On this episode we have country music singer/songwriter Michael Peterson. We discuss his atypical path to finding his way to the top of the CMT charts with “Drink, Swear, Steal & Lie”. We also touch on his tours through U.S. military bases across the globe and his future plans to break into a new unexpected emerging country music market.
Date: December 18 2020
Episode: 37
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Michael Peterson, an American Country Music Artist, Singer, Speaker, Producer and a Hit Songwriter.
Subtitle: “Great things come to those who wait faithfully.”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-37-drink-swear-steal-and-lie-w-michael-peterson/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces Michael Peterson, an American country music artist, singer, speaker, producer and a hit songwriter.
He made his debut on the country music scene in 1997 with his self-titled debut album which produced five top 40 hits on Billboard’s hot Country Singles & Tracks. He also made a cameo appearance on an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
If you are a new listener to I Know this Guy… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!
In this episode, we discuss:
Part 1
Part 2
Our favorite part of recording a live podcast each week is participating in the great conversations that happen on our live chat, on social media, and in our comments section.
In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:
Join our discussion network here!:
Michael 0:00
Seeing where I’ve come now and seeing the career that I’ve been able to make in music business and as a speaker, having that success from knowing where I came from, was a kid that I had a hard time reading. I had a hard time with comfort word comprehension. So to have my life be based upon words and music, that’s regardless of what the details were, like, how many hits I had, or how many songs I had recorded by other people, or those things that we typically think of as success. The success for me is just, I think about having had almost a 40 year career with words and music.
Norman 0:49
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy. The podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell. What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 1:23
Alright. So Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast?
Norman 1:26
Alright. Do you remember Larry Broughton?
Hayden 1:29
I sure do.
Norman 1:30
Alright. So Larry has recommended Michael Peterson. So Michael is a country music singer, songwriter. He’s got multiple hits, number one hits and he’s got an incredible life. I mean, wait till you hear it.
Hayden 1:47
Yeah. I can’t wait to dive into this one.
Norman 1:49
Alright. Well, let’s get to it. Alright Michael, welcome to the podcast.
Michael 1:52
Hey, thanks. Appreciate that.
Norman 1:56
I can’t wait to get into this story. Why don’t we just dig into your backstory? So what makes Michael, Michael?
Michael 2:02
I have a suspicion that all of us are born with certain inclinations, or attract things were attracted to and I don’t know that anyone can say for sure whether that’s a genetic, or a calling, or a destiny that you’re born to this reality to fulfill, or if it’s something that emerges just out of the soil that you’re in. But for better or for worse, as a very young man, I had a tremendous amount of attraction towards music, and towards words and writing. As a young person also, I was in a difficult family situation, and was struggling with some challenges in terms of my ability to process information and learning. So a lot of things that maybe came easy to other kids in school didn’t come that easy to me. I had trouble reading, I had trouble with math and because of what was happening in my home, I found it, I think, difficult to keep my focus when it came to dealing with things that were difficult for me to comprehend or process. So with that as a context of the things that came easy to me, like any kid, you’re looking for a way to succeed, and something you can hang your hat on to say, Well, I’m at least I’m good at that. The things that came easy to me were words and music, that’s where I began to sprout, and grow up in and as you go along through your life, you get feedback from people and so when you get positive feedback, I think, if that’s something you enjoy, and you’re getting positive feedback, then that also adds to that answer to the question, what makes any one of us who we are. So, you get nurtured along the way, you get encouraged, and you have fun doing it and so, now it’s 61.
Norman 3:56
Are you 61?
Michael 3:57
Yeah.
Norman 3:58
Yeah, you sure don’t look it.
Michael 4:00
Well, that’s very nice. So at 61, I look back on my life, and I say that I see that I still have this pervasive is a right word, pervasive attraction towards creating creativity, words, music, and expressing that in a way that’s not just self centered, but that is has a desire behind it, to somehow communicate with other people that’d have it be meaningful to others and so I’d say if you had to identify like, what is the thing that makes Michael Peterson, Michael Peterson? It’s sort of weird, I guess, to speak about yourself in third person, but that makes any of us who we are. You have to look and see what are the core things that have been there over the course of decades. So for me, it’s really about words, communication, creativity, all of that connected to a purpose is bigger than myself. The joy that I find in engaging with others, and seeing these miracles happen in their lives, things sprout up in their lives that maybe came about as a part of our interactions. Sometimes that looks like a book that I might write. Sometimes it’s a song that I might write or sing or perform. Sometimes it’s an interview like this, there may be people after this interview that will send me a note that says, something I said made a difference to them. That really feels great to me and I’d say that, over the course of my whole life, I’ve done many things. But that core has always been a part of those things consistently. So as I say that I’m a man of words, probably too many words. But that’s I think that’s the core of who I am. I have a real heart for people’s real desire to make a difference in other people’s lives, and I love creating stuff.
Norman 5:45
But what age were you when you decided that music was going to be it?
Michael 5:50
Junior High High School, I just knew that that was something I was good at. I loved it. I got into college, my father was murdered when I was 15 and my stepdad committed suicide when I was 17. So I had a lot of emotional stuff going on and music seemed to be a soothing balm, for my sorrow and my sadness and my worries and my hopes and and so I remember being a freshman in college, and there was an album by a guy named Dan Fogelberg called well, I can even check it if I got it right here. I keep it out, because it’s such a seminal album for me, is it? It’s an album called Netherlands. I just buried my dad, it was about a week or two after I buried my dad and I was standing in a department store and they had a little rack of records, LPs across the room. I don’t know why it is. But this one particular album caught my attention and it was this album cover and I didn’t know who the artist was, I had never heard of him before. But somehow in this photograph, there was something in this photograph of this album cover that captured this kind of melancholy contemplative thoughtful place that I was in in my life. At that time, having just buried my dad. So I bought this album, and the album just spoke deeply to me, with everything that I was going through. So I think, the answer to your question is kind of at that moment, I got a guitar, I started having an interest in songwriting, because this music moved me so much and I thought, Well, maybe I could express myself in a way that would help me feel better and maybe, I don’t know, maybe I could make some music that could do for other people with this guy’s music did for me. So I was in my, I was probably 18 or 19, I guess at that point and I really, started trying to write things and go down to the open mic they had on campus every week, and put my name on the list and hope to be able to get up and try to sing something that I wrote. Anyway, that’s really where it started for me. So, there I was, my freshman year in college, and this record from Dan Fogelberg, the Netherlands album, which I had found two weeks after my dad passed. It just profoundly impacted my life and my freshman year in college, I started trying to write songs, and got a guitar and started trying to play those songs for other people. I think that’s really where I got bitten by this bug and I would say that from the time I was 24 maybe until now, I’ve probably written 30-25 to 30 songs a year and of course, you wouldn’t want to hear them all. But, it just is just some there’ve been a couple become a part of my life. So I feel like it’s gonna it’s something that’s connected to why I’m here.
Norman 8:43
Right. When you got your guitar, were you self taught?
Michael 8:47
Say it again?
Norman 8:48
When you got your guitar and you decided to play an instrument, were you self taught?
Michael 8:53
Yeah, I never took guitar lessons from anybody. Although, when people say they’re self taught, I always kind of chuckle because I had 1000 teachers. They weren’t formal lessons. The way I did I would get it like I was a big James Taylor fan, still then and Dan Fogelberg and I would go buy the sheet music and I would buy the sheet music with the tablature on it so you can see where to put your fingers on the guitar and I would sit and listen to the records and try to figure out how they were doing what they were doing and then I had friends who play guitar and I’d they show me stuff and yeah.
Norman 9:33
So what were your other inspirations?
Michael 9:35
At that time of my life, obviously, inspiration is a word that carries with it a kind of a super positive connotation and I guess this in a way is positive. But, the death of my father was a great inspiration to me. I felt so deeply affected and profoundly affected by the deaths of both my dads. I was a young man who probably about age 14 or 15 and had a transformational experience, spiritual experience at a church camp that was a source of inspiration for me and that was a big part I think of getting me through those difficult childhood years, I was feeling like I was grounded or connected to a spiritual source and then I think, playing, I played football in college at Pacific Lutheran University and that was a major, major part of inspiration for me. The fellowship that I had, the friendships that I had, the family that became to me when quite literally, my family had disintegrated. That became a great source of inspiration for me and then I think, above and beyond that, and maybe woven in the midst of all of that, we’re, people like James Taylor, John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, Don McLean, Jim Croce, my grandmother, my grandmother was a tremendous inspiration to me. She was consistently a person who just loved me, just because she loved me and I felt that love and I felt safe around her and so like, it was a good times, whenever I was with her, it was always we shared music, and we laughed and so I think, those were my inspirations, and all kinds of music really, everything from Lambert, Hendrix and Ross and The Singers Unlimited to anything that was pop on the radio, anything from as a kid, I guess I was in high school in the late 70s. So, Bachman Turner, Overdrive, Aerosmith, the Beatles, I mean, all of that sort of what we call classic rock now, and ending up in country music as a songwriter, and as an artist, a lot of those artists are from the South, and their roots, and their inspirations came from being exposed to a lot of country music, I wasn’t. I wasn’t exposed to a lot of country music, I grew up in the Northwest, and the only country music I really heard was the country music that had crossed over to the top 40. So my musical inspirations, ran a very wide gamut and still do and I’m one of those guys who says, really, honestly, music should be without prejudice. I think people should, I think the sort of the idea that if you don’t like and just only dedicate yourself to one kind of music, then somehow you’re not really part of that musical family. Sometimes there’s a sort of a conceit around music that pops up that way and that’s okay. If people want to feel that way. I just don’t, I think there’s only two kinds of music, the kind you like, and the kinds you don’t, and I like all kinds of music. So, broadly those are the things that inspired me, and probably largely still do.
