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Peter Himmelman Releases No Calamity |
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Peter Himmelman is a lot of things and he does them all very well, he is
a guitarist, film and television scorer, a composer, a lyricist, an
author and he is also a motivational speaker to corporate America. Peter
Himmelman is also a husband and a father and we do not want to lose
sight of that, because early in his career Himmelman had a very
realistic opportunity to explode globally and become part of the very
upper stratosphere of Rock artists, but he chose to redefine his career
and placed his family as the first priority in his life.
Fast forward and Peter Himmelman is the go to guy for Fortune 500
companies who are looking for a way to refresh and to renew their
corporate vision and to expand the vision of their employees. He also
has a brand new album with a collection of songs that are thought
provoking and that possess contagious grooves and rhythms. We should
also point out that these songs were written prior to the fall of 2016.
That is borne out when Peter Himmelman talks about why he chose the
title No Calamity for the
album, “I just liked the sound of it. It is a lyric from one of the
songs on the record. I chose that title well before any elections were
in full swing, just to let you know that it is not a comment on any
particular thing. It is more of a personal thing.”
Himmelman talks about his unusually named song “245 th Peace
Song,” “I think I picked that title, because it is subtle irony, as
there are so many songs that are extolling peace as a way of life. The
song is personal and introspective in a way. It could allude to the
interrelation piece between two people. It could be societal in some
ways. It asks questions (about) the holes in people’s lives (that have)
to be filled. It is a statement, but “you’ve
got to be careful what you fill them with.” “The
anger in people’s hearts needs to be cooled,” and then it says, “but
you have to be careful what you cool it with.” There is a push and
pull there. In other words I am empathetic for where you are right now
and what is happening. The response to it also has to be measured in
some way to be effective. The chorus is overt and it says stop the hate
and you can take that wherever you want.”
The guitar intro with supporting booming drums, for “Memories In This
Heart of Mine,” immediately draw the listener into the song and you find
yourself tapping your feet, or nodding your head or moving your hips or
whatever you outwardly express that are into the music that is being
played. This writer was hooked on the first two or three bars of music.
Himmelman sets the scene with an easy to imagine word picture, “the
dog’s asleep at my feet again / the clock reads twenty to nine / I’m
feeling incomplete again / like there’s a hole in the span of my mind /
the fog is slowly thickening / there’s a chill running down my spine.”
The upbeat recurring guitar riff sets a nice counter balance to the more
somber lyrics.
Himmelman talks about “Memories in This Heart of Mine,” “It sounds like
a band from the eighties called Modern English. I wrote it on the piano,
but I understood that it was going to be a guitar playing that melodic
line. It is actually a couple of guitars on the record and along with
that is a baritone guitar, which usually goes an octave or a fifth down
from the regular guitar. It is sometimes used in Country music. They
have very heavy strings. The guitar is usually a six strings instrument
with a super low twangy sound (and used) sometimes on an old Country
song.
Peter Himmelman hooked up with Steve Berlin to produce the album and he
talks about that, “I tasked him with almost a test. I (thought) I have
all of these songs let’s see what he comes up with in terms of a list.
Several months later he got back to me with this pretty interesting list
of songs. I had a collection of about fifty songs that I let him (go)
through.”
As for the songs that Berlin suggested, “I didn’t necessarily find them
surprising. All of the songs that I wrote or had demos of I sort of had
some investment in. They weren’t the songs I would necessarily have
chosen myself, which is good, because I didn’t want him to echo
everything that I was going to choose otherwise what is the point of
objective feedback? In a
sense I looked at that list and I found it more pleasing than
surprising.
I thought I get why he is picking these songs, because of the choruses
and there are very clear modulations, bridges and they have a good
harmonic variance and melodic quality to them. Some of the ones that I
liked were more modal and Bluesy in nature,” explains Himmelman.
Working with Steve Berlin started when Scott Tipping phoned Peter
Himmelman to say that Berlin was interested in working with him on a
record. It was after that lengthy conversation that the song selection
process began.
