Canadian-born, Nashville-based singer/songwriter Peter Raffoul released his debut EP, Songs from a House In Blue, in 2022, and has since followed that up with singles including the recent arrival, “Book Club”. Recording that latest track was inspired by the new song’s engagement while touring and Raffoul’s sense that audiences had taken a particular interest in the earnest track about a devoted, but troubled relationship. Peter Raffoul prefers to mix melancholic elements with the uplifting aspects in his music so far and measures that mix through a lens of emotional honesty.
Originally a songwriter via keyboard and piano, Peter Raffoul, who is the brother of fellow singer/songwriter Billy Raffoul, spent some time moving into guitar songwriting and back again of late to explore new avenues in mood and style. It brought him some fresh ideas and a wider set of options when it comes to composition. I spoke with Peter Raffoul about his latest release “Book Club”, how performances affect his songwriting and recording process, and about how the different iterations of the engaging track “Call Me” came to be.
HMS: I’ve come across your work as a pianist, Peter. Is that your composing instrument for your latest EP and singles?
Peter Raffoul: I was taught piano style for an impatient person as a teen and ran with it. It was my first songwriting instrument, so it was probably backwards compared to a lot of people who do guitar stuff, who write on the guitar and then go to piano. I was always at a piano and occasionally singing with a guitar. But now I haven’t actually released a song that was written on the piano in a little while, since I had started to go the other way. However, in the past few months I’ve been writing on the piano more. I do find them to be totally different.
HMS: I can imagine that changing things up can be helpful if you’re trying to get into new territory. Some people become multi-instrumentalists because every few years they get restless and pick up something else to help guide them into new territory.
PR: I feel like that’s exactly what happened to me with the guitar. I hadn’t maxed out skill-wise on the piano by any means, but I had written so much with it that I was doing things the same way all the time. So I asked, “What’s something that can get me off this path a little bit?” I actually called my brother Billy, since we’re both left-handed, and he was happy showing me his way of playing the guitar. Now I’m stuck playing the guitar upside down. [Laughs] Which is fine. He’s the cheapest teacher I could get! But writing like that has been a good departure from the keyboard. It is a different creative process for me entirely.
HMS: Do your recorded songs tend to come from the same period of time for you, or do you have a cache of songs that you draw and select from regardless of the passage of time?
PR: Seeing a song all the way through the finish line can mean that older songs might not come to light until later. It might resurface and find its way to being finished a year or two later. It’s hard to predict and hard to stay on a path where something that’s been written most recently is the song that will be released most recently. The format of releasing music these days has made it a kind of Wild West of choosing among your songs anyway. With the last four or five releases, those songs are from a recent pool, but some are older.
The song “I Thought You Should Know” was written by me and my brother in Nashville. It was on a list of songs that we were supposed to record, but it got beat out by another song, but when we returned to the studio a year later, we made sure it was on the list to record. That’s kind of how it goes, and we sometimes revisit stuff that’s been waiting. But there are times when you’re super high on an idea that can’t be pushed aside, that’s a song that gets written and released within a couple of months.
HMS: On your previous EP, Songs from a House in Blue, are there songs there that couldn’t be ignored? Do those become guideposts for creating a collection?
PR: I think that’s fair to say. If there’s a song that has some urgency to it, it feels like the next thing, the identity piece. That feels like exactly the story that I want to tell. Songs like that drive projects for me, personally. Sometimes it’s hard not to question yourself and your attachment to a song, but I’ve been lucky enough to release songs and have a feeling that I’m doing right by my art, which is the most important thing.
HMS: You just came off quite a substantial tour, and you probably get to see how audiences are reacting to songs, and that might also help guide you in which songs are milestones.
PR: That’s the whole way in which the song “Book Club” even became a recorded song. I was playing it unreleased on two straight tours. I had written it recently here in Nashville with my friend Tony Esterly. We had a tour coming up right after we wrote it, and I put it in the set, since I was playing acoustically and had the chance to play it to crowds every night. It went over really well. People were asking about the song. It proved itself and I was excited about it. It was a win-win not to overthink it, so we recorded it. Then I played it on tour again, and then just released it. It was great to test it out.
HMS: How do you decide when to record things? Are there times where you go in batches to the studio?
PR: Sometimes you are looking at the demand for a song, but I try not to get too caught up in that because it’s so hit-or-miss about whether something gets online attention. It feels more honest to base it on touring and seeing if people in the room are liking a song.
HMS: It seems like you’re quite open to putting up live performances online too. Is that an intermediary stage where you get feedback?
PR: I’m all for playing a song live as much as I can. Often it helps me understand the song better and will change things about how the song’s final form will be. If I’ve played it live twenty times in thirty days, I find things about the song that I like better. I’m getting a bunch of work in on the song and it eliminates looking back and wishing I’d changed things. Whether a song is released or not, I’m all for giving songs as much live performance as possible. Everything feels so final in the studio, and rightfully so, so I want to test things a bunch first.
