Japan 2023

Q: It’s been a while since you’ve been here - 2013. Looking forward to coming back and catching up with a few old friends?

PG: I am, yes, I always enjoy coming. I don’t enjoy the actual travel (laughs) but I always love it there.

Q: I gather you and Iain haven’t met before…

PG: No, we haven’t. I said hello to Iain on Facebook and I remember seeing Fairport – I can’t remember what year – when I was living in L.A. and they came to play the Troubadour. I think it was the original band but I don’t know exactly Iain’s tenure. I remember drinking a lot, especially with Swarbrick and we even traded friendship rings. He gave me a silver ring but it’s a vague memory and Iain said he didn’t think he was in the band then so I don’t think I’ve ever met him.

Q: Will you be seeing Fuyumi and Satsuya Iwasawa from Bread & Butter when you are here?

PG: I don’t know. Unfortunately, I have not communicated with them in a very long time, I don’t even know that I have current contact. I’m going to nose around because I’ve thought of them and Yoshi Nagata who I have remained close with and Isao Nagata, I am sure I will see him.

Q: We are still a month off but have you considered what you’ll play yet? You have quite a catalogue to choose from, as has Iain.

PG: I’ve been running all that through my mind. It’s a co-bill so we will be splitting the evening and I don’t know yet how long we will be playing but I will do some things from the latest album and I actually just got today, an order from Disc Union for more copies so I’ll ship them over and we’ll have some copies at the performances. I’ll kind of do a smattering, some old favourites and Tokyo is two nights so I might do two different shows on those two nights.

Peter Gallway, The Real Band, Hat Check Girl and Parker Gray

Q: Prolific doesn’t even come close to describing the number of songs you write. Bountiful, copious, profuse…You said back in 2018 that you wrote Reach For It specifically for The Real Band. Is that the way you approached It’s Deliberate and all your writing for the projects you are involved in?

PG: I’m sure you know my wife, Annie Gallup, and Annie writes songs all the time. I write poetry or lyrics and I’m writing regularly but I don’t write songs all the time. I have sort of developed a way or working where I write by project and I’ve been doing that for ten or fifteen years. So, I conceptualise a project on some level – I call it ‘What’s the movie?’ Some of it is the musical landscape, it might have some kind of lyric focus or conceptualisation. With the musical landscape, I like to stretch and change things up with for instance collaborating with my friend Harvey Jones in Parker Gray. With the It’s Deliberate project, I wanted to do a follow-up record and I did write with the band in mind although, when I came back to Maine and put the band together, it was a trio with myself, guitarist Mark Wainer and percussionist/vocalist Andrea Re. Those are two people who played with me decades ago and I have known a long time. Now, we have expanded the band to include Mark’s brother, Joe, who is a phenomenal drummer. With the first record, we made the decision to do as much as we could in-house but with It’s Deliberate, it’s kind of like The Real Band with special guests. My musical vocabulary now when I perform, expands and contracts depending on the venue. I can do solo shows, trios with Mark and Andrea and it’s now going to expand this year to a quintet to include a bass player. We didn’t have a keyboard player when I made It’s Deliberate so I reached out to four different keyboard players that I thought could make contributions. So, I wrote for the band but also wrote with that in mind, to expand the vocabulary.

Q: Poetry aside, does everything you write get recorded and released?

PG: Not everything has been released, no. I am not a person that like, say, Neil Young or Springsteen or Prince that has voluminous archives of unreleased material. I’m not that prolific; that’s not been my way.

Q: So we might see a 2CD Peter Gallway Anthology with some unheard stuff in the future?

PG: There might be someday in the far distant future when I’m gone, some things might see the light of day. There’s not a huge amount.

Production

Q: I have to say that Harvey Moved To Queens is one of the loveliest songs I’ve heard for years as well as one on the loveliest sounding songs. When you first heard it as a demo, or really any song, do you envision exactly how it should sound or is it a work in progress?

PG: Well let me say that Harvey Moved To Queens, if I am remembering correctly , is one of the first of Annie’s new collection that she is working on. I think there are a dozen songs, there are one or two that may or may not make the cut and I want to say that on this project, It think it’s all Annie and Harvey. I may be playing in a few places but unlike some of Annie’s earlier stuff where I contributed a lot of the instrumentation and the vison and stuff I brought to the table that Annie and I talked around, with Harvey Moved To Queens, it’s all Harvey. I don’t know how much you know about Harvey but he is freaking brilliant. He’s an early Delia Derbyshire. Harvey has a collaboration with a Welshman named Garry Hughes who early on was Bjork’s musical director. It’s called the Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society and it is moody electronica. Harvey is a deep synthesist as well as a trained composer and he has become a pal. I met him when he lived in Woodstock when he was doing a lot of studio work with Jerry Moratta who is also a friend. I met Harvey and used him here and there and then I had the idea that I wanted to do a spoken word, ambient record, a sort of James Blake meets Brian Eno but I can’t say enough about Harvey. That is what you are hearing on Harvey Moved To Queens which Annie of course wrote in her own way, dedicated to or inspired by Harvey but it’s not literal at all. Harvey did move to Queens but that’s about as much that there is literal in the song. As a producer, that is something I have got deeper and deer into and really enjoy. I always call it the movie. I ask what it is and try and collaborate with the artist, use their talents for the brilliance and colours and whoever else might fit the pallet which is kind of what a film director does.

