A Conversation with Peter Himmelman – HuffPost 7.16.14

Mike Ragogna: Your new album is titled The Boat That Carries Us. How did the creative process start? Were there songs that spurred on the concept and then the process just evolved from there?

Peter Himmelman: You know, I just don’t really know. That’s a good question. Normally, all these pat answers come to mind, but when you do a Ragogna interview, you’ve got to dig deeper than that.

MR: Oh no you don’t, we still need an answer, Mr. Himmelman!

PH: [laughs] I just wrote a lot of things on paper without any music. They were songs because their architecture is more rigid than some freeform poetry or something, so I had a good sense that these could be songs, and one of them was just this one. There were actually other title ideas, too.

MR: You mean “Green Mexican Dream”? Knew it!

PH: Well, no, that wasn’t one of them. One of my songs is “Ten-Ton Tank,” and I thought that might be fun. I think my son disabused me of that. There were a couple of rejects, and then it just struck me as so obvious, “That would be a perfect title,” a summation of everything I wanted to accomplish in this record.

MR: Exactly. Like “Green Mexican Dream.”

PH: I mean, that could’ve been just another failure.

MR: [laughs] What separates The Boat… from your last project?

PH: The last record that I made was called Are You There? It had sort of a fake band name which, in retrospect, may or may not have been the best idea, but you’ve got to try a lot of things when you’re alive. That’s the best time to do them, I always say. That was a long period of not so much time in the initial studio session but kind of a laborious post-production session. This one was entirely different. A big difference is these players: Jim Keltner is the drummer, he’s been a friend of mine for many years, and I never really played much with him at all. I don’t know why it never happened, but it did on this occasion. Lee Sklar, the bass player is super renowned, I’m sure all your readers know who these guys are, I don’t have to put in their credits or anything. I have a guitarist named David Steele, the name was suggested to me by Sheldon Gomberg, the producer of the record. I’d never heard of David Steele but he played with a lot of people that I like, Lucinda Williams and John Prine and Steve Earle. I was really shocked at how deep of a guitar player he was. I guess he’s assumed to be the go-to Americana guy. As he was playing certain changes I’m like, “Wait a minute, David, you’ve got to tell me you were playing Yngwie Malmsteen when you were like in junior high, I know it,” and he goes, “Shhh, don’t tell anyone.” Of course he was, he’s just so deep and so gifted. That was sort of a different thing, to walk into this room with total strangers in the sense that I’d never played with them before. We had a very short frame of time to record just because I thought it would be more interesting to hit it, budgetary reasons, “How long can you give these guys to hang in the studio?” It’s not like we’re making Guns N’ Roses’ album over the period of a year or something. So I think we had like two and a half days to get in there and make something happen. I’m familiar with how that goes, but this was even more, everything that we did, everything that you hear on the record is pretty much done live. I don’t think there’s any vocal fixing that I can remember. It just kind of is what it is. This is the kind of thing that Lee Sklar always liked and used to do more of in the seventies. You’d just roll tape and you’d get what you’d get. Everybody’s giving it, not just getting it a little bit perfunctory from a bass track and a drum track. I’m not saying this is the greatest way, all the ways to record are really good, but this is what interested me at the time.

MR: Peter, what does music mean to you these days?

PH: Well that’s a good question and it’s interesting that you even have to ask. Everyone that makes music, I think of a certain age, has probably asked that. It’s not a ticket anywhere anymore, that’s one thing. Maybe I could tell you what it’s not. It’s not a ticket to fame and fortune, it’s not a career advance. I think that for many years with the disruption of the sold music part of the music business–and I don’t want to go on a whole tangent with that. It’s just a fact. I think the positive part about it is that it’s a purifier. It purifies your intention. Why are you making this music? It comes down to just because it’s an enjoyable thing. It’s something that I’ve always done and when I don’t do it I’m less happy than when I do do it. There you have it.

MR: You know, without trying to be Mr. Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn, I think there’s been some terrible stewardship over the last decade or so with music and young people. It seems the goal now is to win a televised talent contest as opposed to exploring the art.