Norman 12:45
One of the things I talked to Hayden about, he’s a jazz musician. So I asked him about the different music, the different types of music that he’s heard from around the world, or the different genres, does he work that into his jazz? It might be a certain genre, but all of a sudden, he’s starting to influence it with this type of genre and have you found that you’ve done that with your country music as well?
Michael 13:09
Well, yeah, I think that when you’re creating anything, you’re putting it through this filter, and whatever’s in that filter has a potential of becoming part of the DNA of whatever it is you’re creating. So a good example from for me, in 1996 maybe, I hadn’t moved to Nashville yet, but I was writing with some established writers in town and I was starting to be a little bit of a buzz, I think around town about me is there is when you find your young talent that comes in, and it’s making a bit of a splash and make some noise, people start kind of buzzing about it. So I was recognizing that there was starting to be a little bit of a buzz in town about me. So as a result of that, I was able to find writing appointments with higher caliber writers. One day, I was writing with this very well known songwriter, and he asked me, it was my first writing appointment with him and he asked me to play him something that I was really proud of that I’d written. So I played him this song that had some augmented chords in it and a diminished chord and he told me, pretty much matter of factly, that that would never fly in country music, that country music is about one, four and five, maybe a minor, two minor or something. But, you can’t get too complicated with what country music has to say, like Harlan Howard said, and I agree with Harlan Howard, country music is three chords and the truth. Right and I get that, I totally get that. But I also think that if you are trying to express emotions, sometimes it helps if you have a larger selection of tones that you can pull from. So if you have a diminished chord or an augmented chord or some kind of strange chord, to me that adds color and if you flashback to the 60s and country music, Patsy Cline and Eddie Arnold, and these artists, their records were one, four, and five and they did a lot of musicality to their music that they’re creating. So getting outside of the box for me, what other people thought was getting outside of the box was in the box for me, because I grew up listening to meno Manhattan transfer, and I was in the jazz choir and I love jazz music. So I love film, score music, stuff that was really orchestrated that had interesting chords and movements and emotions in it. This wasn’t outside of the box for me, this is right in the box. It just didn’t happen to be in a box of what a lot of people think is country music. So, unavoidably I brought all of that with me and interestingly enough, as a sort of close to that story, that song that guy said you couldn’t do that way, ended up being a single for me, and was a top 20 record. So, I guess rules are made to be broken.
Hayden 16:17
Well, you also mentioned that, like, it’s one four and five and the truth. But if the truth is for you, those other colors and those other emotions woven into it, then you’re going to have that’s maybe the stronger thing to focus on.
Michael 16:32
I love what you just said. The truth is, for each of us, a lot of things that motivate why we create anything. When I was younger, the things that were driving me to create my ambitions, woven into that natural inclination that I had. But as I’ve gotten older, I’m less ambitious and so sometimes I think my ambitions colored my creativity in ways that were limiting, or I guess it’s a deeper conversation. But my point being, that as I’ve gotten older, and some of the stuff that drives you when you’re younger, some of your ambitions, whether it’s fame, or money, or whatever, those things aren’t as important anymore and so I’m finding that I’m creating for the joy of creating and I have now 40 years of experience. I’m not an apprentice anymore, I’m a journeyman, songwriter and so all of that brings to bear in a way that I think is allowing me I think, create, in many ways, some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever created at this point in my life even though I’m not really in the spotlight right now. I really, I think some of the stuff I’m writing now is as good or better than I’ll ever do.
Norman 17:56
You came from the northwest and I love talking to people about getting them to move, like to Nashville. That must have been a scary move. You didn’t grow up in a city, did you?
Michael 18:11
Well, I grew up in a town of about 27,000 people, I think that is what the population was. It was largely a farming community. But it also is right near the Hanford reactor. So it’s a big government contracting area as well, a lot of people working on nuclear power there. So farming communities, small farming communities, rural, mostly agriculture, and then some government work there. But then after I graduated high school through college, I lived in a big city in Illinois, Washington, and then after that from 19, probably 80 to 1996, I guess. So, all those years, I lived in the northwest and I lived in the Seattle area. So, I knew big towns pretty well and I didn’t get to Nashville overnight. I started going, once or twice a year for a couple of years and just trying to learn a little bit about what it was all about and then, on one of those trips, a guy that I met who was a Senior VP at BMG Music Publishing, said to me that nobody was going to take me serious if I came to town once a year. So, it’s like, either come a lot, or don’t waste your time. So I started going a week a month, and I went a week a month to Nashville for somewhere between two and three years, when you go 12 times 13 times a year, over a couple of years, it’s really starting to get a sense of where you fit and you start to know people and it wasn’t like I just packed up all my stuff and just moved cold and got there and was like, what am I going to do now? I actually laid the groundwork for all of that before I got there. In fact, I didn’t make a decision to move there until I had been offered a deal from EMI, a songwriting deal from EMI. That was my goal, I said, I’m not going to move until I have something really substantial to move for.
Norman 20:15
What year was that?
Michael 20:16
That was 1996.
Hayden 20:19
So I feel like within entertainment industries, typically, like the big cities for either musicians or comedians or the whole gambit would be to make that move to like New York, LA or Nashville. So I’m curious, like, what’s your strategy to kind of take it in chunks? Like, what were you accomplishing on those smaller visits before you made that record deal? Like how did you kind of find your place before moving?
Michael 20:48
Well, that’s a great question and those are great thoughts. Because we all have a journey of how we’re going to get something done and over the years, I’ve had young people occasionally ask me, well, how did you do it? Over the years, I’ve come to a place where I think that when young people ask me that question, they’re really asking, How am I going to make it? Not how Michael Peterson made it, but how am I gonna make it and they’re looking for some roadmap. I usually just say to him, I don’t know how you’re gonna do it. But I do know this, it’s easier to steer a moving car. So get moving, right and for me, when I got to Nashville, the first thing I did is my intuition, I guess, I went and found one of the local music scene magazines or newspapers. I suppose every city that has music has them in Seattle, it was a thing called The Rocket, I think, is what it was called and I knew that there was probably something like that in Nashville. So I scrammed around when I first got to town, and I found one of these music mags and it listed in it where all of the clubs were and where all of the open mics were and I thought, Well, I don’t know anybody here, I don’t know really where to go or what to do. But let me go where I think there’s music happening. So I started hanging out at these clubs when I came to town and I would find out when these open mics were, and I would, instead of just going right away and putting my name on the list, I probably went to half a dozen times and just watched. Because I didn’t know where I fit. I didn’t know if my talent was up to par. I didn’t know if what I was writing was something I thought people would enjoy. I just figured there was a lot I didn’t know, and before I did anything too aggressive, it would be a good idea to try to get an understanding of the landscape. So that proved to be really a good decision, because I saw a lot of people so eager to make an impression but they weren’t ready yet. Like they weren’t as good as they thought they were and so they made poor impressions and you never get a second chance to make a first impression, right? So I just was careful, I waited and I learned and I watched and I met people and I asked a lot of questions and then over time, when I started thinking, Well, I think I have one or two things that might work. Then I started putting my name on these open mic nights, and I’d get up and try to play my songs and then I get feedback, and then I’d meet people, and then we trade cards, and then we’d have lunch and over the course of three or four years, I guess, I started feeling like people, I had contacts there and people knew who I was and there were some people were looking forward to me coming back and I started to develop relationships and I decided that it was a good idea to not be in too big of a rush. Again, sort of goes back to you don’t know what you don’t know. So instead of being in such a rush, take time to educate yourself about what the landscape is and see where you might fit, build some meaningful relationships. So that when you hit the ground, you don’t feel like you’re all alone and see if you can get something going. So that when you move there, it’s not like what do I do now? But you actually hit the ground with a path. So over the course of a couple years, that’s what I did and it was really a good decision.
