‘Miracles’ by Peter Matthew Bauer | New Album, ‘Flowers’

Today, Peter Matthew Bauer shares ‘Miracles’, the latest single off his forthcoming LP, ‘Flowers’, due September 23 via Fortune Tellers Music. The track features a brass ensemble, The Westerlies, on the horn arrangement and it was produced and mixed by Bauer and Matt Barrick.

Speaking on his newest single, Peter wrote: “‘Miracles’ is a big piece of this record and probably the most straightforward, folk style song I’ve ever written. It covers a lot of themes from the record all at once. It’s both looking back at the strangeness of growing up, wandering an old railroad bridge with your friends and then jumping time to the present, wandering around downtown Los Angeles in the pandemic. For me, I guess it’s expressing a lot of the fear and decay of the present time. I finished writing it in December 2021 on Christmas Day”.

‘Flowers’ is Peter Matthew Bauer’s first full-length record in almost five years. Taking from both his own personal experience alongside the stories of several others; a feeling of chasing what’s hidden at the edge of things inhabits the album.

“It’s filled with a kind of dread but also I think a little joy remains”, says Peter. “It’s this weird continuum of losing people from your past, some close and some just characters I knew who were somehow important. That and this feeling of a kind of terror that we are all experiencing together, this cult like feeling I have from my own childhood (he grew up in ashrams in both Upstate New York and Ganeshpuri, India), chasing down specific images and moments that feel alive within that kind of feeling, and then chasing that childhood feeling itself- that sense of home that feels lost sometimes, those are the things that make up this record. It’s like searching for an undercurrent hidden in everything – like an electric charge”.

The album was made in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, working late at night mostly for the last year and a half. Begun entirely alone in his office in Laurel Canyon, ‘Flowers’ became a far more collaborative project with the entrance of Matt Barrick, Peter’s old bandmate in the Walkmen and the drummer and co-producer on all but one track.

“I had been really obsessed about doing everything on my own at home at first. I was using a lot of samples for drums and then playing everything else as I could to put the music together”, said Peter. “Then, I realized I had a song where it would be fun to ask Matt to play really fast and heavy again like he used to years ago. We started calling it “sports drumming”. Anyways, once we had that, we hit this natural thing where we saw it through to the end”.

Peter flew to Philadelphia in January where he’d lived before Los Angeles. Barrick had recently opened Silent Partner, a studio he built with Quentin Stoltzfus and Paul Banks. The record was finished and mixed there. “We spent a week in the freezing cold”, says Peter. “We pretty much recorded everything we could through their spring reverb and Matt’s soviet era delay pedal. It was great to work with an old friend again”.

Peter was born in 1978 in Washington DC. A founder of seminal New York art rock band the Walkmen, he released 6 full length albums as part of the band before his first solo LP ‘Liberation!’ (Mexican Summer) in 2014. He followed that up with ‘Mount Qaf’ (Divine Love) on his own imprint Fortune Tellers, now a record label and management company in Los Angeles.

‘Flowers’ is by far his most eloquent and carefully thought out record, tightly bound together by its original production and songwriting, Barrick’s drumming, and Bauer’s newfound penchant for electric guitar solos.

“Somewhere along the way, I realized I had never really taken a guitar solo in all the years I’ve played music. I became obsessed with figuring out a way to do so while also still moving the songs along. Now that I’ve started, I’m not sure how I’ll stop”, says Peter.

Highlights include the lead single ‘Knife Fighter’ (out May 20th), a dreamy acoustic number built around a deep reggae low end, staccato electric guitars and falsetto singing by Peter; ‘Skulls’, a rock and roll song carried by a wall of farfisas, Barrick’s drumming, and Bauer’s echoing solo. It also features Liily’s Charlie Anastasis on bass and background vocals from Marisa Brown and Hillary Ashen (Peter’s wife and friend who are constant contributors throughout his work). Others include the title track ‘Flowers’, originally written around a series of samples from Bo Diddley records and inspired by a childhood friend’s sudden passing and witnessing a surfer funeral on a Santa Monica beach; ‘Miracles’, the most traditional track on the album with a masterful brass section performed by The Westerlies; and the album’s thematic centerpiece, the final track ‘Chiyoda’, ‘Arkansas’, ‘Manila’.

This last song is an abstract portrait of anti cult researchers Bauer met online, drawing on one in particular’s experience and reactions in the abstract. “It was someone I hardly knew so it’s not really about her. It was just my reaction to her – to her cryptic warnings about the state of things and her obsession with Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. It kind of intermingled with my own experience, my own fears about everything at the moment”- Set against a wall of arp synthesizers, electric guitars and Barrick smashing the drums, the song ends with a sound that’s something like a good U2 song being drowned underwater.