The pace changes with the fourth song on the album, “Fear Is Our
Undoing.” The mood is more relaxed and the vocals sell this song. There
is something about the tonal quality of Himmelman’s vocals that keep you
coming back for more and throughout this album we simply cannot say
enough about the fabulous background vocals. You can be sure that
Riveting Riffs Magazine is going to dig more into other albums that
these singers appear on.
Talking about “Fear Is Our Undoing,” Himmelman says, “Sometimes I just
write titles down. I was looking at all of the titles I had one day and
I probably put this down a couple of years ago. I will be riding on a
train or a plane and I will look back to my notes to see that I have
there. I wrote down all of
these different potential titles. Some of them felt weird or crazy. When
I was trying to write a song I went back and I looked at those titles. I
thought that is an interesting one and I can work with that.
Here are some of the song titles I had way back in June 2014 “Fear Is
Our Undoing,” “Bleary Eyed Travelers,” and there were a bunch of titles
and when I was trying to write a song I looked at them. I thought “Fear
Is Our Undoing,” seems like a truism or an axiom.”
One might easily draw the conclusion from the song title “Fear Is Our
Undoing,” that this is a song that is going to paint a somewhat dubious
picture of humanity, but it is quite the opposite and this is a very
uplifting song of hope, underscored by the words, “Together
we are so strong / We can catch each other if one of us should fall…”
There may be a lot of music fans out there, when they listen to the
songs on No Calamity demanding to know why they have not heard Peter
Himmelman prior to now. He has not been in hiding, but has not exactly
been in the spotlight for much of his career either and that was a
choice that me made early in his career.
“I wrestle with this a lot. Where do I stand in the music part of my
career? How do I reconcile the things that I didn’t achieve? It is not
an entirely comfortable position. It is not depressing, but sometimes
it’s just interesting. I made a lot of choices, none of which I regret
at all. At some point there were millions of dollars being poured into
the promotion of my work? In the nineties I had two or three different
major labels deals. What was difficult for me was not having freedom and
(I was) being commoditized. Part of how I was hamstrung was, not only
that they were holding money over my head, money that I needed for my
burgeoning family, holding it over my head and pressuring that I needed
to be places that I didn’t want to be. You can say that about any job,
but this has an extreme quality to it.
When my first child was born and he is now twenty-seven I was on the
road for 250 days the first year after he was born. It was easy for me
at twenty-three or twenty-four to imagine myself on the road that often
or even more. It was desirable, but you can’t know what you don’t know
and I didn’t know what I would feel about the world once I had a child
and once I was married. I started feeling much differently about it. As
enticing and alluring as “fame” was and having my music widely
distributed or admired, which still appeals to me today, I am not
telling you that I am over the appeal of it, it wasn’t able to compete
or succeed in usurping my desire to be a good father and husband.
It sounds to me to be weirdly
self-righteous or something, but it is the truth that I can come up
with. I did make a decision to leave Sony Records on a legal, financial
technicality to go to a much, much smaller label and to do things that
were on a much smaller scale,” he says.
When asked about his song “Rich Men Rule the World,” and we asked him
for his opinion as to whether or not that dynamic can be changed for the
average man, woman and child, this is what Himmelman had to say, “Well
now we are taking a left turn in this interview and I like it. Just the
way things are set up; gravity takes balls and makes them fall to the
ground. Again it’s axiomatic just the way things are. Hot air rises.
Power is persuasive. Power usually dominates, so as things are without
an incredible, unimaginable, unforeseeable paradigm shift and some
rejiggering of the whole system and that is with a capital W, no I don’t
ever see that changing. It could be rich women. It stands for mankind,
but so few women come to mind when I sing that song, it doesn’t make
sense. The song is a strange one too. I wrote it Hong Kong and I had
terrible jet lag when I wrote the lyrics. It is one of my favorite songs
on the record. I enjoy playing it. Quite frankly I am not sure how to
inhabit the song. It means a lot of things.
It is not a protest, but this is my opinion of the song. I hate to delve
in and the artist speaks, which is always really boring. I don’t
necessarily see it as some kind of indictment, but I see it more as a
personal song, which rails against my own sense of ambition.”
That leads us back us to talking about choosing family as his first
priority over career, “I have to say, if you really want to get into,
now that you have opened me up with that question about “Rich Men Run
The World,” that it was the first time I started waking up and asking
what is the nature here with this push and pull and with this tension
about wanting to make it and for what reason, the quiet, more weighty
joys of starting this young family. The family just won out. Now my kids
are grown and moved out of the house and the clamor of their footsteps
and all of the things that would happen in the house when they came home
from school and just the whole tumult has quieted down.
Then to think about I have to put 150 people into a club in New York
it’s painful to me in a certain way. It’s not something that (keeps me)
up at night and it’s not real grief. I know God forbid what real grief
is, but it’s not that. It doesn’t go in the happy column; it goes in the
challenging column. Yet in terms of decisions having been made I never
regret the decision. When people say they made a tough decision and they
are perfectly fine with it, I never believe them.
I believe that they made the decision and it was the right one
perhaps, but it always had a cost. If it didn’t have a cost you couldn’t
really call it a decision. It would just be obvious.
The unheralded decisions, the small, sexy, private not made for movie
decisions that so many people make, they make the world go around.
I wouldn’t say in my case that it was a sacrifice. Some people
make some great sacrifices. I don’t include myself in this word I am
going to use now, but there is great nobility in people’s choice. There
is great beauty in that. I think that to the extent we are talking about
social activism, more politics, those are the great antidotes, although
not necessarily carried with pickets and signs and placards.
Those are the things that I think on some unseen level keep the
world turning; the heroic unheralded acts that people make in terms of
their sacrifice and for their own integrity and the integrity of the
people around them. (He
laughs lightly) that’s my statement for the day.”
The rapid fire lyrics on “Ribbon of Highway,” match the quick paced
rolling rhythm, a relationship song that once again showcases some
incredible background vocalists. The fact that Peter Himmelman allows
his other musicians and vocalists to have their moments in the spotlight
on the album No Calamity says a lot about both the artist and the
generosity of the man.
“That is another song I must have written on a plane. It is a little bit
older than some of the songs. That is something that I wrote in a batch
for another record probably in 2015 and for some reason it didn’t make
the cut. “Ribbon of Highway,” was one that Steve (Berlin) picked. It was
an acoustic guitar demo. It was actually surprising that he picked that
one. It is somewhat of a stream of consciousness. It just says at the
end of the day in the chorus, look if you want to continue let’s just do
it. Sometimes when you are in a relationship, for a lot of people it is
like you are on a bus and the door opens periodically and you just walk
out. That’s what people do, but we always choose to say, we’ll keep on
going. We’re not ready to walk out,” he says.
Some might hear the songs on No
Calamity as being activist in nature, while others might view that
as being more reflective so we put the question to Peter Himmelman to
get his perspective on this find collection of songs. “My knee jerk reaction is absolutely more self-reflective and if someone gleans some social activism message that makes sense to me I say great. Songs are just there to me and they are neutral. Hopefully, they are oblique enough that people can take away their own meaning from them if they so choose and if they are inspired to do so. None of the things that a person takes away from a piece of art are wrong. My whole life is self-reflection, what is happening in my head and my relationship with other people, with God, my future plans and it is just a lot of living in one’s head. There is a whole universe there that is of great interest to me and how I comport myself in the world. It is like a quantum world. Rather than going deeply outward, it goes deeply inward,” he says.
Life began for Peter Himmelman in St. Louis Park, a suburb of
Minneapolis.
He says, “(Our family) was exactly like my family now; there were two
boys and two girls. My parents were married. It was abnormal in a way.