PH: You hit the nail on the head with that. If you had to boil it down, it’s probably just that everything follows the money. Everything that gets really popular is somehow following the money. It doesn’t mean that it’s the best, but it often gets in people’s minds that if it doesn’t sound like “The Best,” then it’s probably not good, and it becomes irrelevant in a lot of people’s minds. I have said from the very beginning, that American Idol was the death knell of something. I don’t know what, but it felt to me funereal in some way. And The Voice…all those shows. I get it, I understand why people do it. Everyone’s trying to make a buck, trying to move things. It’s fun, it’s the salt, fat and sugar of the music business. But you’re going to find out how bad it is for your arteries at some point. I think I put in some Facebook post that got a million responses, “How would Tom Waits have faired on American Idol?” The other part about American Idol is it’s only about the way that you sing. Simon Cowell, I actually like that guy, I think he’s cool, I think he’s smart. He says from time to time just to reset the clock, “This is a vocal talent show, and it’s specifically one kind of vocal.” He would be very hip, I’m sure. I’m sure he understands very well the merits of somebody like Tom Waits, but that wasn’t the nature of the show. Music just became something completely other with a show like this. An interesting thing, I don’t remember where it was, but my son showed me this article, I think it was in The Atlantic. The conceit of the article was written by a music journalist and he was exploring the oxymoronic nature of music journalism. What he was saying was there was a white ethnocentric focus on rock people in the seventies. You had your hagiographies about Neil Young or Bob Dylan, but you would never find that kind of article written about Marvin Gaye because Marvin Gaye was perceived as a pop musician and it was anathema for a real rock journalist to write about pop music. It just wasn’t happening. Today, things are completely reversed, where no one has any problem getting an assignment to do a thing on Beyoncé. That’s the best. That’s the gold standard. So it’s just interesting how things have changed there because Beyoncé is one of the few people that’s actually generating money. People want to write because there’s money available. It’s funny how it’s so economically driven. It may always have been, but the economics have tilted towards something that’s just pure pop at this point.

MR: But as the movement to bring music education back to schools is gathering steam, where will it lead? Will we be training kids in the basics of music or to be on American Idol?

PH: That’s another great question, but it goes far deeper than that. I know somebody who went to Stanford. He got a liberal arts degree. He said, “Look, if I’d gone for anything else I probably wouldn’t have gotten into Stanford,” it’s an incredibly hard school to get into at any rate. It was easier to get into the liberal arts program because it’s not something that people value. It’s diminishing all across the board, this paradigm of people who pursue ideas that aren’t easily slotted into careers. My daughter just graduated from college, her major was art history. A lot of times you get people sort of snickering about that. “How is that going to serve anybody in a job?” Not, “How is that going to broaden somebody’s outlook? How is somebody going to use that to put cultures into context and history into context via art?” which is an incredibly marketable and amazing piece of education to have. All across the board, the idea of refined expression, deeper expression…it’s somewhat looked askance upon by certain people. Music for sure is one of them. It’s not valuable–it’s not mathematics, it’s not science, what good does it do anyone? The truth is it does a lot of good, making people feel and understand and empathize and become awake to their emotional lives and the emotional lives of others. It’s the currency of human relationships.

MR: And while we’re talking about all this music stuff, what song or songs on the album most reflects Peter Himmelman?

PH: I kind of like this song called “Thirty-Three Thousand Feet.” I like that it’s a little bit fuller production, I go back to it even though nothing’s overdone. I always liked what the chorus said, it just reflects where I’ve been and where I’m at. I don’t remember exactly, but it’s like an imagined conversation I’m having with somebody, or this character is having with somebody, which a lot of my songs are. This person is trying to muster up all of his feelings about the enormity of the change and the successes and failures, the ignominious feelings and the triumphs. I’m fifty-four and this character is the same, I guess we age at exactly the same rate. He’s just like, “I can’t explain any of this to you. I just have no words.” Really, that’s where music comes into play. Music is like tears or laughter. It’s what happens when your emotions are higher than your ability to express them in words. It comes out something like tears or laughter. When it goes to a different place the song is saying what can’t be said in mere words.

