Peter Holsapple’s new album The Face of 68 serves as an unintentional mentorship for songwriter / musicians closer to the beginning of their careers.

Peter Holsapple says, “I am extremely proud of the new record. The songs that make up The Face of 68 are largely songs that were written after the release of Game Day, my last solo record in 2018. What happened was my friend Carlo Nuccio from Continental Drifters passed away from cancer in 2022 and I don’t grieve very cleanly, so I wrote a song. Actually, I wrote a couple of songs, but the song “Larger Than Life,” that I wrote and cut, felt good. I thought it had been a few years, maybe the statue of limitations had been lifted and it would be okay for me to do another record.

I had a folder with about fifteen or sixteen songs and I thought maybe there is something in here. Then I got Don Dixon (producer) on the case and I wanted to do it different than Game Day. Game Day was all me and that was fine and I don’t have to do that again. I wanted to do it with this rhythm section and I got a crack team, Rob Ladd (drums) and Robert Sledge (bass) and made it a very tangible record. We could feel it coming out of the speakers, at least if you play it loud enough, which I do.

I suddenly had a bunch of songs and I had a studio (Overdub Lane) six minutes from my house. I had a producer in Don Dixon whom I dearly love and have loved for a million years. I had a great engineer whom I had worked with Jason Richmond. He had done the engineering for The Paranoid Style stuff, the band that I play guitar with these days. It all came together and pardon the pun, but we did it in record time. That really felt good too, I didn’t have a lot of time to second guess myself. I had Dixon taking that role. All I had to do was show up and sing my stupid songs into a microphone and then we had a record. The studio is in Durham, North Carolina.

I love working with Elizabeth Nelson and Tim (Bracy both of The Paranoid Style). Elizabeth is a very singular songwriter. I never got to work with anybody who is this interesting of a songwriter. If you give a listen to a few of the songs on the Interrogator you will immediately understand why I am saying that. I played on Interrogator by The Paranoid Style and I have a guitar solo that I am very proud of on that.”

From our perspective the song “Larger Than Life,” is the centerpiece of the album The Face of 68, with thundering bass riffs, a great melody, and drummer Rob Ladd laying down a strong foundation. We particularly liked Peter Holsapple’s vocals on this song.  In many ways the song is reminiscent of 1970s Cream and Jeff Beck or Deep Purple’s Smoke On the Water (from the Machine Head album), with less gritty vocals. In fact, have we said how much we like Peter Holsapple’s vocals on this song? The song ends on a spectacular guitar solo by Holsapple.

“(The song) “Larger Than Life,” is about my friend Carlo Nuccio,  who was the drummer and founder of a band I was in for many years called the Continental Drifters. Carlo was a New Orleanian through and through, although I played with him first out in Los Angeles and then when moved back to New Orleans and the Drifters followed along behind. We had a parting of the ways and then we got to be all hugs and kisses again. He was easily the most inspirational musician I have played with in my entire life. He made me a better musician. He had problems and when you are larger than life, you have problems that are larger than life. He got a lot of those under control, he got married and he had a beautiful wife that he loved very dearly, but then he got cancer. Then the cancer became larger than life and it killed him.

I don’t grieve very successfully. I wrote a couple of songs. I miss him. I can’t think of a day since he died that I don’t think about him. I communicate with him in whatever way you can communicate with (someone) in the afterlife. I miss him. I miss him terribly and that is why I wrote this song. It is not really a New Orleans beat, but it is something he would have easily played as well. Rob Ladd is the guy who replaced Carlo (in the Continental Drifters), so there you have it, full circle.

It (the song) is mainly about a guy missing a friend and trying to find a way to communicate that to the people who didn’t know Carlo. A lot of songwriters, you give them a subject and they can write about that. I am not very good with that. I have to come with what happens with me. You don’t really aim for a universality when you are writing it, because you are trying to write what is within you, but if you are lucky sometimes, you make that universality happen. People will say I know that person or I have felt that way or you wrote a song about my life recently. That is the hope. It is a funky song. I like how it sounds.”

The Face of 68, album title bears witness to the titular song title.

“The biggest thing about “The Face of 68,” the song, is it is a song that I actually played all of the instruments on. We cut a version of it, but I thought the demo was more representative of how I wanted the song to sound. Everybody was cool with that. What else could I do, but call attention to it? The rest of the record is largely guitar, bass and drums. I mean that song is guitar, bass and drums too (only he played all three). The record itself is more of an abrasive kind of record than I am used to making. I don’t mean abrasive in a bad way, but in a tonal kind of way. There is not a lot of Power Pop on it. One song is, but the rest of it is Rock.

The other day (you can hear the smile) I had a realization that if we are going to take it literally The Face of 68, the twelve-year-old boy in 1968, that face is staring into records by Cream, and by Paul Butterfield Blues Band and different stuff like that. By and large it is like, before Big Star (the band from Memphis) entered the picture. I cannot understate that Big Star was a cataclysmic discovery and it changed how we listened to music a lot.

The only place on AM Radio where we ever heard anything like King Crimson or anything around that time or Free was on what they used to call clear channel radio. There was a station in Chicago called WCFL and there was a show called Ron Britton’s Subterranean Circus. The theme was the metaphysical circus by the band of the United States of America. That is a lot to say and you are saying to yourself how does he remember all of that stuff and he still doesn’t remember where he parked his car? That is where we got exposed to this stuff. I remember the WTOB radio station would go underground for fifteen minutes on some appointed day of the week. It dawned on them that they should probably do something about their listenership and draw in the older teens after eleven o’clock at night,” he says recalling some of his earlier music influences.

Continuing he acknowledges that The Face of 68 is a reference to his age or was at the time the song was written.

“When that song was written and recorded, I was in fact 68 years old. If you do the math I was twelve in ’68. It was a very good year. I am sixty-nine now, so the timing is slightly askew, but I think people will get the point. I like that song a lot. I am kind of showing my hand. If it was going to happen it would have happened by now and would it matter anyhow. I am still going to be doing this. I don’t stop, because I don’t sell a bazillion records. I do it, because I have these songs I like to play for people. People seem to really like my songs and that makes me feel really good and that I am doing something right.

I don’t know what else I would give that kind of interest to. I have never found anything else that interested me as much as music. When I say interested by music, I say as a songwriter, player, singer, as an arranger and I used to be a producer, as a retail salesperson of, as a writer about, as a critic of. I have worn a lot of hats and it is all because of music. That whole silly meme, but it is true, think of all the people I would never have met had it not been for music. That’s the story of my life brother,” he explains.

Let’s talk about the other people who contributed to this album. Let’s start with your producer Don Dixon.

“We go back to the teenage days. He had a band called Arrogance that we used to go see when we were young teens and they were older teens. That would be 1969 – 1970. He was the guy who ostensibly produced the Sneakers record in 1976 that Chris Stamey put out. It was a little six songs, seven-inch EP. He worked a lot out of Charlotte called Reflection Sound Studios. He did a lot of stuff out of there. That is where he and Mitch Easter did a R.E.M. record.

I have known (Robert) Sledge the least, but I had played with him before. I did a charity show a few years ago and the two of them (also Robb Ladd) were the rhythm section that was the backing band for all of the guest artists. I got up and sang “A Million Miles Away.” I also sang “Dance Hall Days,” by Wang Chung. I had the best time and they were so solid. Rob had played with the Continental Drifters for a while. After Carlo left the band, I was out touring with Hootie (and the Blowfish) and Rob was out with Dixon in a trio, also featuring Jamie Hoover from The Spongetones. I would listen to Rob at Sound Check and I was just blown away. I thought if we ever needed to get a drummer, I thought Rob would be a perfect fit.

Sledge is just like a surgeon on the bass. When we walked in there (the studio) they knew the songs from the demos and they had charts. We just counted it down and started playing it. We took some notes and we played it again and we played some more notes and we said let’s get a version and see what it is like. Dixon would say yay or nay. It went like that for eleven songs and it was great,” he says.

Our conversation drifts back to the songs, this time “She and Me.”

“That is the one song inkling toward a Power Pop kind of thing.  It was another song when I didn’t like the lyrics and so I wrote a set of lyrics about my wife, because she is really a superb person and she helped me figure out how to do this record. She really pushed me in the right direction with a lot of the suggestions that she made. We have been married for twenty-two years. That song presents a lot of the give and take in our relationship and it is not a conventional kind of love song, lyrically,” says Peter Holsapple.

Talking about his songwriting process, Peter Holsapple explains, “More often than not there is music first. I find dozens of songs that are great songs and I have recorded a backing track and I may even have put a horn arrangement on it, but do I have words?  No. I don’t really feel there is an instrumental record in it. I have a hard time with lyrics. The lyrics for this record came together, part and parcel with the music for most of these songs. There are a couple of songs like “She and Me,” and “Fireflies,” that had a couple of goings over, before they became presentable.

For songs that come together all at once or approximately at once, give or take a week or two, those are the ones that are really the good songs, because they write themselves. That is helpful for me if I don’t have to write them and they can come out themselves.

I can go for months without writing a song and then I notice it. I go wow it has been three months. I will sit there and see if I can scratch the surface on something. That is hard to do you know. You want to come from a place rather than make it happen.

“My Idea #49,” that song comes from the title first, lyrically. I have a thing on my iPhone called music memos. I won’t be in my studio, but I will have an acoustic guitar or something around, so I can play this idea and I will play it into that. I will save each one as My Idea so and so and this one just happened to be “My Idea #49.” At some point I will have to go back and check what one through forty-eight were,” he says. 

Finishing his thoughts about his songwriting Peter Holsapple says, “I feel like I am writing some of the best songs in my life right now. I like this feeling. I am not beholden to industry standards and I am not going to sell a million copies and I don’t really care about it anymore. All I want to do is make a good record and if people get a chance to hear it, and if they like it. I have done that and it feels good.

When I walk out of a recording session, I feel really good about what I have done, but it is really hard to do that with your own stuff. I am not a prolific guy. I know people who are prolific and they turn out a lot of songs and they are great. I don’t know how to do that anymore. I was prolific in my twenties, but I didn’t have the life I lead now. I am just grateful that I am as prolific as I am now at sixty-nine. If something happens, I am down with that. I am ready to do the TV circuit, you just turn me loose.”

“The single, “That Kind of Guy,” is a love letter to a certain type of record shopper. I have been that guy. I have waited on that person. It is kind of funny. I don’t want people to think I am being mean in a high-fidelity way. I totally recognize these people and it is a salute to everybody who has plopped down fifty dollars for a first pressing of some single from 1977.

There was a time when music was not as readily available and not to be exclusive about it, but I think we valued it in a different sort of way. When we had something, we really wanted and we couldn’t get it.”

I have in a rhythm section of Robert Sledge and Rob Ladd, trust in a producer whom I love, Don Dixon and I trust the ears of a recording engineer that I have worked with and adored his work, Jason Richmond and a studio that is in my neighborhood. It just felt like the right thing to do. We just had to go in there, feel solid about the songs and make a damn record. We did it. I knew it could be done. It took some screwing up of courage to go in there and do that. Everybody I have played it for in advance has been really complimentary about it. I feel good about that too,” he says.  

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This interview by Joe Montague  published  March 24th, 2025 is protected by copyright © and is the property of Riveting Riffs Magazine All Rights Reserved.  All photos and artwork are the the property of  Peter Holsapple unless otherwise noted and all  are protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved. This interview may not be reproduced in print or on the internet or through any other means without the written permission of Riveting Riffs Magazine.