“I wanted to make a true pop record—something candy-coated that you could shake your ass to—but that had some lyrical depth,” muses Peter Stuart of the musical formula he pursues on “Tomorrow Always Comes,” the new album by his band, Dog’s Eye View. “It’s like wrapping medicine in bacon for your dog.”
It’s a marked departure from the comparatively straightforward sound Stuart plied on Dog’s Eye View’s hit debut “Happy Nowhere” (and smash single “Everything Falls Apart”) and follow-up “Daisy,” as well as his solo album (and Vanguard Records debut), “Propeller.”
“Singer-songwriter acoustic music really bores me, in general,” says Stuart. “A guy with a guitar singing his sensitive songs. Yawn. Part of the idea behind this project was to make a record I couldn’t imagine making—something that wasn’t so safe.”
For this self-described “troubadork,” trashing the heartland pop-rock paradigm of his past in favor of the sonically eclectic, groove-driven tracks of “Tomorrow” was but one facet of a larger transition.
In fact, it took several kinds of heartbreak to get Stuart to where he is now, including a painful struggle to duplicate his early chart success, alcohol-fueled oblivion and the abrupt end of a relationship.
Having scored a giant hit out of the box on Dog’s Eye View’s 1995 Columbia album and embarking on several tours of the U.S., Europe and Japan—sharing bills with Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Cracker, Ron Sexsmith, Del Amitri and many others—Stuart grew accustomed to the spotlight. “I thought, ‘Well, of course! Now everyone’s waiting for me to tell them what I think,’” he now admits. “’Now the music business owes me a living.’” But underwhelming sales of his band’s second record put that illusion to rest.
By the second tour, “I was that guy doing shots onstage and complaining about the size of the crowd,” Stuart admits with some mortification. “And on the ‘Propeller’ tour I was playing in front of five thousand people in Germany and realized I was completely miserable. I mean, what the fuck was I doing? There are scores of young kids with guitars who’d kill to be in my place. I knew I had to find a way to enjoy it again, or I was done.”
After some time off, Stuart felt prepared to start writing songs again, and fully intended to veer from the romantic material he’d crafted in the past. He had, after all, written songs for Bon Jovi, Jason Mraz and the Go-Go’s in the previous few years, so he was no stranger to creating material for a variety of voices.
“My first intention was to write a record that had nothing to do with relationships,” he recalls. “Then my girlfriend of two-and-a-half years broke up with me on the phone from 5000 miles away. I lived in the apartment we shared, with all of her stuff around me, for four months. I didn’t want to move anything, in case she came back.”
Though he was shattered by the experience, Stuart began—for the first time—to view his album as a coherent whole. “It was the first time I really sat down to write a record,” he points out. “My job every day was to write. I wasn’t on tour at the time, and so it was the first record where I was really disciplined as a writer. I’d work every day and make sure I had songs with different themes.”
Not surprisingly, these themes tended to tie into a general preoccupation with loss. “The central idea of the record is the degree to which we focus on what we’ve lost rather than what we have,” Stuart volunteers. “It’s funny how you write an album’s worth of songs about the girl who didn’t love you, but none about the one who does.”
The peripatetic Stuart, who was raised in New York and has lived in Chicago, Iceland, Scotland, Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas and, latterly, the Northeast L.A. neighborhood of Eagle Rock, also found his constant relocation and touring becoming an important motif in his work.
As these ideas came together, a sort of mascot emerged in Amelia Earhart, the famed aviatrix whose disappearance during an attempted flight around the world has spawned myriad theories about her fate. Stuart’s preoccupation with Amelia’s mysterious story crystallized much of what he was writing. “I kept coming up with theory after theory about why she’d left and where she’d gone and where she was going,” he remembers. “I didn’t have an answer, but as long as I didn’t have an answer I continued to be fascinated by her.”
But along with these melancholy obsessions came a new resolve, as Stuart gave up drinking and sought ways to bring a new perspective to his work.
“The great thing about where I am in my career right now is that I have nothing to lose,” Stuart confides. “I’ve stopped worrying about what people might think if I go in a new direction. I’m just putting it out there, and that’s what’s helped me get back to the joy I first felt making music.”
When it came time to record his new album for Vanguard, Stuart once again discovered what he could gain by letting go.
“I took a band on the road and worked all the songs out; the intention was to make a rock record with the live band, just knock it off in a couple of weeks,” he notes. “But we ended up firing the entire band three days in.”
The production team of Good Cop/Bad Cop, a duo consisting of Curt Schneider (Five for Fighting’s bassist) and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Williams (who’d played with Schneider in FFF and helmed records by Old 97’s, Victoria Williams, Peter Case, The Negro Problem and many others), had signed on to produce. “Looking around the room,” recalls Stuart, “we had better players than the band. And it was very clear that making a rock record wasn’t that interesting to any of us. So we sent everyone home and just started doing the record.”
Typically, Stuart adds, after laying down a vocal and rudimentary guitar part over one of Schneider’s programmed drum parts, “I’d leave for a day or two. I’d come back to some song that sounded completely unlike anything I’d ever done before.
“I’d always had a hand in producing my records, but my default is sort of earnest Americana rock,” admits Stuart. “It’s what I know and what I grew up listening to, but it’s not what I’m excited about now. And I knew that I could always do that record in a week. But it was really interesting to experiment.”
Williams and Schneider took it upon themselves to throw as many musical curveballs as possible at Stuart, dressing up his songs with R&B grooves, falsetto backup vocals and percolating synthesizers. Songs like “Gone Like Yesterday,” “No Regrets,” “Strange (Just the Way You Are)” and “K.I.S.S.” were radically transformed.
“I heard what they were going for and thought, ‘Can I get away with this?’ And then I realized, ‘Why not?’” laughs Stuart. “It was a solution to me for exactly what I was missing on the radio, something that sounds fun but has some lyrical depth. Otherwise I was gonna make the same record again.”
Setting aside his customary tendency to make what he calls “safe” records, Stuart relates, “I said, ‘OK, that’s exciting. That’s the record I wanna make.’ It was a necessary challenge on this record to say, here’s the song on acoustic and vocal. Now fuck all that. Take the guitar away, use the vocal and build an entire track behind it. And the less I was involved in that, the more exciting it was, because then I’d come in and hear this record that sounded really cool and get to sing the lyrics behind it.”
He even put down his guitar and allowed himself to embrace his role as frontman-vocalist, which he says has enhanced the pleasure of playing live. “Performing this record’s a lot of fun when I get to do it with a band, because I get to just be a singer guy, and wear and suit and dance around and interact with the audience,” he acknowledges. “It’s amazing how different that feels, to just communicate the melody and lyric.”
Recorded at Pepper Tree Studios in Studio City, California, “Tomorrow Always Comes” features guest appearances by Jason Mraz, Paul Doucette of Matchbox 20, Matt Beck, Kelly Moneymaker and others.
Greeting the world with a new, very different album and a serious attitude adjustment, Stuart is ready to tour again—and to let the chips fall where they may. “I have no way of knowing what people see when they see me,” he says. “I just know it’s a really difficult road, and I wake up every day and want to do it. I’m willing to sit in vans for 20 hours and sleep in Motel Sixes; all that stuff’s just ancillary noise, because the hour you get onstage is totally worth it. It pays the emotional bills.”
