Two and a half years ago I was standing in my kitchen, feeling overwhelmed and distraught, exhausted after a year of non-stop touring, and even more in debt than when I had started the tour. I looked up at my wife, and as I said the words “It’s not working”, the despair rushed up from the deepest depths of me and I fell apart, so profoundly frustrated, discouraged, and afraid.
I love what I do, I don’t only love it, it’s essential to my being. What I do is my ticket to connection, to meeting the most wonderful people, to sharing myself with the world, to an endless list of experiences night after night that I know I am so lucky to be having. I do this because I have to, I must.
As wonderful as it is, there’s a lot of the picture that I don’t share. I figure the world doesn’t need to hear about my little problems, there are bigger ones out there, I’m just trying to be a singer-songwriter, I have it pretty good. But our problems are always the biggest to ourselves, and on the inside, it’s an intensely all-consuming life, every moment not on-stage is spent trying to get back there, and then the other moments are spent trying to pay for it all, whether that be through writing grants and submitting grant reports, running crowd-funding campaigns, answering endless emails, doing songwriting workshops, playing private events, taking odd jobs, whatever it takes. I can go months without taking even an afternoon off. I’m not complaining, I’m not hard done by, I get to do my favourite thing in the world, I’m just admitting that it doesn’t just happen, it comes at a cost.
After almost 10 years of trying to make it work, putting out albums and touring my face off, I reached what felt like my lowest point as I said those words to my wife. I cried hard. Really hard. I felt like a total failure, like it was never going to happen for me, like I was delusional for thinking that I could ever have a sustainable career singing my songs for people, what a crazy idea.
And then an amazing thing happened.
I got invited to play a show out in Alberta in the town of Fort Macleod. Up until that point, I had never played in Fort Macleod, I didn’t even know it existed. I got an invitation to play a show at the Empress Theatre, on a Friday night. My thinking was: “No one is going to show up, why would I play a big theatre on my first time through a town I’ve never played before? This is a mistake”. Nevertheless, my manager thought it was worthwhile so I agreed to it and showed up for sound-check at this beautiful little theatre. After sound check, I’m taken downstairs where a wonderful local family has prepared an extensive and intensely delicious vegetarian meal for me, they’re all smiles, I’m already getting a really good feeling about this, though still wondering who is going to show up. As I walk out onstage, I’m astonished to find a crowd of 200+ people cheering with delight and chanting my name. What followed next was one of my favourite shows ever, playing my songs to this enthusiastically appreciative audience, many of whom seemed to already know all the words to my songs. It felt like my ‘Searching for Sugarman’ moment. I found out after the show, that the reason my songs were known in the area, was because there was this ‘character-building’ camp called FACES, which is a 2-week camp run mostly by Alberta teachers. It’s free for the students as they’re earning summer-school credits, and they’re all grade 9’s going into grade 10. They’re taken hiking, rock-climbing and white-water canoeing. The point of the camp though is not really about doing those activities, it’s about discovering what you learn about yourself when you do something you thought you couldn’t do, it’s about learning to trust others, to work well in a group, to overcome fears, to develop empathy and integrity. There’s an incredible curriculum that the students are guided through in tandem with their experiences, and within that curriculum are themes and concepts like forgiveness , congruence and community, to name a few. The leaders will often anchor the learning through songs, and as I came to find out that night, they had been using songs of mine like ‘Forgiveness’ and ‘The Fence’ and ‘Oliver’s Tune’ as part of that curriculum!
You never really know what’s going to happen when you put something out into the world. You never know what’s growing under the ground from all the seeds you plant out there.
At the end of the night, spirits high, sitting around the kitchen island, eating a crazy delicious cake at the house of the family that had cooked me dinner and were putting me up, surrounded by all these beautiful humans, many who worked at FACES, one of them confessed that they actually had an ulterior motive in booking this show for me: they wanted me to come work at the camp as a leader. My manager (looking out for me of course) had apparently already turned it down without my knowledge, given the seemingly ‘unrelated to my career’ nature of the request, but after meeting this group of people, and seeing the real home that my songs had found in their curriculum, I thought: “whatever these people want me to be a part of, I want to be a part of’”, so I said yes. A couple of months later, I was on a plane to Alberta for my first session.
