Peter Broderick - How They Are

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4...according to our Phil on Wed 01 Sep, 2010.

Ole Peter is back. It's been a while since his last release. In fact we've just been discussing that it seems like it was more of a recent thing but it's actually his first commercially available release this year. Oh, and it's not even a proper album... It's a stopgap 7 track mini-album jobber which was written while he was on sabbatical with a poorly knee! Nils Frahm is on board as pro knob twiddler and the artwork has been done by Machinefabriek. The music is lush as you'd expect. It's a totally stripped back simple affair with Peter playing guitar or piano (or both on some tracks) with him singing wistfully over them. No electronics or weirdness... Just simple songs played beautifully with a bit of heart. It's mainly piano based and the tunes are downbeat and moving as you'd expect. 'Pulling The Rain' is my favourite with its sombre sound and amazing piano-ness. His voice just trickles over the music lightly like rain pitter pattering off a car bonnet. Am being all poetic again! Lovely stuff...

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Peter Broderick on the making of “How They Are”, his 7-track ‘stop-gap’ mini-album…

Throughout most of 2009, in the brief, scattered periods when I wasn't on tour, I was working on what I thought to be my next album. After recording and releasing quite a few different projects these last few years, I was ready to slow down and take my time on something. Around mid-2009 I asked my friend Nils Frahm to come on board as producer for the new album, and that's when I started to get a clearer picture of what this album might be like in the end. It quickly became larger and larger, with us spending late nights in the studio, sleeping on the floor, recording layer after layer of any instrument laying around.

By the beginning of 2010 we were making good progress and everything was moving so quickly, but at this time I was suffering from a surgery I had on my knee in December 2009, and I just hoped and expected that things would get better like the doctor said they would, and I could continue on with what was looking to be the busiest year of my life so far. Starting in March, I had plans to be on tour all year long, both with solo concerts and as a touring member of Efterklang. Come the end of February, with the state of my knee declining to the point of me walking on crutches and not wanting to get out of bed, it became very clear that I needed to take a break. I wiped out my calendar for the next three months and flew home to Oregon to stay with my family and get into a regular physical therapy routine.

I spent a few months mostly at home and in bed, and out of that time came something that for me was very unexpected. I started to write. Since I couldn't be up and comfortably playing an instrument, I started making compositions on the computer screen with words instead of sounds. And with my musical brain I immediately imagined all of these little stories and poems being turned into songs. I would sing or speak the words into my voice recorder and imagine them being turned into pieces of music with an orchestra underneath, or just a guitar, or just the voice alone.

Once my knee started improving and I was up walking around again, I took these words that seemed so fresh and exciting to me, and sat down at the piano or with a guitar or a violin, and created many songs in this way. It was the first time for me as a singer/songwriter that the words came before the music. And in this time alone, and especially after working so long and hard on this huge sounding album with Nils, I was really loving the simplicity and spaciousness of good old fashioned acoustic music. No tricks, no electronics, just me doing what I can do at once with