Q: When producing yourself, what’s the key to balancing being the songwriter, musician and the producer and is it ever a conflict of interests?

PG: There can be. I think it’s a skill one can develop over time with experience. I’m a bit of a born compartmentaliser so I’m able to do that and as a producer, my philosophy is that in the end, it’s not my record – it’s the artist’s record. I don’t consciously produce to put “my stamp” on it. For instance, I love and respect the work of Daniel Lanois and his style, you can feel it on almost everything he does. As a player and producer he has a style and I think I bring some of that but I’m always asking myself ‘What does this really want?’ As Annie says ‘There are a lot of ways to be right’ and there are but it’s always the artist’s record. Being a songwriter, I try not to have anything get in the way of the songwriter and the song.

Q: You’ve been producing since the 1960s. The desks have expanded from four-track to infinity, instruments and amps have advanced and the technology is from a different planet but you still retain warmth and feeling on a recording. Do you still use analogue or have you learned to use digital to present that warmth?

PG: I started on four-track but I wasn’t a guy that was playing around bouncing tracks back and forth on a two-track reel to reel. I wasn’t an electronics studio guy playing around with tape recorders from the very beginning. I came to it a little bit later than some others. I haven’t worked in analogue for a long time and in a way I came late to computers, I was somewhat computer-phobic and when home studios started happening with that not very good sounding and not very stable digital recordings on video tape, eight-track and sixteen-track, that’s when I started having studios in my home. Then I got into computers and then there was a buddy of mine who said I had to get Pro Tools which I was reluctant to in a way because it was another learning curve but I did get into it and I did up the ante. Now there is a lot of material that I have really gotten into and really enjoy, where you can study other people, tutorials and so much gear out there. I am more of a right-brained guy than a left-brain so to me it’s all about feel and I like warm and fat so that’s what I gravitate towards. I’ve learnt how to achieve that through the almost infinite amount of tools and toys and colourisers that one can did into.

Singer/Songwriters

Q: The singer/songwriter genre is still popular here. Your own popularity in Japan has never waned shown by your 1972 self-titled album being re-released in 2020 on SHM CD and 180gm vinyl. Is the genre still healthy I the USA? Any new blood coming through you recommend?

PG: There is so much out there. I will say that I am not a person who says we were in the glory years and that everything now is crap. That’s not me. I am remain extremely curious and the people that have caught my attention, a great songwriter, someone that has really captured something is Phoebes Bridgers. I think Billie Eilish is a phenomenal songwriter, frankly. Bon Iver,  Justin Vernon is phenomenal although a s a songwriter, being lyric driven, most of the time I don’t know what he’s talking about but it doesn’t matter. Those are the three that come to mind.

Q: So it’s healthy. That’s good to hear.

PG: I think it’s healthy. I think the good news is that anybody can make a record and put it out there. The bad news is that anybody can make a record and put it out there and that’s what’s happening. I mean I’m fascinated by it and I read a piece about TikTok and the phenomenon of it. They wrote of an artist who had never written a song, a ten second snippet of something and it was saying something to people and all of a sudden it’s viral with industry people and influencers and all of a sudden this person has a music career and they had never written a full song. Now I don’t say that’s a crock of crap, it’s just that you have to weed through. I think there are talented people that are still coming to the fore but the question is who are the songwriters now that people are going to look back on in fifty years’ time, the Bob Dylans and Joni Mitchells…I don’t know.

Q: I agree with you on both points. It’s great that this person has this TikTok phenomena but what I feel is going to be missing is that association you have with music when you are growing up. I’m 61, listened to your records when I was growing up and Deep Purple and ABBA and many others and the first time I heard those records is a memory. When I hear them now, it flashes me back in time. I don’t think that will happen in fifty years with that TikTok video.

PG: No. People are flooded and attention span is so short now and a song’s shelf-life is so short now. There’s no question, it’s so different now.

Q: Well when you and Iain are over here I will be more than happy to listen to you and be in my own little time capsule. Promise me and everybody you will have a little recorder running in the dressing room should you happen to pick up guitars at the same time won’t you?

PG: (laughs) Ok.

Q: Peter, thank you for joining me. An absolute pleasure.

PG: My pleasure and let me just tell you that I am working this year, I have completed two drafts of a memoir. It will be coming this year and I didn’t write it with the illusion that I have to get some major publisher but I have a friend who is a book agent and is interested in getting it to a publisher.

Q: Well then then next time you come back, I shall get you to autograph it.

 PG: (laughs) Ok. Thanks Glenn.