Norman 24:17
Yeah, one of the things that you said and this is really interesting, because I work with a lot of online sellers or people that want to work from home and build a brand on Amazon or Shopify or whatever and they jump into it. They don’t take the time to either take a course or see where they fit in or see where their brand fits in and what you were just describing, I think this is across so many different not just music, or art, but right across the business world as well. Take your time, understand, like you said, you’ve got one time to impress and if you launch a product, if you do something in business, you can always go back and fix it. But you could have launched so much more successfully if you would have just been cautious and taking your time a bit more rather than just jumped to a launch. So just found it interesting that you said that.
Michael 25:16
That’s a good point to make is that these are principles that are not affixed to any particular genre of business is just sort of going to some lessons that you learn and it wasn’t like, I read it in a book or anything, I just had a feeling, which doesn’t make me special, I think it makes me fortunate, I guess, that I had a feeling that I should be more careful with it. In any of our lifetimes, we take a lot of hits from, what’s that old saying about? Good judgment comes from experience but experience comes from bad judgment. Right? Oh, that wasn’t a good thing to do. But, I’ve also had a couple of really good decisions that I made and that was one of them.
Norman 26:12
Music Industry can take its toll on with travel. Did you like the traveling?
Michael 26:20
Yeah, I did. I loved it, I would say, okay, so COVID. Right, here we are in the middle of COVID. What are the things that I’ve experienced out of COVID which sort of unanticipated? I’m 61 years old and this is, and I’m not exaggerating here. This is the first time in my adult life, since I was probably 23 that I have had consecutive months at home without traveling, 10 months I’ve had, I haven’t traveled. I haven’t been on the road anywhere. That would be the first time since I was probably 23. So I mean, prior to COVID, my wife and I were on the road about 150 to 280 days a year. So I mean, it’s just a way of life for me, right? So this is the first time that I’ve had a chance to be home and really just like, love my house and get a routine or, my life has been packing and unpacking. I remember when my kids were really little, they thought I worked on an airplane. They’d see a jet in the sky, they’d say, Oh, that’s where the Dad works. Because I’m getting nothing. Yeah, so I enjoy the travel, but I guess as I’ve gotten older, there’s again, a sort of a cliche, but it’s like, I would say to people, my least favorite part of my job is all the waiting, waiting to get there and waiting to have it all happen. Fair part is the performing part, the engagement people part. I don’t get paid for that, I get paid for sleeping in hotel beds, and flying on airplanes and moving around all the time. That’s what I get paid for and having to figure out how to eat in a way that doesn’t make you weigh 400 pounds on the road.
Norman 28:27
I’ve never figured that out.
Michael 28:29
Yeah, well, that’s a challenge, right? I mean, those are inherent challenges, we travel a lot. So I don’t know, I don’t know how COVID has changed me, because it’s still, I think likely that we are months and months and months away from the entertainment world, becoming anything that looks like what it did before in terms of work. I wouldn’t be surprised if for another year to 18 months away from everybody from the ticket sellers, to the venue owners, to the people that manage artists, to the artist, to the fans and all of that has to sort of line up in a way that ensures that when you have an event, people want to be there, or they even have a place to have an event and I think we’re probably a year to 18 months away from that. So, I don’t know how I’m going to be on the backside of this. I may find that I want to travel less. There’s some fun things developing for me in Brazil. So I’m looking forward to that. But, who knows how long it’s going to take.
Norman 29:35
We have just come off a couple incredible interviews with some Brazil musicians.
Michael 29:42
Really?
Norman 29:43
Yes, incredible.
Michael 29:46
Why don’t we get that?
Norman 29:47
Well, Hayden?
Hayden 29:48
Yeah.
Norman 29:49
Why don’t we get into that? Let’s talk about some of those. Well, if you go to Brazil, we’ll make some introductions and you’ll be blown away.
Michael 29:56
Oh yeah, I’m going to Brazil. There’s no question about it. It looks like I’ve got a major record label down there. We’re gonna make a record. Yeah. Tell me about these guys you met.
Hayden 30:09
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Dorival Cyammi or Dori Caymmi. Well, we had Dori Caymmi on who’s the son of Dorival Caymmi and in Brazil, Dorival is on the same level as Antonio Carlos Jobim. Like they’re equal partners in songwriting. So we had his son, who was an incredible arranger. He was really involved with 60s MPB music in Brazil, and was also living in Los Angeles for a few years there, too.
Michael 30:41
Oh, very cool.
Hayden 30:42
Yeah and a few classical musicians as well.
Norman 30:45
Marcelo Bratke was on.
Hayden 30:50
It’s so funny Brazil keeps coming up.
Michael 30:52
It’s an interesting place and people think of Brazilian music and you think of Jobim when you think of people like this, and that kind of like Samba and that kind of music. But surprise, surprise, like, Brazil has its own version of country music. Did you guys know that?
Norman 31:09
I don’t actually know that.
Michael 31:11
Okay. So it’s called sertaneja and it might surprise you to know that if I were to, so let me ask you, like, what do you think the most popular sport is in Brazil?
Norman 31:24
IJust off the top, I would probably say soccer.
Michael 31:27
Yeah, that’s what most people would say. Did you know that the number one sport in Brazil is rodeo?
Norman 31:35
Get out of here.
Hayden 31:35
No way.
Michael 31:36
Well, they have 150 to 200,000 people at a rodeo.
Norman 31:39
Really?
Michael 31:40
Yeah. Because they have such a big agricultural, cattle farming and there’s a huge Western, not Western, that’s American, that huge farming culture there. Right? So they have their own version of country music, and they sell millions and millions and millions of albums. Like there were several artists down there in the 90s that sold 10 million albums off on one record. So the guy that I’m working with is a guy that was one of the big, big producers and songwriters in the 90s down there, his name’s Cesar and he’s won four Grammys in the Latin Grammys and he’s had over 1000 songs of his he recorded and he’s had songs and produced artists and songs on album sales of over 100 million just in Brazil. So, it’s just a really interesting time to be engaging with that and when I think of Brazilian music, like you said , and that’s kind of what you think of, is it Bossa Nova? Like there’s this whole other world, like, if you went on YouTube, and you typed in Brazilian country music, you’d be stunned. Page after page after page after page, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and some of the videos on there have 200-300 million views.
Norman 33:19
After this, I am going to check that out. I had no idea.
Michael 33:23
Yeah, it’s incredible and the Brazilian country music has more in common with, I would say, like, if you think of music in the 70s in the US, like singer songwriter, and soft rock, so it was a little more lush production, more melody driven, like a lot of modern records in country today seem like they’re super compressed, everything is loud and it’s more about the groove and a hook that just it’s more like dance music in a way, and I don’t mean that in any way to be critical. I’m just saying it’s if you observe what these records are, they are very loud records and there’s a lot going on and it almost seems as though sometimes the vocal or the melody is not meant to be the focus. It’s the whole soundscape that’s meant to be the focus. You know what I mean, right? Yeah, so the music down in Brazil, the country music down in Brazil is more like 70s music was in the US. It’s more about the lyrics. It’s more about that melody and their productions that they’re making are just less busy. They’re not, they’re less like the US. They’re more like what I just described, I guess. So, I’m excited to be making a record down there and I think you guys would find that you really, really like it. I’ve been learning Portuguese for about four months. I’ve been studying Portuguese and I’m looking forward to that. Anyway, that’s a bit of a side road to rundown. But yeah, I’m excited about Brazil and I’m excited that you guys have some contacts down there. Maybe I’ll look forward to meeting them.
Norman 35:08
I know, these contacts are, they’re just so nice. They’ve been on and even the people that have led us to other people, non musicians in Brazil. So we will definitely make sure that you get their names and so I’m kind of curious, what is or is there a favorite album that you have or favorite song that I mean, it’s just something you look back at and for one reason or another, it’s your favorite.
Michael 35:38
It’s going to be many, like, I suppose it would be for any of us. But, songs that come to mind, James Taylor has a song called The Secret of Life. That would be one. There’s a song by an artist named Bob Bennett called Matters of the Heart. Beatles, The Long and Winding Road. Songs of mine that are favorites, or most of them are songs people have never heard, a song called In Black. I mean, I can just like, there’s so many songs that mean something to me. The Beatles’ In my Life. But not the Beatles version isn’t my favorite version of it. My favorite version of it is an obscure version by Oh, he just died. He played James Bond. Sean Connery. Yeah, Sean Connery did a version of In my Life on an album. That was the last album that Sir George Martin produced before he passed and it was an album, I don’t remember the name of the album. But it was interesting, because Martin now of course, had access to all of those Beatles masters, right? Yeah. So did you guys hear this record?
Norman 36:48
I believe I did.
Michael 36:49
New artists come in and do new vocals over the original tracks.
Norman 36:56
Yeah, I remember that.
Michael 36:58
In my life, I think that’s what it’s called. So the Sean Connery version of In my Life is like, it’s a stone cold. It’s amazing, right? There are places I remember and another great song would be a song called Here’s to Life, great jazz performance and I’m trying to remember the singer’s name. Skipping my mind right now. But yeah, I mean, just songs that you hear over and over again, that you choose to hear over and over again. September by Earth, Wind & Fire. You put me on the spot. It’s hard to think Dan Fogelberg, lessons learned off of the Netherlands record. Another great recording that the Netherlands album and most of the Dan Fogelberg records were produced by a guy named Norbert Putnam and Norbert’s very well known fact he might be a great guest for your show. In fact, that would be a great call. Norbert produced The Night they Drove Old Dixie down for Joan Baez. He produced the first five Jimmy Buffett albums including Margaritaville. Norbert is a Hall of Famer, really a legend in the music business and Norbert and I have become friends over the last few years and he produced some tracks for the Dan Fogelberg tribute record. One of which was a version of Netherlands with the final vocal performance that Donna Summer ever did. So surprise, surprise, Donna Summer like this r&b superstar diva right, was a huge Dan Fogelberg fan, go figure right. That’s the power of music like you would think that she would love Dan Fogelberg but she loved that song Netherlands and loved Dan Fogelberg and her last performance before she passed away to cancer a few years back was her performance of Netherlands and it’s stunning. I mean, it’s breathtaking and it’s on the Dan Fogelberg tribute records, where they, in this case, Norbert was able to use the original tracks. But you put down a Summer’s vocal on it like, it’s unbelievable. So those are songs that come to mind.
Norman 39:06
Wow. Hayden, do you have any questions?
Hayden 39:09
I was actually to bring it back. You were talking about the production, the differences of production on like, country music and American outcome compared to the Brazilian label, like how involved are you with that side of the album? Like, you write the songs, you perform the songs, but how involved in the actual production and creation of the soundscapes and everything are you or have you been throughout your albums?
Michael 39:34
I’ve been very involved in setting tone. With regards to the Brazilian project, that’s a whole new arena for me down there. So Augusto, a Grammy Award winning producer and sold a lot of records knows that market down there really well. So I’m going to literally lean on his sense of where I fit in the expertise. I can’t tell you too much more about the kind of record we’re gonna make. Because it’s an incredible idea that he had and we’re gonna chase it with Augusto, we already are. I think I really, I’ll bring my vocal and if there’s something that bothers me, I’ll say it, I’m sure it’s the same with you Hayden. Things that you, let’s say, really dug 20 years ago, you have a different perspective on. So as you go through the journey of making records, you’ll learn stuff, I’m at a place now where I really am starting to understand what people meant when they said the record was getting in the way of the song. Right? So I’m really at a place where it’s like, I recognize it for me, as a writer. Sometimes the beauty of what I’ve written has gotten lost in the record, like the nuance of the subtlety of a turn of a phrase or, sort of, not able to be highlighted, it was sort of overwhelmed by the sonic landscape. So I don’t know, I feel like in the future, I’d like to make records that highlight by peeling away sound, that highlight the lyric more than those melodies more. So I think they’d be more sparse, I would think so. So, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like those other kinds of records, I do. I like records that are sonic assault. Not always, it’s a principle, but sometimes when it works, it really works. It gives you a good shot of adrenaline. But I don’t want everything to be that, I want to have a variety. One of the things that I’ve had people tell me over the years was that like, let’s say, for instance, my first single was called Drink, Swear, Steal & Lie and then my second single is a song called From Here to Eternity. Okay, if you didn’t know that they were the same artist, you wouldn’t be able to tell by the records. Whereas sometimes, the old music business adage was, if you had a hit like your first hit, then follow it with a song that sounds kind of like it was a takeoff on that hit and then you develop a sound, right? You develop it, people go, Oh, that’s so and so I know that’s Jimmy Buffett, because it sounds like the beach, right? You have a sound and if there’s been some feedback that I’ve gotten over the years about my music is that the variety was so wide, that at times people wouldn’t have known it was me. Like if they were a fan of one song, they were fans of Drink, Swear, Steal & Lie, but then they heard From Here to Eternity, unless you told them it was me, they wouldn’t have known it was me. So that’s made it harder to develop my brand, I think, in some ways, because I have such a wide variety of musical tastes and things that turn me on and I’m capable as a singer of covering a lot of ground. So, I suppose in my joy of wanting to explore all of that, I think it sometimes made it more difficult, I suppose for me to develop a sonic signature, and I don’t have any regrets about that. It is what it is. I’ve had fun doing it and doin it that way. But, I think those are things you think about when you have that conversation. Production wise.
Norman 43:51
Right and like you said, two different songs. If I didn’t know it was you, I wouldn’t have thought the both work were made by you. What was it like getting your first hit? Drink, Swear, Steal & Lie. Well, how did you feel?
Michael 44:02
Well, first of all, I think my first feeling was, I was excited because it’s so rare, like that anybody like for anybody ever to have a hit record and I’m not saying that now as a boast. I’m saying it’s like looking back, I had a whole group of friends who did not come to town about the same time as me and everybody had this dream of having to hit a record. So, there were one or two of us out of my year group, so to speak, that had that experience. So, you’re getting a lot of congratulations and a lot of attaboys from your friends and of course, you want to succeed and you want to keep going. But it’s also all brand new. In a way it’s like you don’t know what you’re feeling because you’re right in the middle of it, right? You can only know what you’re feeling or give words to it after you get away from it for a few years and can look back on it and go, yeah, that’s what that meant. Well, when you’re right in the middle of it, it’s like, it’s I don’t know, it’s like you’re riding a total world, or a rocket ship. I remember I went skydiving one time, the only time I went, and after we landed, we jumped out of this plane, I don’t know, I’m going to say we jumped out about 15 or 18,000 feet and when we landed, I said to the guy that was tandem jumping with me, carrying me down. I said, Can we do it again, and this time, I’ll be in my body. So it’s kind of like that. It’s like, it’s all happening really fast. You don’t really have any training for it, so to speak, of how to process it, what it means to be suddenly, like, I don’t know, my first three singles all went to number one. Not on Billboard, but on CMT and at that time, CMT was considered a major chart and my first three singles were all Top 10 on the Billboard Chart, a number one and number three, and a number seven. So to have three in a row like that, suddenly, there’s a lot of people that want your attention, there’s things you got to do, and you’d never done before and it’s just, it’s an awful lot to deal with. But there’s a lot of joy in it and there’s things you experienced that aren’t as joyful, but it’s all part of my past and I’m grateful for all of it.
Norman 46:43
We talked to a lot of entrepreneurs that once they have success, let’s say it’s a number one hit, or it could be something that they’ve done in business that they don’t know either how to handle the success, or that they may go into a depression, because then it’s they got to go, Oh, how do I achieve more than what I just achieved? Did you experience anything like that?
Michael 47:08
I wouldn’t put my experience that way and I suppose, I didn’t have a hit record until I was 37 years old. At that point, almost everybody in Nashville would have said I was too old to even get a record deal. 37, it seems young now at 61. But at 37, I was considered too old to even get a record deal. Four out of the box, they’re looking for people that are 18,19,20,21. So I think a lot of the things that happen to young artists, like you just described are happening to young entrepreneurs. When you have success when you’re really young. you process it differently than if you’ve had some time to live. So I was 37 years old, and I had my first hit record. I had already had some successful business, I’d had my ups and downs, I’d been through some life and some living. So I think some of those kinds of things didn’t impact me as much. I felt fortunate to have had it happen, I did the best that I could and I figured if I was going to keep it going, that I would just keep doing it the way that I did it before. How did I get there? I would just try to repeat that. For a number of different reasons, I pulled away from all of that. Sometimes people will say like I was on a podcast last week called Remember me and they asked me like, so what happened? Why did your career end? Well, I think there’s a general perception sometimes people have when you go out to the spotlight that your career ended, my career didn’t end. I’ve made 18 albums in the last 15 years, I’ve continued to be on the road traveling, I’m just not in the spotlight anymore, not in a major label, where they’re spending the money to promote and it was probably 2004, 2005, I just chose to step away from it all. There was a lot going on in my life and I had a kind of an unfortunate experience at a major label there and I just realized that wasn’t a position I wanted to put myself in anymore. One of the joys of being an entrepreneur is that you get to be your own boss, right? So when you’re an artist on a major record label, it’s not really like being an entrepreneur, there’s an entrepreneurial part of it. But, whoever is running that label has the power, the ability to essentially just pull the plug on your business at any time and I just found myself in a place around 2004 where I said, I’m never going to let that happen to me again. Where I put my whole heart and soul and life into something, and somebody just willy nilly, decides that they’re going to pull the plug and your whole business just goes to nothing. That was an experience I had that was, really, really difficult and I just decided that I was never going to let that happen to me again. So I stepped away from it. So, I did what I could at that point to move forward with my talents and my abilities and the success that I had experienced, and try to capitalize on that and build what was next and that led me to where I am now, which is the happiest I’ve ever been in my adult life. Everything that happens to us, we have a choice of how we’re going to respond to it. We always have a choice. Like I have wanted those things to happen to me but I did have a choice in how I was going to respond and so I responded the best that I knew how and all of that led me here, so I’m good with all of it.
Hayden 51:06
That’s it for the first half of our interview with Michael Peterson. Make sure to tune in next time to hear the second half of the interview. If you’re a fan of the show, make sure to check out our Facebook group. The link is in the description of this episode. We’d love to hear from you and create some discussion around all of our awesome guests. So if you’re out there, let me know. Don’t worry, I can just sit here twiddling my thumbs until I hear from you. I’ve got all day. Anyway, that’s enough for me, and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:00
Hey there, guys and gals, welcome to part two of our interview with Michael Peterson. If you have not heard part one yet, make sure to go back and check that out. It really touched on a really heartbreaking and beautiful story from his childhood, which really helps inform the rest of the interview. But I guess if you’re just using this podcast to fall asleep at night to our beautiful voices, then you can forge on right ahead. I know I do the same. If you’re a fan of the show, make sure to check out our Facebook group, there’s a link in the description. We’d love to hear from you and we’re planning on trying to grow this little Facebook group of ours, so that we can create a lot of discussion around each episode and maybe even get you guys and gals involved in the interviews themselves eventually, so make sure to check it out. That’s enough for me and now for the rest of the episode.
Norman 1:04
You’re also composing for all sorts of other musicians. Right?
Michael 1:07
Yeah, yeah.
Norman 1:10
How does that feel, by the way? So having composed a song that you hear done, like, for instance, Timothy B. Schmidt. Listening to a song that he might have done that you’ve written, do you get some emotion from that?
Michael 1:27
Oh yeah. I mean, every artist that I know and I’m assuming then that it’s true for all artists, is we had people that we looked up to. So when you get a chance to work with people that are iconic in your own world, like somebody that you’re a fan of, that’s a thrill. So to get to work with one of the Eagles, that was a thrill to me, and still is to this day, working with Denise Williams. Let’s Hear It for the Boy, Too Much, Too Little, Too Late and Silly and working with The Imperials then when I was in college, mid college and just the years following after out of college, and the Imperials were the biggest name of gospel music. They were Elvis’s backup group, they won all kinds of Grammys, and double wards, and I had all their albums. So to have them now, I look back now and they’ve recorded six of my songs over the years and whatever went to number one. But these are people that were my heroes, right? The people that I loved their music. So it’s a thrill to be able to have your songs recorded by other people. It never gets old. Just this last week in fact, as a friend of mine, here in Las Vegas, Jamie Hosmer is his name, he just put out a brand new CD this week, he had his album release party and he and I co wrote a song on the album and he had me on his release party podcast and it’s just a thrill. It’s a thrill to talk about the songs, talk about why we wrote it, how it came about. It’s just there’s just something beautiful about creating something and seeing people enjoy it whether it’s the big time or whether it’s something that’s a custom album. Thinking about creating, when I first started going to Nashville, I told young people that I have a chance to talk to occasionally about this. I say, if you want some good advice, here’s some good advice, save everything that you create. Don’t just say to yourself, Well, they didn’t like it so I’m going to throw it away. Save everything, right. So I have a couple of shelves in my house that are filled with notebooks that go back 40 years, that I saved everything and the reason why I’m saying that at this point in the interview is this to say this. When I first started going to Nashville, people wanted to know what I was creating and I had some meetings with publishers and managers and different people. They passed on everything in the early years, well, that’s not good enough, and even though they might not have set it that way, they basically didn’t say, Yeah, thanks for coming, and only my friends liked my music and they had to have the beer in the refrigerator. Right? So it was kind of those days, right? Well, funny thing. This is really an interesting dynamic. So, I was fortunate enough to have some success and I had some hits. Some of the songs that publishers started saying they really liked, were the very same songs that they had said they didn’t like before I had success. So what I learned in that and what I think is true, although I haven’t been able to prove it is that context for any idea that we have, comes into context. So if you’re a manager or a publisher looking to find new songs, you’re listening through a filter and you’re seeing through a filter and if your filter is while this guy’s having hits right now, let me hear what else he has. Then you’re listening as though I’m already successful and you’re hearing it differently. That’s the only explanation I can have for because most of those songs at The Imperials have recorded our songs that were turned down by everybody. But after I had success, they heard them differently. Right? So it’s like, I don’t know, imagine you have an idea. Somebody’s watching the show right now, you have this idea you’ve had for years, you’ve loved it, and you couldn’t get anybody to bite on and you may be tempted just to say, Well, nobody likes it. I’m gonna throw it away, because it must not be any good. But the truth is, so here’s a story. I was ready to quit the music business. I had applied for a job with a police department and I had already passed the physical test and I was going to go in for the written test. This would have been 1989 or 90, I guess, before I ever went to Nashville and I was really shredded. I was running out of money. I was running out of work. I didn’t know. Nobody seemed to be liking what I was doing and I got a phone call from a guy that said he worked for a publisher in Indiana, a guy named Bill Gaither and if you’re a gospel music fan, you might know the name Bill Gaither. Bill Gaither is arguably the most successful music publisher of gospel music in our generation and so I got this phone call, this guy said, Well, we have this song of yours, the Imperials want to record and I’m like, Well, first of all, how did you get my song? Because I didn’t pitch it to him. I had no idea how they even got it. So they said, Well, we don’t know how they got it. We just want to just get a license from you to record the song. So yeah, okay, so they recorded the song, it ended up being the first single off the album and it ended up going to number one. Now, the backstory of this is, this was a song that had been passed on so many times by publishers. The song that was 10 years old, had been sitting in my catalog for 10 years when this phone call came and I realized that that moment, here was a song that I thought wasn’t good enough but got recorded 10 years later, when I was about to give up and I heard a little voice inside of me that said, Well, I’ve been a hit songwriter for 10 years. I just didn’t know that. Right? So that’s why I say save your work, save everything. Because you may have already done some of your best work, but you don’t recognize it as such, because other people aren’t recognizing it as such. But you may have already written your Magnus Opus, it’s just the world hasn’t heard it yet. So that’s why I say save everything. Right? Be careful that you hold on to your intuition that tells you something’s really good and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t things to learn. I mean, there were some many, many things that I thought along the way were really good. But with time and looking back and experience, I’d say what’s not as good as I thought it was. But there were some things I look back on. I had a song that I wrote John Barry recorded for his Christmas album, a song called My Heart is Bethlehem and I wrote it for a church service when I was in my 20s. The pastor said, I’m going to do something for Christmas. Can you write me a song? Okay, so I wrote this song. So fast forward, I don’t know.,10 years maybe. No one’s ever heard this song, except the people that were there that night in church when I played it. Okay. So fast forward 10 years, maybe more. I’m in a castle in the south of France that belongs to I can’t think of his name right now. He managed The Police and he managed Clash. Copeland, Miles Copeland was his name and his brother was Stewart Copeland, who was the drummer for The Police. Every year, a couple times a year, Miles Copeland would do this event called The Castle and essentially would bring writers, hit songwriters from all over the world together with hit artists and the idea was to spend about 10 to 14 days creating copyrights. So it’s basically a big songwriting retreat. So that was where I met Timothy Schmitt. That’s how he and I ended up writing together. One night while I was there, John Barry was also there, and he was in the room now to me in this old, I don’t know, 500 year old house that we were sleeping in, and I couldn’t sleep. So I was sitting up just playing my guitar and he’d been out with his friends or something, some songwriters doing something he came in, it was probably about three in the morning and he stopped by my room say, Hello, we’re talking a little bit and he told me he was doing a Christmas album and I said, Well, do you have all your songs and he said, No, I’m still looking for songs. I said, Well, I wrote a Christmas song once.
Michael 10:28
Right? So he said, Well play it for me. Okay, I took a second, tried to remember it. I played a form. He loved it, he recorded it, it became the title of the album and for the last 10 years or so, it’s been the title of his annual Christmas tour and many people have said it’s one of the finest new Christmas songs of the last 20 years. But it’s just something that I wrote for a church service that nobody ever heard, except the people that were there that night. What I’m saying is save everything. You just never know when it’s going to come about and I was 23 or 24 years old when I wrote the lyrics to that song. I look back on it now and I think, Well, where did that come from? I looked at the other stuff that I wrote around that time, like, if I look back at my notebooks, and they were a very different level of writing than what this was. So where did that come from? Why did it come out? Why is it so? I don’t know. Just beautiful and otherworldly. I don’t know, so all of that, I guess being said, Be careful that you have some kindness for yourself and your creative process. Recognize you’re on a journey, save everything. Right and you never know, maybe you’ve already written some of your best work. You just didn’t know it because the world hadn’t had a chance to hear it yet.
Norman 11:49
Right. That’s great. I love those stories.
Norman 11:53
Now, you’ve also performed quite a bit on military bases. So tell us a little bit about that and I know there’s different audiences. So how does that audience compare to your average audience?
Michael 12:09
When 9/11 happened, I wanted to do something. I was in the middle of my career, and I was so stunned by what happened in the Twin Towers being hit and Pentagon, that I went down to the recruiting office, and I tried to join. But they told me I was too old, so I couldn’t join. So I said to my agent, I said, maybe there’s something I can do, maybe there’ll be an opportunity for me to do something for the troops, just let me know. I got a call from him one day, and he said, You remember you said you don’t worry about the money, you just go do whatever? I said, Yeah. So there’s an event at Fort Campbell in Kentucky and about 1200 service members who are about to deploy to Iraq, probably a bit about 2005-2004. So I went down there and I did a show, some nights where you think, Wow, that was magic and then, you have other nights where it’s just another show, and it felt like it was just another show in terms of like, how the audience responded, it wasn’t like, I get a big standing ovation, my hair didn’t catch on fire. It was nothing magical about it in that sense. But after the show was over, this guy came up to me and asked me for my phone number and he was the Executive Officer to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army guy named Cody and about a week later, I got a call from this contractor in DC, saying that General Cody’s had given him my number and had asked him to call me and see if we could do something together. Who would have thought at that time that my willingness and just desire to serve, not worry about the money at all, just how can I help would lead to so many beautiful gifts and really a change of paradigm for me. There’s a bigger story here, so I’ll get down this road and if you want to stop me, stop me. But, when I told you that when I left this last major record deal, because I just felt like they pulled the rug out from underneath me and I was never going to have that happen again. One of the things that I did was I just knelt by my bed and I just asked God, bring me whatever you want me to do. I’ll do it and at that time, I wasn’t a particularly religious person. But I had a feeling that I had a purpose for being here and I had a feeling that if I had some guidance, maybe I can fulfill that purpose. So I just prayed, I just said, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. Just send them my way. So I started getting a lot of phone calls from people asking me to donate my time and I remember thinking, Well, maybe I should have prayed for like paying gigs. Anyway, so here came this opportunity to go do this thing for the army and there was no money. I mean, I started a publishing deal and I had some money in the bank. So it wasn’t like I was worried about paying my bills at that point and I prayed and asked, If you want me to do it, you tell me how to do it, my phone started ringing and I started doing all this stuff that was all for free. So it led me to get this phone call from this guy in DC after I did this show at Fort Campbell and I went to DC and they said, Hey, what do you want to do? Honestly, I looked at him and I said, I don’t know really very much about the military. I don’t even know how to answer the question. I don’t know. It’s sort of like I said to you earlier, like when I went to Nashville, like, I figured I didn’t really know what’s going on. So if I had some time to learn what was going on, then maybe I could see where I belonged. So I basically said the same thing to him. Like, I don’t know how I can help. I could say, I could speak. But honestly, I said, if you just give me a chance to hang around, let me hang around a little bit, and let me see what it is that you guys need and maybe I can figure out, we can figure out together if there’s some way that I can help. So that was the attitude that I had, and the approach that I had. Well, on my first trip there, I met the person who was in charge of handling my visit there and she was a colonel in the army, who was the head of Strategic Communications for the Department of the Army, we began to work together. She kept asking me how much I needed to get paid and I said, I don’t want to get paid, just pay my bills, just pay my expenses, travel and food and lodging, whatever, but I just want to donate my time. With that woman, long story short, became my wife, a joy that I have in my life now and the blessings that have flowed from being her partner in life are immeasurable to me and that was all born out of me, kneeling beside my bed said, Hey, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do and I’ll go wherever you want me to go and I’ll try my best to serve people. It led to me meeting Jill, which led to me doing over 150 performances in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Norman 17:28
Wow. 150.
Michael 17:29
Yeah. I mean, well over 150, probably from over about a nine year period. The first trip I took was with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time, General Peter Pace and it was this annual holiday tour. So this was pretty thrilling. I get to fly in the Air Force too with General Pace, and three or four other artists and some dignitaries and we visited 11 countries in 14 days. I said to General Pace when we were flying home. I mean, we were in UAE and Bahrain and Iraq and Afghanistan and I mean, it’s just Kuwait, and Germany and I said to General Pace on the way home, I said, there must be a lot of service members who are in remote areas who never get a show like this and he said, Oh yeah. He said, most servicemen and women never get to do something, never get to see shows, like USO shows, because they’re in two remote places and I said to him, If there was any way for me to go do shows for those service members who are in remote areas. I said, I’d like to do that. I said, I bet you have a lot of people that want to do the big shows. I said, put me on a helicopter and send me to the places where nobody goes. That’s what I want to do. So he took me up on it and so over the course of nine years, I did I think 11 tours around the world to perform for service members who were largely in remote places, sometimes we’d have three or four or five people in the audience and that led to over 150 performances in these remote areas, and it changed, like he’s talked about how different the audiences are. Hey, let’s say 2008, 9 or 10. I hadn’t had a big hit on the radio in 10 or 12 years and I’m performing for service members who are 19,20,21,22. So they don’t really know my music and then, you’re sitting in a room, waiting for the audience to show up and here comes some service members who just been on a patrol where they’re kicking down doors, looking for bad guys and they’re welded as tight as a drum. So, what kind of show are you gonna do for them? So these are things you think about when you’re in those places, right? You think, what is my real job here? What’s my real intent and I really said, It profoundly changed me really, because I started really feeling as though my real purpose for being there was to try to help them relax a little bit. If I felt like if I could get them to smile, or if I could get them to just drop their shoulders a little bit, and if I could get them to laugh a little bit, so I started adding a lot more humor into my shows, and I started incorporating storytelling more and we went from performing in little, little venues that would be in I don’t know, like in a room somewhere in a building in a portable building and we’d have three or four people show up, because honestly, they didn’t necessarily know who I was. I was experiencing some shows where service members just sit like this, through almost my whole show and I started asking, like what’s going on? Then, somebody explained to me that the only reason they were there was because their Sergeant had ordered them to come because he didn’t want to be embarrassed that nobody showed up for my show. So there’s something they called Mandatory Fun and so I said, Well, that’s not right, I don’t want to do that. I said, There must be a different way to do this. So we started setting up in the dining facilities. Because there’d be 1000 people in the dining facility coming and going as they please, they weren’t there for a show. But I said, Well, what if we set up in the dining facility, and just put me in a corner somewhere, I don’t need an introduction. Just put me in a corner, give me a little stage, a little PA, and just let me start playing music. I’ll just play and whoever wants to stay can stay, whoever wants to go can go, but at least there’ll be people there. Right and there are people there that are there, because they want to be there. Right? So I started just playing in these dining facilities and it was transformational. Because hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of service members would stay.
Michael 22:16
They would stay and they would laugh, and they would have fun and they weren’t Mandatory Fun and I was more at ease because I wasn’t putting on a show. I was just playing music and it just transformed me as a performer and it made me realize that so much of the accoutrements that we add to a performance career, they don’t work everywhere. There’s something really powerful about just being vulnerable and being available and whoever wants to stay can stay and man, I learned so much from that and I would say that, 70 to 80% of my performances in Iraq and Afghanistan were like that and man, I had so much fun, and I made so many friends. I still get letters today from service members who said they saw me in a dining facility, and how they heard me say something that encouraged them to change their life. So it’s a very different way of looking at it. So yeah, very different kinds of audiences.
Norman 23:17
That’s incredible. Did that affect the way that you performed when you were not at the USO shows?
Michael 23:26
Yeah. I mean, it really did. Because when I came back, I felt like I had found my voice. Like prior to that, on some level, I felt like I was a singer. Right? But having that experience over the course of nine years, I felt like I became an entertainer. Right? So I felt like I understood what worked for me to engage an audience and to help everybody relax. Right? So it became like, in a room full of 1000 or 2000 people. Nowadays when I have those opportunities, Yeah, I’m not always successful at it, but it’s something that I shoot for, is to create an environment where everybody feels like they’re sitting in my living room and we’re just being together. We’re just laughing and having fun. It’s not a show. It’s more like a friend has come over with his guitar, right? So it feels more like that, it’s not that I can’t do other things. I know how to do those other things. I did them for years. But my favorite thing is this, is to just be together, to share a moment where it’s not so planned, like I have an idea kind of what we’re gonna do. But it’s not like click, click, click, click, click. It’s more dynamic than that. Like, we’re together. Let’s be together. Let’s have fun. Let’s laugh at stuff and funny stuff happens all the time, that is able to happen because I made room for it to happen. Instead of it just being like a jukebox that plays one song after another.
Norman 25:09
That is interesting. I did not expect those answers. Yeah, that is really cool how you were able to take that, take the Mandatory Fun, and then just make it unveil itself to you. That’s really cool and we were talking a little earlier about the person who referred you to us and said, You got to talk to Michael, he’s so interesting. That’s Larry Broughton. I want to go over. We were talking about this because I thought it was amazing. Just prior to the call, how you met Larry.
Michael 25:38
Larry Broughton and I met through the Institute for Veterans and Military Families out of Syracuse University. So anybody that is connected to military families at all, chances are that there’s some resources through the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, that might be a blessing to those you know who are in the military or who have family members, military family members, veterans now. They have an entrepreneurship training program for veterans and military family members and it takes a lot of different forms. Like they have one called the EBV, which stands for the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities. They have another one called the V-WISE, that stands for Veteran Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship and so my wife and I have been very, very involved with the V-WISE, really since its inception. One of the things that I do in helping V-WISE is I help them with branding and programming and I help them with their live events. So I say on average, three times a year, for the last almost 10 years, they will have an event, a weekend long event in a city, could be any number of cities across the US, it’s never the same city necessarily speaking twice. It’ll be a weekend long event that will have 225 to 230 women, all veterans or military spouses who come together for the weekend to receive training on how to build a small business. So it’s really soup to nuts, and they are being taught by leading entrepreneurs in the country and by PhD level professors from these business schools. We go to do these events and so we have a lot of guest speakers as you can imagine and Larry Broughton was one of our guest speakers early on in these events and so right away when Larry and I met, we’ve just hit it right off and he did such a great job that they’ve had him back as a regular now on these events. So golly, over the last, I want to say seven years or so. I bet Larry and I’ve done 20 events together.
Norman 27:55
Geez, that’s incredible. Hey, you gave a stat that blew me away, that the average person that goes through, or the average entrepreneur.
Michael 28:06
I think they said 60 to 70% and I’m not exactly right on this, but I’m close 60 to 70% of the graduates from the IVMF Programs have started small businesses. Okay, now the impressive statistic is that close to 97% of those who started those businesses are still in business today after 10 years.
Norman 38:31
That’s crazy.
Michael 28:36
The gross earnings last year of the IMF graduates, and again, don’t quote me on this, but I’m close. I think it’s in the 10s of millions. I heard it was upwards of $50 million a year that their businesses are generating. It’s astounding, the success rate that they’re having is off the charts in terms of compared to other entrepreneurial startups, most startups fail. Right? So they’re doing something right and part of it is, I think there’s a certain kind of person that starts a small business that’s a veteran, right? They have certain qualities that they bring to entrepreneurship that help them succeed and it’s not that they have to be a veteran to have those qualities. But veterans, by and large, have certain qualities that allow them to beat the odds, so to speak, when it comes to entrepreneurship, the IVMF is the place for training and launching small businesses in the country today in the US.
Norman 29:36
I hope after this podcast, we can reach out and provide some resources. I don’t know if they’re willing to take any but I’d love to be able to help somewhere along the lines.
Michael 29:44
That’s fantastic. I’ll let them know.
Norman 29:47
Yeah, definitely. I’d love to help. Yeah and when we talked to Larry about this, he was talking about that attitude, being able and why he was successful and why he felt the vets that went on to become entrepreneurs, they had this mindset and anyways, you were just saying you’re talking about that. I thought that was really interesting. Okay, so let’s talk about something a little bit different. I want to talk about any potential or hurdles that you’ve had to overcome. What were they and how did you learn from it?
Michael 30:22
I think all hurdles are personal, like after a moment, I was gonna say you mean personal or professional. But, if you think about it, they’re all personal. Right? The trauma of my father’s murder and my stepfather suicide as a teen, those are obviously the major hurdles. Looking back, and being thoughtful about what I’m about to say. I feel as though what helped me through that were relationships and key people that showed up that encouraged me. My high school football coach, my college football coach, the pastor of my church, who has retired who I’d never met before he showed up at our house, said he’d had a dream and in his dream, God told him to come over and say hello to me, and to encourage me and offered me a scripture verse Proverbs 3:5-6, that has been for me a guideposts for me all through my life. So people, people that stepped in, and offered me encouragement at times when I needed it. My grandmother, those were difficult times, music helped me through that. But I’d say music, people, and just putting one foot in front of the other, not fighting so much. I think another thing that really has helped me over the years is things that I read. I remember having a feeling in my early 20s, I had a pastor, mentor friend of mine, that said that if I read a book a month, he asked me one day, he said, Do you want to be in the top 1% of intellectually stimulated people in the world? Well, who doesn’t want to say yes to that? Right? He said to me, when I said yes, he said, Then read a book a month. I thought, Well, that sounds pretty easy, right? Read a book a month. In that time, in my early 20s, I found a book written by a guy named George Seldes, S e l d e s and the books called Great Quotes and I remember just as clear as I’m talking with you right now, standing in a Barnes and Noble and seeing this book on the shelf and picking it up Great Quotes and something inside of me, some little voice inside of me said, If you want to think great thoughts, you have to read great thoughts. So I thought, Well, that sounds like a good idea. So basically it was a quote book. So I was in my early 20s and I started devouring this quote book and I got turned on to this idea that that was good casual reading. So where some people might want to read a novel, or historical fiction or history books, I read quote books. I’ve got shelves and shelves full of quote books that I read, and I read these over and over and over again, because I had this feeling that it was somehow is imparting wisdom into my life and principles that I needed and to this day, sometimes when I’m talking, I’ll say a quote and I don’t remember if I said it, or somebody else did, because it’s become so woven into my life, right? So I would say that what you said, What helped me get over hurdles? This idea that I get to choose my thoughts. Like, I get to choose my thoughts, I get to become the master of my emotions. Now, I haven’t succeeded in that. But, I have pursued it and at moments in my life, when there was tremendous discouragement and adversity, these thoughts that I placed into my mind that had become a part of the fabric of my being, those are the things that arise when the voice of discouragement speaks to me. I hear this tap, tap, tap on my shoulder and I hear the voice of encouragement speak to me. Whatever you think affects what you choose or how you act, I think our choices are what determine our outcomes often, in spite of our circumstances. It’s choice, not chance. Right? That brings about results in our lives. At least I believe that and I’ve seen it over and over again. I’m in the middle right now of memorizing a book. I don’t know, years ago, I started reading this book by this guy named Og Mandino. Have you ever heard of him?
Norman 35:17
Oh yeah. I’ve got a book of his.
Michael 35:19
Okay. So there’s a book of his called The Greatest Secret.
Norman 35:23
That’s what I have.
Michael 35:24
Okay. So I started reading that probably around the time I was 35, or 36 and I read it at a time when I was going through a really difficult personal transition in my life and I’d had this book that had been sitting on my shelf for decades. I’d gotten it from my college football coach and I never read it. But one day, it jumped out at me when I looked at the bookshelf and I started reading, I thought, Well, I’ll try this. I was going through a difficult time then too in my 20s and I found that after about 30 or 40 days of reading the scrolls, there’s 10 scrolls right, and you’re supposed to read each one for 30 days, three times a day. So by the time I reached about 30 days, on the first scroll, I started feeling as though I’d like I was memorizing it. I wasn’t trying to memorize it. I was just doing what he said to do, read it three times a day for 30 days and by the end of the month, I felt like I kind of knew it and so I got this idea, what if I could memorize a book? Like how cool would that be? If you could say that you memorized an entire book. So that was 40 years ago, right? No, probably 30 years ago when I started doing that. I started down this journey of memorizing this book and life came along, and I kind of let it all go. Well, about five years ago, I picked it up again and I started reading it and I started trying to work on fulfilling that promise that I made to myself that I’d memorize a book. So right now, I’ve memorized the first seven scrolls. Like I know them by heart, I could say and recite them to you, the seven scrolls. So I’m right now I’m working on the eighth scroll, there’s 10 scrolls, but I’m working on the eighth scroll right now and the eighth scroll says, I won’t recite the whole thing to you. But the topic of date scroll is today I’ll multiply my value 100 fold. Right and it has like four pages of this topic about how it is that you can multiply your value as a person. The last one that I just finished memorizing is titled, I will laugh at the world. So it took me I don’t know, it takes me the better part of six or seven months to memorize one of these scrolls. Because I only read it once a day but I do it every day. Memorizing I will Laugh at the World has been just so powerful, it’s been so empowering for me, your original question was, What are some things that have helped me over some hurdles? Here I am all these years later memorizing Og Mandino and the last year I spent memorizing I will Laugh at the World and like there’s so many key lines in this that pop into my head every morning when I wake up and I do my recitation. Because I’ve been working at the last month since I finally memorized it. I’m trying to drive it home now and make sure I remember it. So in addition to the new reading that I’m doing, I also recite the previous one. So there’s so many lines in it that jumped out at me that every day when I wake up, it’s part of my ritual now. I recite these things that I’ve memorized, and there’s a great line in this one, it says, I will paint this day with laughter. I will frame this night and so on. Well, when you think about that, what does it mean to paint the day with laughter? Why don’t we all get to decide what that means to us. But to me, what it means is that I get to choose today.