It was abnormal, at least from my perspective and I am sure my brother
would agree. It (the family) was very supportive. We had our challenges,
but at the core everybody loved each other and supported each other. (He
laughs lightly) somehow I thought it was an impediment to becoming
famous in Rock and Roll. I was not a rebel, (although) I did a lot of
things that rebels did. I might have just been a plain old hedonist. I
never rebelled one second against my parents. There was nothing to rebel
against really. First of all I had so much freedom, too much freedom
probably and part of it was just generational. Even now I feel a sense
of responsibility having had that gift. What’s it like to not have faced
derision from one’s parents or to have seen terrible corrosive rancor
between them? That’s why I say it is abnormal. My experience just having
been in the world for a while is that’s not the norm. What does it mean?
What I meant about it becoming difficult in Rock and Roll part of what
could fuel it is a sense of futility when you just say fuck everything,
I am just going for it. I am just going to bleed for this. I don’t have
a name that I care about. I am just leaving things behind and I am
reinventing myself. I had too much connection to my parents in some way,
so it was like I can’t do that, because it would be displeasing to them.
That’s not what you want when you are going to try and become a Rock
star. You just have to say fuck everything and everyone. That’s the
quality that is most attractive to people.
As I say in my
book, my dad was an entrepreneur and while he wasn’t making pottery or
dancing or something, he was very creative. I always try to stress to
entrepreneurs that they are essentially artists who are taking a nascent
idea and manifesting it, which is exactly what Michelangelo did. The
outcomes are different and the motives might be different.
My mom would occasionally play the piano and she was really good, but
she hardly ever played. There was a lot of humor in the house. It was a
really funny family, as is my family now. It is one of the means of
communication. It is the juxtaposition of paradox. It is attention to
unlikely scenarios and smashing them to great effect. Some people don’t
have it and some people do. It is a way that you find commonality. The
things that you find funny, can really bond you with somebody if they
find them funny as well.
What’s paradox? What’s normal? In that sense there was a lot of
creativity and nobody else was going out and writing songs like me. I
felt as the third child of four I needed to (do that) in order to get
attention and I still feel that way. I feel I need to do something
great, to make some mark or to achieve something. It has been an
albatross in a way. It is tiresome, but I don’t think I will ever outrun
the impulse. It is kind of the way that you look at it as your survival
mechanism with people fighting to get attention and resources.”
Peter Himmelman’s father’s Tape O Rama business became one of the early
musical influences in his life.
“One of the things he had going was an eight track tape shop, probably
the first one in Minnesota. We laugh at the technology now, but it was
pretty cutting edge. He brought home all of this music, Credence
Clearwater and Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones when I was in fifth
grade. Through my sister’s bedroom door I could hear The Animals and The
Beatles and I thought wow, this is speaking to me,” he says.
Musical education in school was another early influence for Himmelman,
“I played the saxophone in fifth grade and I played it all through high
school, (including) in a high school band.
I started playing guitar in the sixth grade. I had a band since
sixth grade and some of the guys that I made records with on my major
label were those guys that I played with in junior high and senior high.
I don’t play with them quite as much now. They are great musicians. I
always had a band. I did not do well in school. I did abysmally in
school.”
Continuing he says, “I was making money in a band when I was twelve and
we played at bar mitzvahs. When I was in sixth grade we would change the
name of the band every week. There was a band called The Reflections and
there was another band we called Pyramid. There was band called Birch
and my mom said that sounds like the John Birch Society, I think it is a
bad idea and I had no idea what the John Birch Society was and I didn’t
really care. Then I was in a band called Alexander O’Neal and the Black
Market Band when I was fifteen. Alexander O’Neal became a big Soul star.
Then I joined a Caribbean band called Shangoya and we played Reggae. To
me it was just all one piece (the different styles of music) and it
still is. I was really into Reggae and they also threw Calypso in there.
Calypso was not something that I even knew what it was. I found it less
interesting than Reggae, but it is really interesting to me now. I was
steeped for a year or two in those rhythms. Then one year out of high
school we started Sussman Lawrence. That band got a lot of notoriety in
the mid-west and we moved to New York. I got my solo record deal and the
guys from Sussman Lawrence became my side band for about three or four
albums.”
Peter Himmelman’s book Let Me Out: Unlock Your Creative Mind and Bring
Your Ideas to Live opened doors for him.
“There is truth in the one thing that I could say and I will give you a
couple of strands. The music business started to disrupt and you could
no longer make any money from making records and touring. The record
business used to flood the radio business, which is really the
promotional business with money and it was easy to get people out to
your shows. I am not talking about the level of a U2, I am talking about
the level where I was. The whole thing dried up and so I did a lot of
things like film and TV scoring and you can tell when I get to a middle
of an interview I get languorous and I like to talk, but there is no
talking there. I was holed up for 12 years in my studio making music for
television. I got lonesome in a certain way and it was a super high
pressured job. It was lucrative, but it was driving me crazy. My kids
were going to private schools, one after the other.
I needed a new way to make a living and I was trying to look at
my skill sets and to see what is at the essence of what I do?
One of the things that I have the ability to do is to bring type A
people, normal people, crazy people, wild artists and it doesn’t really
matter I can make them feel like they’re third graders. I can get them
out of their normal routines and rituals. Now I get paid a pretty
handsome fee for coming into companies and basically getting their
employees to think like third graders for a moment. What they do with
that creative energy is up to them.
When I was starting down that path I understood that people who are
successful in this business they always have a book. I started working
on the book and the more I got into it the more interested I was in the
whole subject of human creativity. What does it mean? Miraculously I
finished the book and even more miraculously there were several
publishers that were interested in it, which was way beyond my vision
for it. It was just like a remote idea. It came out on a Random House
imprint called Penguin almost a year ago (October 2016). I get a lot of
comments about the book from (people that) it has helped. They call it a
prescriptive nonfiction book, which is probably another way of losing
the hated term self-help book.”
Himmelman came up with a couple of terms in writing his book to act as
metaphors to communicate his message. One of those phrases is Milky Way
Moment.
“It is a term I don’t quite use now when I speak. One of the promises of
the book is if there is something that you want to do, like let’s say it
is study Jazz piano and you have been a lawyer and now you are in your
fifties. It’s just something you always wanted to do. Everybody has
something like that. It could be just a conversation, such as I really
want to call my sister from whom I have been estranged or whatever it is
I want to start a business. It could be big or small. I know we all have
those and we never get started on them. The promise of the book is, if
you read it and you are interested in it, I pretty much guarantee you
that you can start the process. I am not going to even promise that you
are going to be famous or excellent. You will be joyously engaged. I
always wanted to fly an airplane and I used my own process with that.
One day I was flying a Cessna 176 Skyhawk over the San Fernando Valley
near Los Angeles and I realized I loved it, but I didn’t love it enough
to actually endure the rigors of becoming a pilot, but I loved the
experience.
The Milky Way Moment is stepping into that, which you previously only
dreamed of. Let’s say you wanted to take Jazz piano lessons, it begins
the minute you sit down and start doing something. You get the joy of
actually being engaged in it, which I think is a complete shift from
nothing to something. That sounds like a very trite and small thing, but
really it is a great upheaval. You have left the world of promise, this
ephemeral idea and you have made it manifest. You have crossed over a
threshold in a way and you have begun taking action on that thing that
you previously only mulled over. That is a Milky Way Moment when you are
either reaching the stars or in my book I liken it to chewing on a Milky
Way candy bar, the rich chocolate flavor is only a metaphor. What you
get for not taking action is what I call the dry blade of grass, which
stands in distinction to the Milky Way bar, because there is no
lusciousness in a dry blade of grass. That is to say for mulling an idea
over and over and over again in your head, if you want to use the
metaphor of a Jazz pianist in the making, you get a certain pallid
pleasure just thinking that I could be good if I only tried. The amount
of pleasure that you get, which I am being a little sardonic about is
equal to what you get chewing on a dried little piece of grass. It is
basically nothing. Once you step into the Milk Way Moment you are
getting so much more,” he explains.
The other term that Himmelman coined is Brain Bottle Opener and he takes
time to enlighten this writer as to what that means.
“In this book there are simple exercises. As a reader, I am not really
or prior to writing this book I was not necessarily a fan of writing in
this prescription nonfiction genre, so I try to be disruptive of it a
little bit. The word exercise bothers me, so I tried to come up with
another term that I find interesting. I write it as I would like to read
it, so it is a brain bottle opener, something that can open your mind
and expand your mind that has been locked. It has an alliterative
quality to it that I thought sounds cool. We called it a BBO. That’s how
it was born,” he says.
Peter Himmelman
says that in the beginning, “even companies that you would think ere
“stodgy” completely understood (the value of what he was presenting).
There wasn’t a lot of resistance. When I started this whole thing I
didn’t understand that there was learning and development and there was
this culture of innovation. I didn’t know any of that stuff, I was just
a musician. There was a lot of receptivity, as there continues to be
now.
It’s interesting to get interest and it is a little more challenging to
have buy in. The companies not only pay the fee that I demand, but they
take people out of their jobs for a few hours or a half of a day, so
there are costs. Until they do it they wonder about the effectiveness of
it. By nature I wouldn’t say it is obscure, but it is a little bit hard
to define. As I playfully suggested, what is it worth to you to have
your people, as though they were third graders, playing in a sandbox,
free, uninhibited, happy, ready for change and ready for new
experiences, trusting, open minded? Those people who are sophisticated
and who work in learning and development parts of companies are
fascinated by that and the promise to them means quite a bit.
The difference between creativity and innovation is that creativity is a
state of mind. It is a mood. I just read a New York Times Magazine
interview with Tom Waits and he said if you want to be a songwriter you
have to put yourself in a place where songs fall on you like birds or
insects. It is a state of mind. That’s a great quote and it is a state
of mind. If you want to innovate, whether it is a conversation or
creating a new way of doing business, a new product or service to bring
it into that world, you have to be open and you have to create a second
state of mind. You take that state of mind to come up with ideas and
then you drive the ideas through a process and that is the beginning of
innovation. The innovation process becomes a rote process by nature and
you constantly have to put the paintbrush back into the paint again and
that is the paint of creativity. It keeps that mood going.”
Peter Himmelman’s album No
Calamity, engineered and mixed by Jeff Stuart Saltzman at B-Side
Studio in Portland, Oregon and mastered by Adam Gonsalves (Telegraph
Mastering) and with additional engineering by John Paterno is one of
those albums that in an age where the majority of people acquire their
music digitally, this is a CD that you want on your shelf in hard copy
form. No Calamity is a
timeless treasure and the songs will long outlive anyone reading this
interview today.
Please visit the
website for Peter Himmelman.
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Rather
than being plaintive as in in sad or mournful, Himmelman is the
plaintiff and prosecutor condemning hate in all its forms making the
case that it serves absolutely no purpose that in any sense can be
considered constructive. While Peter Himmelman’s vocals have a gravelly
quality to them they retain a melodic quality to them. Make no mistake
however, that what drives this album are superb instrumentals by
Himmelman on guitar, joined by guitarist Scott Tipping, drummer Chuck
Lacy, bassist Matt Thompson and a trio of superb background vocalists,
Kristin Mooney, Claire Holley and Willie Aron. Jeff Victor, Himmelman’s
cousin serves up a fabulous Hammond organ solo for “245 th
Peace Song.” Other musicians who make an appearance on the album
include, percussionist Jimi Englund, Paul Chandler (trumpet), trombonist
Anthony Meade, Jean Mastaler on viola, cellist Skip Von Kuske and
Mitchell Froom (Hammond organ, mellotron).
