Peter Katz returns to Canmore for his third performance at Communitea.
Taking place Tuesday (May 8), the show follows on the heels of Katz’s newest album, Still Mind Still, released last week.
“Still Mind Still” is a song that I wrote for a friend of mine who was going through a pretty bad period of anxiety and depression and was having trouble sleeping,” he said in an interview last week. “I wanted to write something that she could listen to at the end of the day and just put the day away, but as I wrote the song I realized I was writing it for myself, and my own ability to stop and take a breath.
“That was a theme for a lot of the stuff I was writing about, trying to find these moments of stillness amidst chaos,” he explained. “With life being so busy and so many things pulling at me, it just felt like that song is what this whole record is about.
“It feels like a little pause and I’m really excited about it.”
The album is Katz’s second full-length solo album. He also wrote two albums with his previous band, Peter Katz and the Curious.
“That band had some of the same songs, but a bit more rocky, jazzy kind of thing,” he said. “They’re still really good friends of mine, it just evolved into something else and that format didn’t make sense anymore.”
From Toronto, Katz headed into the countryside to record Still Mind Still.
“We recorded it in this log cabin in the countryside, and a lot of the record is me standing, playing and singing, and getting actual takes of songs,” he said. “I’m pretty excited about it, it’s the first time I did it that way and allowed it to be so raw and vulnerable and that feels like the direction I’m meant to be heading in.
“To try not get in the way and distract too much, to deliver the songs and make something that sounds like an actual human being playing an actual song, versus something that’s put together to be greater than the sum of the parts.”
Getting to record an album in such an environment, without the high expense of typical studios, also made it a much less stressful experience, he said.
“It was also fun to not be in an expensive record studio watching the clock go by at a hundred dollars an hour,” said Katz. “I don’t find that creative or inspiring – I find that stressful – so it was nice not to have that part of the equation and take our time and work our own hours and experiment.”
With a tour which began last week in Ontario, Katz is currently heading west across the country and is looking forward to his arrival in Canmore.
“Communitea – it’s one of my favourite places,” he said. “There’s some places that you walk into and just like them – there’s a good vibe, a nice person behind the counter – it’s just one of those special places and people seem pretty relaxed and happy to be there.”
Katz also spoke highly of Marnie Dansereau, the café’s owner, and the community in general.
“Marnie is just great, and good food, good sound, and as someone who’s a solo performer who plays mostly acoustic music, it’s designed for places like that,” he said. “That’s where it really connects and makes sense.
“It seems like people who are in Canmore are there by choice – it’s a beautiful place to be – and people there just seem generally pretty happy, and that’s nice, it rubs off.”
Katz typically plays over 150 shows a year – a necessity – but also a prize, he said.
“It’s a combination of survival – that’s how I make my living – but also I’m in it for the shows,” he said. “I get to stand on a stage and play my songs for a room full of people and that to me is the cherry, that’s the prize.
“All the other hard work that goes into writing the music and making albums and driving the country and sleeping on floors, all of that stuff is really hard work, and when you get to play the show, that’s the gift to me, the part that I love.”