Michael 38:56
I can choose today, how I’m going to respond to the day and if you paint the day with laughter, that means you’re walking around the whole day with a paintbrush in your hand. You’re painting laughter everywhere that you look and so I’ve had more laughter in my life this last year. So I mean, that all goes back to what I started to answer your question, which is some things that have helped me over the hurdles. I think learning that I could choose my thoughts and making the effort to focus deliberately, on certain things to memorize. So that, when I found myself discouraged, or when I found myself, with my mind being assaulted if you will, by negative thinking, I can actually recognize number one that I’m being assaulted. Number two, choose to think about something else and you don’t always have a book you can pick up right? But if you’ve memorized the book, you can shift gears and focus on reciting the thing you’ve memorized and you can’t think of two things at the same time. So when you choose to think about this thing you’ve memorized, you shift your thinking. Right and then when you act on the things that you’ve memorized, it just just changes your life and I would say that that’s been a really important part of me getting over hurdles, is reaching for things I know the truth instead of choosing to trust my hopes instead of my fears. Right and picking up by habit and on purpose, positive things to remind myself of that empower my life. I
Norman 40:42
I love it.
Michael 40:43
Is that too deep of an answer?
Norman 40:45
No, no, I think that’s an incredible answer. Thank you. I’ll switch the other way, though. Let’s talk about your successes, biggest success, how they affected you, and what you learned?
Michael 41:01
I would say probably when you ask about successes, I was a kid in school, who my grade point average was about a 2.3 at best when I was in high school, and I almost failed many, many classes. The fact that I got to go to college, and I got to play college football and play for a national championship team. That was something that I don’t know that anybody thought that I could ever do when I was a kid. It’s funny, you ask that question because I’ve been going through my old journals, my old songwriting journals, and seeing stuff that I wrote, like in the early 80s and reading that stuff, most of it is not very good, but seeing where I’ve come now, and seeing the career that I’ve been able to make in the music business and as a speaker, having that success, from knowing where I came from, was a kid that I had a hard time reading, I had a hard time with word comprehension. So to have my life be based upon words and music, regardless of what the details were like, how many hits I had, or how many songs I had recorded by other people, or those things that we typically think of as success. The success for me is just, I think about having had almost a 40 year career with words and music, and being able to sustain that. I haven’t really worked any other jobs since I was 36, or 37. I haven’t really worked any other jobs, this has been my livelihood, and to be able to make a living doing what I love to do, that is success. One of the things from the Og Mandino thing I was talking about earlier, is one of the quotes from that, I will Laugh at the World says that only with laughter and happiness, can I truly become a success. Only with laughter and happiness, can I enjoy the fruits of my labor. Would it not be so far better would have been to fail, for happiness is the wine that sharpens the taste of the meal. To enjoy success, I must have happiness and laughter will be the maiden who serves me and so, the way I used to measure success when I was younger was by my accomplishments. Now I’m at a place where I’m recognizing that there’s a lot of people that have great accomplishments that are not very happy and so could you really call them successful? So for me, the answer to your question is talk about my successes, I think the greatest successes in my life that I’ve been able to do what I’ve loved to do for a living for the better part of 30 years now and that I have joy in my life and happiness in doing those things, and that I have joy and happiness in my life so I can enjoy those things. I think that to me, that’s the mark of success.
Norman 44:10
I love it. Congratulations.
Michael 44:12
Hey man, I’m grateful. I am so grateful. I don’t know, because I don’t talk about this stuff with a lot of other people. But I don’t take credit for a lot of it. Other than I feel grateful. Less than taking credit, it’s more about feeling grateful. I feel grateful that I’ve been able to be successful in that way.
Norman 44:33
Now Hayden, do you have any questions for Michael?
Hayden 44:37
I think I had one. Maybe we can tie it into this. Like I know at the beginning of the podcast, you mentioned how you can develop a sense of purpose and it was tied to creativity in songwriting and words. How has that changed over the course of your career and even considering what you just since maybe reading these scrolls like, has that affected your purpose or affected your creative process? Or like, how has it changed over your life?
Michael 45:13
Yeah. Well, I love I love that question. The biggest revelation that I’ve had, is this whole thing I think has come full circle for me. Like when I was in my early 20s, and I didn’t have a name, I didn’t have any success that other people would recognize as success. I was writing songs because I felt compelled to and I was creating because I felt compelled to. I mean, how do you explain somebody that writes 25-30 songs a year just because, right? Now, I’m 61, I’ve come full circle, and there was a time in my life when I wrote, all the time that I was in Nashville. I wrote because I had a publishing deal and because I was a songwriter, and an artist, and I was ambitious in my career, and you’re right for those reasons. I co wrote a lot. Well, since I moved to Las Vegas, which was eight years ago, I’m not co writing very much. I’m mostly writing by myself again. I’ve chosen not to have a publishing deal. So I’m not feeling any pressure to write for the market. I’m writing things that turn me on and and I’m not worried about when I’m writing them, I’m not worried about who’s going to cut this, or what’s going to come with it. Because when I look back, that’s the thing we talked about earlier, when I look back, most of the songs of mine that had been recorded by other people, were not songs that I wrote trying to get somebody to record them. Most of the songs that I’ve written, that have been recorded by the people were songs that I wrote from a place of just being honestly and just writing what I felt and what I believed in and most of the songs that I wrote I that I love, that I think are my best work, are not songs that I was trying to write commercially. They were just songs that I that I wrote from a place. There’s a great author by the name of Frederick Buechner and Buechner is a novelist who’s deceased now. He has a book that they have published of his writings called Listening to your Life, daily devotional that I’ve been reading for the better part of 15 years now and one of the passages in listening to life Buechner talks about, What it is that the job of a writer is. So if you’re a writer, he says, Your job is to open a vein, to bleed on the page and to pour out your truth, your honesty, whatever it is you want to say, to point out in such a way that it is a living, it’s a living expression of some kind of, I don’t know, like the words almost carry a DNA in them of the emotional experience that you’re having. When I read that from Buechner, I think the songs that I’ve loved the most over the years that have touched me the most, have been songs that I suspect had some of that blood in them, the DNA in them. Like I think about a song by Mike and The Mechanics called The Living Years, it was a big puppet and it was about a guy who’s reflecting on the death of his father. But there’s something about that song that isn’t just a puppet, there’s that lyric that speaks some kind of truth that’s timeless, that feels like somebody’s opened up a vein, to say those things and so, these days creatively, I feel like I’ve come full circle. I’m writing more about myself. I now have the experience of 40 years of writing, that I bring to bear on what it is that I create, and how I choose to create it. But more than anything, I’m trying to open a vein and it doesn’t always mean it’s serious, like I’ve been working on this song, it’s a silly song. But I know enough about craft, and songwriting craft, to think about how I’m shaping it and I want it to make me laugh and so I mean, it’s a serious pursuit. Even a funny song is a serious pursuit. It’s an artistic endeavor. But I still feel like I’m opening a vein and pouring myself into it in a way that matters to me to hit a mark that I’m aware is there for me, and to not give up on it until I’m completely satisfied, that that’s great. That makes me laugh, or makes me feel something and I’m finding that when I write songs like that, that people tend to respond to them more. So I guess in that sense, that’s what’s changed me is they’re more aware, but in many ways I’ve come full circle too.
Norman 49:40
Alright. Well, I think we’re winding down to the end of the podcast and Michael, I wanted to thank you for sharing your time with us today. It was awesome.
Michael 49:49
Well, thank you very much for having me on. I really, really appreciate you guys.
Norman 49:53
Well, Michael, it’s been a joy to have you on the show. I’m so happy you were able to share the last hour or two with us talking about your life, your success, the hurdles that you’ve had to overcome. It’s been just great talking with you.
Michael 50:07
Thank you so much. They’re great questions. Thank you for giving me the platform.
Norman 50:11
Oh, you’re very welcome.
Hayden 50:17
Thanks for listening. That’s the end of our interview with Michael Peterson. Tune in next time to hear an interview with Andre Norman. Andre spent a large part of his life in prison actually and through that experience, had an epiphany that he wanted to change his life and now is in the business of prison reform. Needless to say it was quite the heavy talk, but I think you’ll really enjoy it. So make sure to check it out next time. That’s enough for me and I’ll see you next time.
