A Conversation with Peter White – HuffPost 10.6.14

Mike Ragogna: I heard you have a great big Smile coming soon.

Peter White: [laughs] Well, yeah. I’ve actually been trying to get myself on an album cover smiling for years. I thought if I called the album Smile there couldn’t be any way that I could avoid it. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice for me to be smiling on an album cover?” and I never really achieved it after what…thirteen albums?

MR: Is it because your music lends itself to being more contemplative?

PW: I don’t think we can draw any conclusions about the music. There are certain songs that are very happy. In fact, the title track “Smile” is a very happy song. It’s about encouraging people to smile. “I love the way you smile.”

MR: How did you approach Smile differently from the last album? Where there any new tricks, technical or otherwise, that you used?

PW: I would love to say that there were, but there really weren’t. I’m pretty much doing the same thing I’ve done on every album. I’m just trying to create a variety of music that if someone listens to the CD all the way through, they will be taken on some kind of mystical journey through different moods, through different landscapes. Of course, if you listen to each song separately, you won’t get this.

MR: Ah, an intentionally coherent album. It gets harder and harder to do that in an environment where people don’t have a lot of time to listen to full albums and who have also gotten into the habit of downloading singles.

PW: Yeah, and sometimes, I do that too. But if it’s an artist I really like, I’ll listen to the whole album, absolutely. I think if you are an artist that listeners have grown to like because they like the fact that you make a whole album they can listen to all the way through, then I think I’m always going to have that kind of following, where people listen to the CD all the way through. “Hey, there’s not a bad song on here,” when somebody tells me that, that’s the greatest compliment. “Oh, I liked that one song!” Well, thank you, but what about the others? [laughs]

MR: So what about the others, sir? Takes us on a tour through the album from the creator’s perspective.

PW: A lot of these songs, I actually wrote a long time ago, I just put together these songs that I thought would fit together nicely to form almost a movie from beginning to end. I’ve even made a story using all the titles. I play that game sometimes. “Make a story using all these titles…in the correct order, by the way!” I just try to make the best music I can and present these songs in the best way possible. It’s up to the listener to figure out, “What is this? Does it touch me?” If it touches people, that’s all I care about.

MR: And I imagine that same intention had to be understood by your guests on this project. You have Mindi Abair, you have Rick Braun, Euge Groove, and many others.

PW: These are all my best friends and people I’ve played many shows with. In fact, I just did a show recently with Rick and Euge and I’m doing another one this weekend with Rick and Euge. It’s a show called Jazz Attack and we all play together. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get my friends to play on my album?” Rick plays the flugelhorn like no one else in the world, I think, so it’s natural to have him on there. I’ve got Euge playing some lovely–plaintive, almost–soprano sax. It’s not the funky Euge that you’re used to hearing. Mindi, I had her put down her saxophone and just sing. I said, “Just sing for me.” She said, “Peter White, did you write these songs? Did you write these lyrics?” “Yes, I did.” “Well, wow, they’re so romantic.” She was very surprised.

MR: Earlier, you compared this album to a movie. Was that film in your head from the beginning or was it something where you jumped into creating the music and then saw where it took you?

PW: Yeah, I think the latter is right. I don’t usually start an album with any kind of concept. I find that the concept grows out of the music. I think you’re possibly confining yourself if you start out with a topic. “Everything’s going to be like this.” The only “concept” albums I’ve really done–I’ve done a Christmas CD, yeah, and also I did a couple of CDs which were all cover songs, mostly from the seventies by the way, because to me that was the best time for music. That was when I was a teenager, so the music stayed with me all that time. But apart from that, I think people get too hung up about style. Let me go out on a limb here. I think if you have a great song, they can present it in many different styles and it still is valid. I’m trying to present my songs stylistically in the way that I think presents them best for my style of guitar playing.

MR: By the way, speaking of playing, I’ve always loved how you played like a wild man on the Al Stewart recording “On The Border.”

PW: Yeah, that’s how I started, with the Spanish guitar. Back then when I was twenty years old, Al Stewart put it in my hand and said, “Play this,” and the rest is history. I’d never really played nylon string guitar. We have different names for it, nylon string, classical, spanish guitar, it’s all the same really, but I’d never really played that kind of guitar, I was playing steel string. But Al’s influence set me on a road from which I’ve never strayed. People would remark on that and say, “That’s the sound! You sound great! When you play that, you sound unique.” I thought, “Wow, I’ve got to go with this.”

MR: Can you see how you’ve influenced him as well?

PW: No one’s ever asked me that question. I congratulate you, Mike. I’m always looking for a question I’ve never heard. Al really sees his songs more as lyrical rather than musical. In that way, I don’t think I’ve influenced him at all. I never really had a hand in his lyrics. I would make suggestions now and again but nothing major. He always liked the music that I’d come up with, so what he’d do is take a piece of music I’d written and put words on top of it. That’s how we worked together. He never really got that much into the music and I never really got that much into the words.

MR: It can argued, though.

PW: I would love you to argue, Mike! I don’t really see it but maybe you do.

MR: [laughs] This is more like what I mean. When you look at Bacharach and David, you’ve got the music influencing the lyrics and vice versa. My feeling is that Al must have looked at the music from that more tactile sense when working with you, no?

PW: I think certainly before I met him, he was more used to going into the studio with an acoustic guitar and the band would play around him. When I started writing songs with him, that kind of changed, now that I think about it. I think you’re right. We would create music and it wasn’t necessarily based around guitar. For instance, “Time Passages” was written around an electric piano riff. The acoustic guitar was actually not a huge part of that song. Since I stopped playing with Al–I do play with him occasionally–he’s made a few albums without me and he’s pretty much gone back to playing acoustic guitar and having a band play around him, which is how he did in the old days before I met him. But there was a whole period in the middle where the band would create the sound. The musicians–myself included–would create the sound and then he would work his magic on top of that.

MR: I’ve often wondered if the approach of folks like Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan wouldn’t have been furthered if they didn’t have bands like Tom Scott & The LA Express and The Band to collaborate with.

PW: Bob Dylan was already established as a folk singer but not to the extent as when he played with his band. Same with Joni Mitchell. It took their music to a whole new acceptance level.

MR: Yes, especially Joni with Court And Spark and Miles Of Aisles, and I’m thinking The Band/Dylan collaborations helped get him not only through Planet Waves, but the experience got him to Blood On The Tracks. Beyond the new acceptance and success they experienced, my feeling is it might have opened up creative portals for them. I’m suggesting you had that influence on Al Stewart.

PW: Well, I appreciate that, Mike.

MR: You’re very welcome. Now back to you. What do you think of jazz these days? It’s grabbed and integrated a lot of other genres, R&B, hip-hop, funk, soul. I know it’s a silly question, but what is jazz?

PW: It’s not a silly question. I heard a perfect definition of jazz one day, I think it was Pat Metheny on a TV interview. He said, “Jazz is music for improvisation.” How succinct is that? I feel that my music skims the boundary of jazz, there’s a little bit of improvisation there and I think when we play live there’s a little more because tend to jam out a lot more but my music is far more grounded in pop and R&B and rock than it is in jazz even though there are elements of jazz in it.

MR: And if one were to classify Peter White?

PW: Well, I don’t bother myself with classifying. I hear other people all the time, I walked in a music store one day and a guy said, “Oh, you’re Peter White, you’re the new age artist!” and I said, “Oh okay, yeah, I’m the new age artist.” What does that mean? I record it with a crystal? People want to categorize. Generally musicians don’t categorize; we just don’t do it because we feel it inhibits us. It’s just music. We’re the sum total of all the musical stars we heard growing up, which for me was The Beatles, Motown, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell. It’s all in there.

MR: And obviously you have to be exposed to the current biggest hits in the world, the things you just can’t get away from…

PW: It’s funny because I just read that Iggy Azalea has the number one single of the summer and I hadn’t even heard it. I thought, “I’m doing something right.” I heard Daft Punk and it was great. It sounded to me like, “We Are Family” because it was Nile Rodgers on there.

MR: I love what you said earlier about how, basically, even if you have clear influences, people shouldn’t genre-fy musicians. That’s got to be the most unsatisfying thing about making music.

PW: It’s pretty inevitable, especially from journalists, because they have to put down in print something that will make people understand and hear the music they can’t hear and yet it’s kind of impossible at the same time. No matter how much you describe a song, you still can’t hear it whether you like it or not. If people say, “If you like this music, you’ll like that music,” well, no, that’s not necessarily true.

MR: It’s like how Amazon makes suggestions.

PW: That’s right! No one has yet said to me, “Because you like Joni Mitchell, you’ll also like AC/DC.” No one has said that to me, and yet it’s true, Mike. I do like Joni Mitchell and I do like AC/DC, but that doesn’t fit into any algorithm. To me, this whole thing about, “If you like this, you’ll like this,” because it’s all stylistic and as I said before, I think categorizing by style is way overrated. I can listen to music in any style and if it touches me, it touches me. I’m not going to worry about, “Oh, it’s the wrong style, it’s too hip-hop, it’s too rock.” It doesn’t matter to me.

MR: What is the thing that brought the biggest smile to your face about Smile?

PW: The feedback that I’ve been getting from people, people who have obviously listened to it and remarked to me about certain things that really touch them, which makes all the work that I put into making the album, months and months of work worthwhile. I’m obviously very nervous every time I finish an album because I don’t know who’s going to like it. This is very much my vision, it’s not by committee. I’m not going around saying, “Do you like this, do you like that?”

MR: Have people commented on your continued growth as an artist?

PW: I get all sorts of different comments. That’s their perspective, I don’t really see it, I just hope that with each album I make I get better at making music. I’m too close to it to really see if that’s true. I can listen to my earlier albums and say, “That’s a good song, but it could have been done differently.” In fact, I’m redoing my first three albums. This is a long-term project where I’m going back and remixing them the way that I would if I was making them today.

MR: Are you going to recut some of the musical parts?

PW: I’ve actually added some musical parts, but I haven’t touched the original guitar. To me, there was nothing wrong with the guitar; the guitar was fine. It’s kind of a remix in that I’m taking the melody and just adding a few things that if I was recording it today–which I am–this is what I would add, this is how I would present it. It’s really a remix, it’s not a redo, I’m not re-recording, I’m just remixing.

MR: You have a good share of beats and samples that you’re throwing in?

PW: Yeah, some. We didn’t have them in those days. I’ve gone back and I’ve found bass parts that I’ve never used because they were out of tune, but now with modern technology, you can make anything in tune. I was talking to Brian Culbertson. He redid his first album but he completely re-recorded it. What I’m doing is different because I like the guitar, it’s everything else that I thought wasn’t up to par. So the guitar is completely unchanged but I’ve also added things that I think would make it better for today’s audience and today’s atmosphere.

MR: It seems like you and the group of artists and musicians on this album took concepts like good songwriting and furthered them within your own creative atmosphere. Does that seem right?

PW: Some of us have actually come right out and said it, I think Mindi said it on her previous album, all we’re doing is trying to keep up with what they did in the seventies. Those great founding records back then. Forget about improving the music, we’re just trying to keep up with that music. That was the best music ever. There’s a song on my new album called, “Beautiful Love,” which is my tribute to Barry White. I don’t know if anybody gets this, but if you listen to it and the way the song starts, you can almost hear Barry White starting to moan and groan the way he does. That’s what I hear anyway. I wonder if anyone will ever get that. The first time I heard Barry White, I was awestruck. I said, “Wow, this is amazing. I’ve never heard a pop song where the music starts but the singing doesn’t come in for another minute. I’ve never heard that before. That was pretty revolutionary. I’ve taken that concept with this particular song with a long, drawn out intro that just builds gradually.

MR: “Don Quixote’s Final Quest” seems almost like a commentary on what has come before on the album. Was that intentional or is that just my over-reading?

PW: I love that. It’s certainly a throw back. I’m glad you said that because I’ve never really looked at it that way. That goes further back than any other song, I think. I wrote that song maybe twenty years ago. I kind of forgot about it and then I ran into Freddie Ravel who’s a piano player and he reminded me that we had tried to record this song together and then we gave it up and that was about ten years ago. I said, “We have to finish that song.” So we finished it and I nearly left it off the album because it’s just so different to everything else. But I said, “Why not?” When The Beatles recordedSgt. Pepper’s… there were all sorts of songs on there that were completely different from anything we’d heard before from The Beatles. “She’s Leaving Home,” just the string quartet, with The Beatles singing. I thought, “Why not?” This is part of the story. Maybe the protagonist in our story went to the movies and he saw a movie about Don Quixote. Maybe that was in the soundtrack. Maybe that’s what happened on that particular day if you look at everything in sequence. I’m glad I did leave it on the album because I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on that song.

MR: And you end with the optimistic “Awakening.” Since you described the album in terms of a film, it’s clear you understand the concept of a happy ending.

PW: Yes. Once again, I didn’t really get that, but now that you point it out to me, it really does make sense. It’s a nice awakening. Maybe it was all a dream, Mike, maybe it was all a dream…

MR: [laughs] Cue wavy visual effect and scene change! See, that’s what you get when you talk with an over-thinker. So. What advice do have for new artists, Mr. White?

PW: I think you have to open yourself to as many musical styles as possible. If you can play the piano, to me this is the bedrock of western music. The fact that I can play the piano even though I’m known as a guitarist, it has enabled me to write and arrange all of these songs because most of it’s done on the keyboard. When I joined Al Stewart’s band, by the way, he hired me to play the piano. He already had a guitar player. I probably would not even be here talking to you today if it wasn’t for that. Whatever other instrument you play, or if you’re a singer, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Learn to play the piano. And get out there and play as much as you can in public. Go to places where people play and meet them. There are clubs here all over in L.A. For instance, there one I know called Cafe Cordiale. I go there all the time and musicians hang out there, musicians jam there, this is where you get to meet musicians. Be true to your heart. Make music because you love it, not because you think this is what people want to hear. I’ve never been good at that. Maybe that’s a good thing. I’ve never been good at trying to figure out what people want. What did Rick Nelson say? “You can’t please everyone so you’ve got to please yourself.”

MR: Nicely played, sir! What about you? What advice would you give you if you were starting out as a kid again?

PW: This is a great question. I would say, “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

MR: Beautiful.

PW: I remember being very worried when I was younger, and now I look back and I think, “What was I so worried about?” If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. There’s only so much in life that you can control. Probably less than you think. Just do your best and go with it. Try to avoid making decisions based on fear or greed and that’ll give you a good life. I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the best piece of advice. If anyone had said that to me, that would’ve given me a lot of solace. A lot of comfort. “It’s going to be okay. What are you so afraid of? Don’t be so fearful.” And if you do have fear, because we all do, walk right through it. Don’t let it control your life. When I started out, I was full of fear. I had no experience, I was just starting out, I didn’t know anything. All I knew was how to play the guitar. And yet that was what kept me going. The fact that I could play guitar opened doors for me even though I wasn’t sure where I was heading.

MR: No fear. This said from the man who was handed a Spanish guitar and told to play it.

PW: Well, it changed my life. Al Stewart–who I met at the age of twenty and I’m so glad I did–I only met him because I was living with my mother and going down to London to do auditions on the train. I was making appointments to meet people on a public telephone because we didn’t have a telephone. Kids today say, “How do I get someone to listen?” You have everything now. You have the internet to tell you how to do everything. “How do I fix my sink?” It’s on the internet. “How do I play this song?” It’s on the internet! Everything’s on the internet!

MR: Yeah, some things shouldn’t be on the internet, huh! [laughs]

PW: [laughs] Some things shouldn’t, but if you can think of it, it’s on the internet. We didn’t have the internet, all we had was blind luck. Just keep going and, hopefully, things will click. And you meet people along the way, as I did with Al Stewart. As I said, it changed my life. I was very lucky.

MR: So what’s in your future? What else does Peter White want to do?

PW: People do ask me this, and I wish I had some exotic hobby to talk about like falconry or pole-vaulting. Underwater pole-vaulting, now that’s something new. I’m going to turn sixty soon. I’m just amazed that I’m still here. In fact, that is a question that no one ever asks me: “Why are you still here?”

MR: Hey Peter, why are you still here?

PW: [laughs] I don’t know! I’ve managed to keep away from drugs and only occasional alcohol, but I’m still fit and I’m very grateful for that. All I want to do is keep making music and playing music because that’s what keeps me going. That’s what keeps me young and enthusiastic. As long as there are people out there who are willing to listen and want to come to the shows and take the time to wait after the show to tell me that they liked the music, that means so much to me. Otherwise why would I do it?

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne