A MOMENT WITH PETER DAY OF DAVENPORT
CASSIDY ALEXA: What does your artistic process look like? Do you have a daily routine or do you just create when the moment moves you?
PETER DAY: It’s always changing. It depends on what’s going on in life, where I am at in guitar or piano playing at the time, and what I’ve learned about writing or recording.
PD: The key for me is tricking myself into thinking I’m not being creative. This funny thing happens; I will be cracking jokes, playing around on the instruments, and then it just happens; the spark. When I get that spark, I get into the mode, and there’s no stopping me.I spin out of control. A song is born sometimes within five minutes, maybe an hour.
However, that’s not always how it goes down. Sometimes, it does feel like work, and I have to sit down and force myself to create. I am excellent at procrastinating. The similarity between the two is in the fact that when I hit the spark, the process then becomes second nature.
Any art at some point becomes a little like work, and keeping daily practices is super important to me. I can always improve. I never will become content with what I am doing. There’s always room to grow, and I believe if you get to a point where you say you have learned it all, well your probably just a bad player (laughs). For me, it’s practicing scales on guitar and piano. Just playing songs. I do need to work on singing more but I currently am not (laughs). The other part is learning new information on guitar, drums, bass, microphones, singing, recording, songs, writing as much as I can, and then trying to spin it my way.
CA: Where is your favourite place to write?
PD: I never have a ‘place,’ per say to write, but I do always need to be by myself. I find I don’t write with people very easily. Not to say I haven’t ever; me and my good friend Sam Weber have a very easy working relationship; we are on similar wavelengths, so I can write with him. That being said, it’s never one space. Keeping it fresh is super important to me.
CA: If you could only eat one meal for dinner for the rest of your life what would it be?
PD: Probably burritos, for sure! It’s pretty much what I live off when I am in the studio. It’s all we eat (laughs).
CA: What is your favourite thing to wear on stage?
PD: I don’t have one thing I like to wear, but I do enjoy a bit of something wacky, colourful, or off-beat feeling. Our band is made up of five to six people, depending on the day. Being that it’s mainly focused around me and my twin brother, we get the rest of them to dress in black or neutral colours, and then Patty and I dress to pop out. I’ve worn silver disco pants, a washy paint splatted blazer, just to name a couple.
I really love colour, so I try to use that to my advantage. It gives me the feeling of wearing a mask. With the costume I tend to come out of my shell. The same goes for Patty; we try to kind of conceive our outfits together.
CA: What has music done for you?
PD: What hasn’t music done for me?! I’ve wanting to cry, scream with joy and drive off a cliff! It really does everything; mostly positive, but you also go through the hard times with it and sometimes it’s because of those hard times… but I mean, all that aside, why do I keep doing it?
It really keeps me together, and gives me an outlet to get over the drama that life can be; the mess and the craziness. I can go sit down and mess around, create from nothing. That makes me feel an ecstasy that I have otherwise never found. The other thing is a connection; I can potentially change someones day or life through something that I did via a song or show. For me, that’s what it’s about; connecting. Especially at live shows, having an audience support you is the best.
My Oma (Grandma) always told me to do it. She saw how much I loved it, and said “throw all the other shit aside, because you are going to die, so you should follow your dream.” She said that all before she heard me perform any music, just at the earlier stages and she sadly never got to hear or see any of the music I’ve released but it drives me forward even more and I do it for her.
Sounds like your Oma was fucking RAD Peter, and I know she’s looking down on you proud as hell.
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