the ugly hug

Written by Rohan Press (rohanpress@gmail.com)

I’ve been trying to work my way through those lines — “clear eyes, full hearts / can’t lose but won’t win.” That’s from “Friday Night Lights” by Peter Lewis (recording under the name Peter Horses), who put out his debut record, xbox verizon, on Bandcamp last May. Peter told me that “Friday Night Lights” is “looser” than some of the other narrative-based songs on the record, but to me, it sustains a quiet emotional tone across its disparate imagery — a mourning still smoldering, a bitterness that cuts both ways. It was a tone that immediately found purchase in my heart. “Just let me down: say you were wrong,” the song’s character insists to their presumably wayward lover. Desire, rightness, wrongness; they’re all so entangled. On the one hand, the song creates a space to inhabit that bitterness, to ask the person who hurt us to admit their guilt. But this is not just a fantasy of emotional restitution. It’s a way to feel the loss honestly, even to quietly confess our own culpability within it. I might not be able to lose, which is what I really want—to lose and thus to not be let down—but at least I can resolve not to win.

Across all the songs of xbox verizon, there is that kind of buried self-address: all these external, sometimes absurd situations the characters find themselves in (most memorably, a plan to kidnap Jerry Seinfeld on “jerry”) reflect, or invite a new way to understand, our everyday emotional bereavements. All of these songs were written between 2022 and 2023, and it took a few years of encouragement from friends (including Aaron Dowdy of Fust and Oliver Child-Lanning of Weirs) before Peter decided to self-release them on Bandcamp. You could call it “slacker rock,” if you’re into terms like that: most tracks are simply grounded in Peter’s guitar and voice with maybe some drum machine loops (with the exception of “the plan is the end,” recorded with James Gibian on drums, Aaron Dowdy on guitar and Ryan Hoss on bass). I can hear Sebadoh, Elliott Smith, MJ Lenderman; whatever the lineage, these are sturdy songs, they’d hold their own in any arrangement, and I knew the first time I heard them they’d make a lasting imprint, as they have.

Peter explained to me that he grew up in Fredericksburg, VA, whose quietly vibrant art scene made an impression on him. “There was this Fredericksburg all-ages music scene that was happening when I was in high school and in middle school,” he told me. “It was very, very pivotal I think. My dad was involved in that; he had a bookstore where they would do shows. And then Fredericksburg has some cool music coming out of there. Daniel Bachman is from there; Jack Rose, too.” 

After graduating from the Cinema Program at Virginia Commonwealth University, and spending a few years in Richmond, Peter migrated to New York City for grad school at The New School, in Media Studies. He moved back and forth between Virginia and New York a few times, before settling in the latter, where he’s been since 2022.

I’m so grateful to Peter for his complete openness—genuinely a rare thing—in agreeing to hang out and talk about his music. Below you’ll find an abridged version of our conversation, which seemed to lead us, gradually, to an understanding of the role of songwriting in the threefold emotional process of resignation, acceptance, and ownership. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

There’s a theme of resignation on xbox verizon that I find really affecting. Your first words on “Jerry” are “lost your nerve.” And on “Farcry 5,” at the pivotal moment when the character is about to approach an old flame, they “chicken out.” But I love that, because it feels like what you’re doing in these songs is actually giving that feeling of loss some dignity. So I want to ask you: how does songwriting for you play a role in processing emotions? Because at least for me, as a listener, what it seems like you’re doing is taking what could just be seen as a negative emotional situation, and you’re giving it a sort of dignity or finding a different way of relating to it.

Well, I think I’ve struggled with expressing negative feelings, whether it’s sadness or frustration or anger—these sort of emotions that are just difficult to express, because they put you in a position of opening yourself up to conflict or guilt. And for some reason, in a lot of the songs, I find that the characters that are singing the song are sort of shitty. It’s a kind of petulance: it’s these people whining and struggling with something that is maybe just minute. I’m just using the song to express an emotion or a thought that is maybe not the most coherent, or the most appealing, thoughts that you would bury or suppress. And for some reason, I find it easier and more interesting to have these characters who are saying basically the quiet part out loud, they’re kind of expressing themselves in a way where they’re just being totally honest, and the way that they’re being honest is maybe kind of annoying. But it can also be kind of a funny feeling or can capture this sort of anxiety and indecisiveness that I think that I feel in my day. So I’m kind of using my own feelings to yell through these characters, to get upset and to get angry and to be annoyed, which is something that I’ve struggled with, in my own life, to allow myself to feel.

All these characters are having a moment, whether it’s a small problem or a big one, like on “Jerry”—this incredibly silly problem that’s larger than life and very cartoonish. The problem to me is the interesting thing, because when you present the problem in the song, you get to explore it a little bit. Are they going to solve the problem? Is the problem solvable? And then the song can kind of help you figure it out.

i can’t save money but i can do math

and he’s got enough and i would settle for half

throw jerry seinfeld in an unmarked van

hold jerry seinfeld hostage if you can

I will also say, although sometimes these characters are sort of silly or pitiful or whatever, I also really feel like these characters have a lot of tenderness. 