MR: Is that the goal?

PH: Unfortunately or fortunately, I never had any real goals. Most of this stuff is pretty impulse-driven. It’s just like, “Here’s a thing that occurred to me” with some refinements, but it’s just a thing that popped out. I mentioned this somewhere and I thought about it and I think it’s important and I recently discovered it. I just thought, “I always do this stuff for just a handful of people.” It could be that in my mind when I’m writing things and I’m making things I’m doing it for like four or five people, and they pretty much have been the same people my whole life with just a few changes.

MR: Do you believe you know those people well enough by this point that they’re appreciating it?

PH: I don’t know. Maybe they represent a larger body somehow. How many people can you really connect with at any one time, anyway? Not very many. If you think it’s more than say two hands of five digits a piece, you might be fooling yourself. I think that they’re stand-ins for everybody else. If the relationships are close and quantitatively small, they can be representative of reaching out to a broader world somehow.

MR: Nicely said. What advice do you have for new artists?

PH: I know that a lot of young artists are always looking for a manager. Everybody’s thinking, “I need to invest some time getting this one person who can lift me off of this plateau and get me noticed, do things, cup me in their two mammoth hands and just throw me into the air.” But there isn’t anybody like that. Then you say, “Well, look through history, look at Colonel Tom Parker, look what he did for Elvis, he made him a huge star,” and I say he didn’t make Elvis a huge star. Elvis already was a star. Elvis made himself into something that was totally inimitable. He had a vision of himself that he pursued diligently, fearlessly, passionately. He had no choice, perhaps. That’s what he became. When he was playing these shows that Colonel Tom Parker came and saw he already had a recording contract with Sun studios and all that. He was a star. Be more reflective of what it is that you’re trying to put into the world, what it is that’s going to make you completely unique from everyone else, and put passion and time into that, and the managers and all the other stuff–the catapults, if you will–they’ll just come around naturally. But you’ve got to turn yourself into a heavyweight stone before anyone wants to put you on their catapult. It takes a lot of manpower to push that thing up, they’re not just going to put up any old stone.

MR: And it seems one has to at least have potential.

PH: And he had it, Elvis had this super interesting thing going on, this connecting thing, something that nobody else had. I remember when our band, Sussman Lawrence had our first gig. It was in Minneapolis and it was packed. It was totally, totally sold out. A lot of people complained that it was full of our family and friends. There was some grousing about that. It was a three or four hundred-seat club, standing room only. I’d been playing in this reggae band and was somewhat known, we were working on a record, I think we had a record. How the hell do you think we got three to four-hundred of our family and friends? Because they liked us! We were good, so our families came out. There was some energy there. Why would you come out if it wasn’t happening? I’m just saying, that’s how you do it. You attract attention in your inner circles first.

MR: What does the future hold for Mr. Peter Himmelman?

PH: Well, the boat is going to be doing some sailing. The Boat… is a significant part of me generating creativity in myself as well, drinking my own Kool-Aid and adding credibility to this idea that I’m a person that makes stuff. It’s not like I just made things twenty years ago. I’m actually scoring a new television show this fall, it’s called Dig on the USA Network. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s going to be a pretty heavy show. It’s co-produced by Gideon Raff, who created Homeland and this guy Tim Kring who did Heroes. It’s a really well-done show and I’m going to be doing the music for that.

MR: Peter, see if you can get some music on the Heroes reboot too!

PH: I didn’t know about the Heroes reboot, that’s interesting.

MR: Congratulations on everything, man. Hey is scoring something you’d like to do more of in the future?

PH: I have to figure out how to do it in a way that’s going to allow me to keep going on these other things that I like doing. I think it will. There were days when you did a twenty-four episode series and it was just really hard to do anything else for say a year at a time.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne