do you sometimes have to tell Marv, “Just give me an hour and a half and then come back. Just give me a little break.”
MR: Yeah. Once they let go of Marv, what is the response? What are you watching as far as people actually able to turn the corner and start tamping down that left brain a little bit?
PH: Well the things that I’ve found, – and again this is testing a theory because I’ve only taken this to market about a year and a half ago so it’s all new and I got to work with some very big brands early on. Frankly my own Marv was really, really at a high peak telling me, “You’re not going to be able to do this, this is so bizarre, what are you trying to do? You don’t have a background in psychology or neuroscience.” But as it turned out, the results were astonishing. I can show you some of the testimonials and things that people have said, but what I found most striking is that it’s really emotional. I’ve never done one of these without a certain amount of tears and breakthrough emotions, emotions that in a certain way are really guiding people and pushing them to a new place. I don’t know if you’ve heard my song, “This Father’s Day?”
MR: Of course, it’s one of your classics.
PH: That song, especially when we’re talking about breakthroughs or creativity and teambuilding, is something I use as a touchstone for the work. The essence of the song is that my dad was ill with cancer and on the last Father’s Day of his life, I hadn’t purchased any cologne or tie for his party that they were throwing, this big lunch to cheer him up when in fact, we all knew that this was it for him, this was terminal. Instead of writing some kind of funny little ditty, it was four in the morning and I wrote a song that expressed pretty much everything I ever wanted to say to him. At the end of this song, I broke down and cried on the tape itself, on this little four-track recorder, and as I was about to erase it and record it “right,” I said, “I’m just going to leave this.” The most embarrassing, Marv-inciting thing you could ever imagine is hearing yourself blubbering on tape on a love song for your dad. It’s not something I would normally ever do but I overcame my Marv moment and gave it to my dad at the party. Listening to that tape together became a profound moment for the both of us. He died shortly thereafter and that song being so absolutely alien to anything I ever would have thought to do to advance my music career–using that metaphor about doing something entirely different to effect change–that turned out to be the thing that, with a grouping of other songs, got me my first major recording contract. And the idea that you’re expressing your love for somebody in your life, somebody that’s given to you and provided for you and enriched your life, being vocal about that in some way, especially in a letter or a song is a powerful experience. It’s also indirect and safe in a way, like expressing yourself behind a duck blind, but still being completely in touch with somebody that you love. Sharing your love with the people you love is an incredible way to silence Marv. It’s also in my mind, the conduit to the wellsprings of our own creativity. It’s hard to explain exactly why it works, but in major corporations, I’ll have people take out their iPhones and one of the first things I do, after playing that song for them, is have them write a letter to their mom or their sister or an old lover or an uncle, and it’s a really great, liberating way to start off this experience. How does this connect directly to creativity? It’s hard to point to just why it works. I can only tell you that the response is tremendous, it just opens up all these gates.
MR: Yeah. It’s breaking down filters. Being able to express oneself without all the filters and without Marv interfering totally makes sense.
PH: For me, as a songwriter, I guess there are a lot of different strains of songwriting. Some of the pop-craft of it is something other than what I do these days. Some like writing a catchy thing or a funny thing, which I’ve done a lot of in my life, but then there’s another thing, which is the act of mining in some areas where ideas surface without much conscious thinking.
MR: Yeah, without the filters.
PH: Right, and you know there is a certain amount of skill to be good at it, but right now, we’re not even talking about being good or judging quality. Just to have things that fall down into your lap, ideas, thoughts, phrases that you wouldn’t have otherwise been conscious of, it’s such a refreshing experience and I know most people go years without that having happened to them.
MR: So this kind of puts you in the role of mentor. Do you like being a mentor?
PH: You know, when I was twenty years old, I took some aptitude test for some reason and the result of it was really depressing to me. It said, “One of your good skills is that you’re a facilitator and a teacher,” and I’m like, “Who wants to do that? I want to be THE GUY!” I had no interest in it, and I remember Bill Cosby had a similar profile. As I matured and had kids and stayed married for twenty-five years, that role of mentor or facilitator or teacher is something that I do every day and it becomes more and more interesting to me and more and more important.
MR: Peter, what advice would you have for new artists?
PH: You know, there’s something that John Mayer wrote that I really responded to. I guess we respond to things we already believe, but I’ll put it in my own words. Don’t spend so much time trying to market yourself. It’s good advice I’ll give to myself as well, and ironically, here I am doing an interview with you. But nonetheless, it’s true, developing your ideas and filling your minds with the thoughts and ideas of other people, and then creating something that’s perfectly unique. For example I just heard on the radio some interview with this young English artist, this young girl. She seemed smart and she had a song called, “Set My Pussy Free.” I think that was the title of it. “Set My Pussy Free.” I mean, you know, the metaphor, not everyone’s going to want to choose. It was a smart song and had the ostensible concept of being about a cat. I’m not saying it’s an ideal metaphor, and she must have been a very beautiful woman because if she weren’t, I’m sure it wouldn’t work well–but that phrase “Set My Pussy Free, certainly stuck with me and I could imagine it being a memorable piece in her stage performances. I always think about Prince’s “Purple Rain” or “When Doves Cry,” just as a title, “When Doves Cry,” if he would’ve said “When Love Lies,” or something, that works in a way but is so unbelievably pallid compared to “When doves cry,” which just opens you up to all kinds of feelings and possibilities. “When Doves Cry” doesn’t mean anything per se, which is another thing I’m constantly stressing: Forget for a minute about meaning and a linear train of thought, go for something that creates feeling and momentum and energy. “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I don’t really know what that means and neither do you, but we all really like it. It means little but conjures up everything.
MR: Yeah, good point. That’s right on. I guess we could wrap it up here, but is there anything that we should be knowing about Peter Himmelman in the near future in addition to what we just talked about?
PH: Well I’m in a process of writing a lot so I would imagine that that’s going to culminate in something. A book of poetry, a new album, I am working on a book called Marv Or The Milky Way, which is talking about a lot of these concepts and hopefully that will be finished by, I would say, early Winter, because it takes a while.
MR: So I’ll be interviewing you again next March or so?
PH: I’d love it.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne