Peter White – HuffPost 3.5.12

Mike Ragogna: Peter, what advice do you have for any new artists?

Peter White: Play music that you love because you love it. If you’re expecting fame and fortune, it may never happen, but you have to hang in there because you love it. That’s the reason you’re in the music industry. Just get out there and sing and play in front of as many people as you can. If you have talent, I fully believe that you will rise to the surface.

MR: That’s basically your story, isn’t it?

PW: Yeah, basically. I didn’t go to college…my mother was horrified. At the age of eighteen, I declared that I wanted to be in a band and travel the world. All my friends went to college and I stayed home trying to figure out how I was going to do that. I’m very lucky because I met Al Stewart within a year and a half of leaving school and shortly after, started touring and working with him. One of the reasons that I was also very well prepared was that I could also play very many instruments at the time. I’ve always thought – and this is another piece of good advice – that if you only play one instrument, you’d better be Pavarotti. (laughs) What helped at the beginning was being very versatile. When Al asked me one day if I could play accordion I said that I could. I didn’t really know how, but I learned. (laughs) Since then, I’ve become a lover of accordion and it’s on most of my albums now. You can hear a little bit of accordion on the track, “My Lucky Day.”