Those 2 weeks changed my life. I was there as ‘Peter’, not ‘Peter Katz’, and every morning I woke up bright and early and went for a run and did yoga with the students. Then our days were filled with outdoor adventures and profoundly meaningful moments of connection as we worked through the curriculum and built the safest community I’ve ever been a part of out in the wilderness of Alberta. We canoed down the rapids of the North Saskatchewan (sometimes swimming down the rapids of the North Saskatchewan, I tipped frequently…), we overlooked the Rocky Mountains from one of its most beautiful peaks, we rock-climbed in the gorgeous Kootenay plains, and repelled off the edge of cliffs. We shared in our triumphs and our failures, we shared stories, we laughed, we had dance parties on the bus, we connected. I saw so many transformations in these students, from totally non-responsiveness on the first day, to the biggest smile and victorious cheer as they reached the top of the rock cliff.
I was unknowingly going through a major transformation of my own. I remember lying down in my tent on the 3rd or 4th day, completely exhausted but also completely content. I realized in that moment, that for the first time in as long as I could remember, the inner monologue that was perpetually buzzing around in my head had gone silent. There was peace up there. It was beautiful. I had been so focused on the needs of my 8 students, on the needs of the group of 32 of us, on everyone but myself, that I had forgotten about all the things I was used to worrying about, and I loved it. I also realized that I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I didn’t want to pretend to be a role model, and then not live it myself. So after I got home in August of 2013, I re-entered my career with a new sense of commitment and purpose. I started running religiously every 2 days, without fail, as I had learned that it was a very real tool for me to deal with the negative voices in my head. No matter how I was feeling, I felt better after running, so I committed to it. (I’ve run every 2 days for the past 2 years, whether I’m on tour or not, almost without fail). I also committed to writing and focusing on music vs focusing on my place on the career ladder. I threw myself into writing, challenging myself to write a song a week, I even did 3 songs a week for a period. I took risks and put myself in the room with other people to co-write for the first time, challenging myself to write with people who I was intimidated by. I started spending more time at the piano, determined to get comfortable enough to play it live with confidence. I put my energy into trying to get better at making art, and that decision felt so right.
More amazing things started happening. Royal Wood emailed me wanting to do a tour together in Europe. Then he invited me to LA to try writing a few songs with his producer Bill Lefler. Then I started opening shows for him in Canada and started finding that I actually could win over a crowd of 500-1000 strangers every night. Most nights opening for Royal, the audience gave my piano-player Karen and I a standing ovation, it was an incredible feeling. Eventually I had written over 50 songs and was ready to make a record, and Royal and Bill were eager to make it together. And then I saw that the Ontario government was offering a new grant for artist-entrepreneurs, and despite an intensely long application process that made we want to run the other way, I threw myself at it with dogged determination to get it. (it took me over a month to complete). 4 months later I found out that my application was successful. Thanks in part to that money, personal savings from touring, and the money I had raised from my crowdfunding campaign, I made ‘We Are The Reckoning’, a record that I’m so proud of, and then I leveraged the strength of the album to get additional funding and bank loans to take a full-band out on the road for the first time.
Fast forward to now. I’ve just spent the past 3 months playing music with my incredibly talented and kind and ‘you feel so lucky to know them’ band-mates, throughout Europe and across Canada. We played almost 50 shows in 5 different countries, and in spite of an intense schedule, there’s wasn’t a single moment of ‘personality conflict’, they were the perfect co-conspirators. Night after night, we delivered a show that I was intensely proud to be able to deliver. Night after night, almost without exception, we played to record crowds for me, including sold-out shows, in advance, in many markets. We played to 340 people in Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre, presented by Massey Hall, sold-out a month in advance. We sold-out the Black sheep Inn a week in advance, a venue I’ve probably played 15 times, never able to sell more that 30-40 advance tickets. We sold out the Ironwood in Calgary well in advance, we sold out the Tuchlaube Theatre in Aarau Switzerland on a Monday night, we sold nearly 200 advance tickets at the beautiful Aeolian Hall in London, and so on. There were also some low points, a few shows where things were a major challenge, or where the audiences were thin, but 95% of the shows were a bona fide success in my books. Almost all these shows, if you had told me a couple of years ago that I’d been playing to crowds like that, I wouldn’t have believed you.
In addition to actually playing the shows, I made so many connections along the way. I met people night after night, who walked up to me and told me how my songs had made their way into their lives. I got emails from all over the world with touching stories, words of encouragement. I had people tell me that they didn’t commit suicide because my songs were there for them, I had people tell me stories of falling in love to my songs, of my songs playing as their babies were being brought into the world.
In spite of all this amazingness, all of this ‘success’, there’s a reality check that I’m still facing. I’m standing on the other side of it, and the future is still a big, giant, question mark. Despite generous grants and crowd funding, and despite an army of people putting my bandmates and I up in their homes and feeding us meals, and despite those world-class bandmates agreeing to work for less than they’re worth, and my manager taking a serious pay cut, and so many people doing me so many favours along the way, I’m still staring down a scary line of credit, wondering what next, wondering how to keep the momentum going, how to pull off the next run of dates, how to make another record, how to find the time and energy to write another 50 songs. I’m also wondering about what happens if I ever lose my voice or break my arm or if I can’t do shows for some reason, about how I’ll be able to sustain this pace as I grow older, about how I’ll ever be able to have a family if I’m always so busy and away from home, about how I’ll ever get to that place where I can call my career ‘sustainable’.
I don’t have the answers to those questions, I don’t know that they exist. What I do know, is that surrounding all these feelings, is a constant feeling of profound gratitude. I tell the story of ‘Oliver’s Tune’ every night from the stage. About how, upon getting the diagnosis of terminal and incurable cancer, that he had a feeling of peace knowing that he didn’t need to change anything because he was already doing exactly what he wanted to be doing. I feel like I’m doing my very best to walk towards that. I’m proud of myself, and that’s not an easy thing for me to feel . That feeling is fleeting, you can knock me down if you know what to say, my vulnerability is as present as ever, but I have developed this knowing that I can and will get back up again. I’ve done it enough times by this point, I can say with confidence that I’m not stopping now.
I can also say that maybe it is ‘working’, maybe this is what it is –a collection of islands of perfect moments onstage every night with my band and moments after the show talking to people, with a sea of hard-work, self-doubt, frustration and uncertainty in between. And maybe that’s ok, maybe that’s life. Those moments where I get to play for you are SO good, SO good, I would do anything to be able to keep having them, so I do.
My motivation for sitting down to write this this evening was that I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for coming to my shows. Thank you for spending your hard-earned money and for taking your precious time, to be in that room with us. I hope we honoured your time, I like to think that we did, and I promise to keep doing that every time you come out to see me/us play.
I also wanted to share this collection of pictures that I took many nights onstage. I tossed my phone to my drummer (Viktor in Europe, Benjamin in Canada) and they would take my picture in the same pose every night. This collection of pictures makes me smile. I’m going to print it off and put it above my desk and look at it when I’m deep in the muck. That’s my motivation right there: being in the room with you.
I’m writing this to you on the plane, flying out to Calgary, about to do 2, 2-week sessions with the students at FACES. I’ll be offline for a chunk of the summer. They just made the announcement that the flight is nearly over, time to shut this down before I head off into the Alberta wilderness. My time with these students is me recharging, refueling, living some life, so I can have new stories to sing about. Looking forward to seeing you on the other side and sharing what shakes out.
Lots of love, Peter
P.S. I also want to give thanks to all the people on my team who help me pull these things off. I don’t carry this alone, so credit where credit is due.
P.P.S. I’m going to refrain from editing this with a fine-toothed comb, no time! I just wrote it and then I’m going to post it. It might be one big ramble, who knows. All I really wanted to say was thanks for a great tour and share this picture collage with you, but a whole lot more came out so I’m sharing that too.