HMS: Does anything come to mind that changed with “Book Club” between demoing and recording?
PR: Yes, there was some small stuff. When we went in to record it, there was a bridge that I play live that wouldn’t fit for us. We decided to go to an instrumental moment instead. When it was recorded, the bridge didn’t flow as well, but live allowed us to speed up or slow it down as needed. We had to part with the bridge on the recording. You’ll only hear that bridge when I’m playing live.
HMS: I actually noticed that instrumental part and thought it was an interesting moment. With “Book Club”, on one level, the lyrics are really sweet, because they show an incredible amount of commitment. But on the other hand, they suggest that the speaker is in a very low place mentally. It’s interesting that we don’t know what happened in that story and that it’s possible that neither party is an angel in this situation. It’s not a typical love song in that way.
PR: I’m glad that you have that interpretation. I agree that it’s got this left of center view of what a love song or a romance story should be. That’s kind of where I fall as a writer. There’s often something hopeful about my songs, but I like it when I have that feeling that something is melancholic and moody, but it has something endearing or uplifting about it, too. A lot of it isn’t about being black and white. That’s not the kind of songwriter that I am, or at least not the songwriter that I want to be. I like the push and pull of things, that unpredictable feeling of what the lyric might mean. Some songs bring that across more obviously, but in this one, I like the fact that there’s some controversy about how things are going.
HMS: One of the lighter elements in the song is the honesty and the directness of the speaker. Sometimes when you get to points in life where you can be that honest, it actually feels like a relief. Even if what you’re conveying is heavy. Getting to a point of honest is generally a helpful thing and that might be an uplifting element here.
PR: I like that. I agree. I think that the honesty is important. You have to be honest about the bad shit, too. That’s always been important to me. For some reason, as a writer, I touch on that much more than just the wonderful stuff in life. Maybe that’s just an era or a choice at the moment, but that’s definitely a present thing for me right now.
HMS: The song “Call Me” is around in three versions and it’s really thought-provoking that we can compare the different takes. There’s the studio version, the demo version, and even a stripped-down live version online. I heard that the song was written on the road.
PR: Yes, that’s one of those ones that felt urgent when it was finished. We didn’t release it right away, but I knew that the hotel version had to exist. I didn’t mind making multiple versions of it, I just knew that one had to exist. It’s very literal. I was in Atlanta on a writing trip. I was feeling pretty down, heartbroken, with some personal stuff kicking my ass a little bit. I didn’t want to say these things to a stranger in a writing room. I knew there was something in there to write about, but I was reluctant to bring it to a session because it felt really personal.
So we did something else that day. I went back to my hotel room and was up super-late. I had my little keyboard and microphone with me and I set it up in the hotel room. At three or four in the morning, I was playing this little part over and over again. Before I knew what was going on, I had this little demo that I didn’t even consider a song at first. It was a poem with some stuff behind it. But I listened to it the whole way back from Atlanta to Nashville in the car and I really liked it. I could stand behind it and I believed in it. It was authentic and honest. I wanted to make sure it saw the light of day and that people could experience it the way that I did.
That demo made it out in the world, and now there’s also a Produced version that has some energy behind it. That song is one that’s very important to me and I’m glad it got recorded.
HMS: Do you perform it live?
PR: A ton! It’s so sad and self-deprecating in a sense, and I started playing it on the piano live. It has become like “story-time” and I’m not sure why. I stop at certain parts of it and I start saying things about that night and let the audience in on the story of the song. There’s a twist at the end where I talk about how the front desk called me [when I was recording the demo]. When I get to that point, it gets laughs out of the audience, which I was never expecting. It becomes this shared moment, I guess, of vulnerability.
HMS: It breaks the tension.
PR: It was a highlight of the show for the last couple tours. That’s a fun one.
HMS: I did laugh at that line in the song, too. I think the song can feel tragic, and then for that moment, it becomes dark comedy. In the song, the speaker is having realizations and then something mundane and silly breaks in. It’s also the image of the songwriter, stuck in a hotel, who can’t even get enough privacy to write their three-minute song.
PR: That was the whole thing. It was a perfect storm of all those things being true that made for the song. It was words and music, so I decided it was a song.
HMS: The studio recording of that song is really its own thing. It’s very different even though it’s the same song. I was amazed by the layers and big percussive elements. It has a rising element. That’s really cool to see those possibilities come out in the song.
PR: Thank you. Credit to the Producers for doing that with me. I brought the demo version of the song to them and all I had to do to get my vision across was to say, “And then it just goes crazy here for a second!” And they said, “Okay, okay.” So we started messing around with that. That was enough information for us to start building it. I love how the band version turned out. It gives some insight into what that song would be like to play live with a band. It would probably be pretty fun to play that song.