I really appreciate that. I do think that the tenderness comes through in a way that I find surprising. I don’t think I sit down to try to write tender lyrics; it’s just something that I feel lucky enough to be able to tap into. If it’s a song more about a character, it’s about what makes this person tick, what makes them a human being. The songwriting is really kind of fluid that way, where I’ll come up with one lyric that I think is good. I remember with “Friday Night Lights,” the first thing I had was the “throw up my hands” bit at the beginning, and I didn’t really know what the song was about.

throw up my hands

and launch myself into the sun

my hair goes blonde

what’s that ‘bout how they have more fun?

Can you tell me a little about your personal history with songwriting, coming out of college and then moving to Brooklyn?

I played in friends’ bands a lot in college and after, but I hadn’t really done much of my own stuff. I had always tried to write music and it just hadn’t really worked the way I wanted it to work, and I was never very happy with the stuff I did. And then for some reason in 2021, I had gone through a weird breakup and I was living with friends and I was teaching at VCU—I had gone full circle and I was teaching in the program that I graduated from and having a weird time in general. And I finished, I think, the first song I’ve ever actually finished, that summer [“10-4”], and then came up with a couple more songs, and then moved back up here [Brooklyn], and then started coming up with songs in kind of a weird cyclone of being able to do it. I was just like, Oh, this is all of a sudden becoming so easy to do.

I go through ebbs and flows, though, where sometimes you’re kind of in—you’ve got something that you like, and you’re trying to work with it. And the rest of the time is kind of trying to find that thing. So there’s periods of time where I’m feeling like, man, I got nothing. I got nothing to say. I think that’s normal. This stuff came out of a period of time where I just was on a roll. And that was a couple of years ago at this point. All the songs came out in May, but almost every song I think I wrote between 2022 and 2023, and then I was like, oh, man, I’m tapped out. I was just sitting on them and thinking , ‘oh, they’re just demos, I’m going to try to re-record them with a band’ and so on. And it just wasn’t happening. And then, everyone’s like, we like them as is. So I’m like, oh, okay: I guess in order to make some room in my brain for working on new things, I just got to get these out of here.

It honestly blows my mind just because, you know, you just drop some music on Bandcamp on a random Thursday and people respond. And that’s so cool. I think that I still have difficulty accepting that.

You did bring a band in, though, for “The Plan is the End,” right? You had Aaron [Dowdy] from Fust on that song? 

Yes, another way that I’ve been extremely lucky is that in college, I met my friends John Wallace and Ryan Hoss, who are both incredible musicians in their own right, from the southern part of Virginia, where Aaron is from. They all went to high school in the same place. And the guy who drums on that song as well, James Gibian, my favorite drummer in the world, all grew up in this one part of Virginia. So over the last 10 years or so, I’ve become very close friends with a lot of these now-North Carolina guys through this sort of kismet meeting of my two friends in college. And I have been lucky enough to find myself in this very solid group of people who I love, but also are extremely talented musicians. I had been sending Aaron and these guys these songs for a couple years. 

And so for “The Plan is the End” , I went down to visit my family in Richmond, and basically, we just got together for a weekend and played some of the songs. And that one just so happened to get recorded on James’ iPhone. And the recording sounded okay enough that when I got back up to New York, I just overdubbed the guitar and the vocals. And that’s the version on the record. It’s basically just an iPhone recording, which is pretty goofy. 

But yeah, these guys are steadfast buddies of mine. And I feel very, very lucky to have them in my corner. I don’t think I would have released the music if it wasn’t for my friends, who were basically like, This is great. And we think other people would like it, too.

We played our first show in October at Feast, which is something that Oli [Oliver Child-Lanning] and Justin Morris and Ori Messer and this whole North Carolina crew put on and it’s a really big, beautiful little music festival and a friend of mine, Sarah Bachman, described it as a “who’s who of who’s that.” Aaron played lead guitar, my friend Sasha Popovici was on piano, James was on drums, Oli was on bass, and my friend Avery McGuirt, who lives up here, was playing fiddle. Those guys have been so awesome, just in terms of making me feel good about the music and also helping me do the music for other people and think about it in the context of being in a band, which is something that I really wanted to do with the music, but I didn’t really have the opportunity to do.

And just to have that link back to Virginia/North Carolina, too, to that community, and to feel that’s still nurturing you in a really big way. 

Yeah, I have so many friends who live in North Carolina now; half the people I know in my life all live in North Carolina. I spend a lot of time going down and visiting and doing music down there. So much cool stuff is coming out of NC. Fust is taking off, and Sluice as well, and Ollie’s group Weirs.

It’s awesome playing music with people. I did a lot of it in college, but in the last 10 years, it hasn’t happened so often, and I really crave that experience. I do so much of this stuff on my own, at home, but it’s so much more fun to do with other people. I want more of that. That’s kind of my focus going forward: finding ways to do that more. 

I wanted to talk about “10-4,” which is my favorite song on the record. I’m curious about the narrative in your head behind that song in particular and its complicated address, the way the narrator refers to his addressee, in different moments, as both “buddy” and “an asshole.”

Yeah, I think that it’s an interesting one, because half of it feels a little nonsensical. Like “Polly Pocket on the hood of my car.” That was the first thing I came up with. There’s this weird mix of these made-up iterations of something like that. And the bouncer bit as well is something that actually happened to me. But that song was the first song I did where it was like, this one’s done. And that kicked everything off. So it was a weird culmination of a bunch of different things. I had just gone through a few difficult years in a relationship that was at times really beautiful and at times really, really hard.

polly pocket on the roof of my car

i lost her doin’ donuts in the car park

and when she hit the pavement

i felt lighter

You said something earlier about this idea of resignation, which I think is a theme in a lot of this music that I hadn’t really picked up on. Just letting things go—letting them be what they are, which is something that in my day-to-day life I struggle with—just accepting these things. That’s just hard to do. And that song to me is a sort of resignation. It’s like, when things are good, I’ll help you pack the car. And when things are bad, I can pack the car and I can go.

so i can be up when you’re able

and i can load the car when your folks call

you got a 10-4, good buddy

for certain enough you’re an asshole

and i can load the car when it gets old

you got a 10-4, good buddy

I was feeling very, very frustrated, I think, in some aspects of my life, resentful and angry at people. And that whole song has this feeling of, fuck you, I’ll do whatever I need to do. Like, “I could be a tugboat captain,” I can do anything I want to. This kind of middle finger to people who tell you how you should be operating or something like that.

And maybe nobody’s even paying attention to you, but in that moment for you, you’ve got a bone to pick, you know? There’s just something about this weird mix of resigning yourself to the way that you are in this moment, while also being allowed to be pissed off. In that song, it’s like: I lost my girlfriend; I might’ve gotten beat up at a bar; I got Pfizer. It’s like all these different things that can have two responses, which are similar—on the one hand, that’s all fine, and also, I’m allowed to be upset about it.

To me, it just keeps coming back to your line “long live the bummer days.” That’s sort of the watchword for me for a lot of the record.

Yeah, I really feel very strongly, even though it’s hard, that you’re allowed to feel bad sometimes. And sometimes you have to feel bad. Just accepting that “today I don’t feel very good” or “today I feel upset or angry” is really important to me. Who knows how long the bummer days will go on. They go on forever. That’s okay. It can be like that forever and you would be fine. And that’s what it means to say we could be buddies or we could be—well, that this might not work out. Either way, it’s gonna be okay. 

Yeah, even if it isn’t okay, even if things continue to get fucked up, that itself is okay. 

Yeah, it is. It’s like a weird, cascading thing where it’s just like, if that’s what it is, then that’s okay. Like, what are you going to do? It’s so much harder to be pushing, to be trying to stop these things from happening. So much of life is out of your hands.

Sometimes we hurt each other even worse when we try to overly control our own feelings. 

Absolutely. I think that I’ve been on the receiving end of that. I feel like I’ve done that.

I wanted to end with one of my favorite lines from “tough talk,” where you ask, “what good’s a heart in heartless times?” Obviously, you could read that cynically: you could say, well, we live in a fucked-up world and it’s ending and, to use one of your other song titles, “the plan is the end.” And we’re just doomed to have our hearts crushed. And maybe there’s a little bit of truth to that. But I just love how you leave that unresolved. You don’t say, actually, our hearts will save us. And you also don’t say, the world will ultimately destroy us. You just ask the question—“what good’s a heart in heartless times?”

Every once in a while, I have this idea that—oh, this is what the record’s about. And for a little while, “the plan is the end” was kind of that touchstone. I was like, oh, this record’s about how fucked up the world is. I mean, there’s so much happening all the time that is heartbreaking and deeply frustrating and horrible. And I have a hard time not thinking about it, but also feeling like I’m not doing much about it. I feel very helpless. Maybe this goes back to the “bummer days” thing too, where I was feeling very predisposed to being, in a social situation, the guy who’s like—did you read the news today about the horrible thing that happened? Feeling like I was the bummer. There’s this social pressure to not be a bummer or something. I was thinking about that a lot when I was working on some of these songs. 

Is it all just trash and sadness again?

Is it all hearts fixing to mend?

And for the “heart in heartless times” bit, it’s funny, ‘cause it’s a line that when I finished it, I was like, I should change that line. ‘Cause in my mind, it felt a little too on the nose. A few people have said that that line really resonated with them in a way that I didn’t expect. 

I remember watching an interview with Michael Haneke, the German director, where he was talking about his process and how people are often telling him, you raise a lot of questions, but you’re not giving us many answers. And he said something that just always stuck with me. Something like, the role of the artist is not to answer the questions, it’s to ask the questions.

I think a lot of the time, with songwriting and with lyrics, I’m almost having a conversation with myself, where I raise a question and it prompts another question. Just cascading rows of feelings. And just moving on, because I know that I’m probably not gonna have the answers. And if I’ve ever written songs that I don’t really like, or didn’t make the cut, I think it’s sometimes where I feel a little too confident about what the answer might be. And when I listen back to it, I often feel—that’s not real, that one’s not grabbing me. I’m not loving that one because it’s too decided. Maybe where the boundary between the character and me coalesces is in these questions where I’m not even hoping for an answer.

It’s funny to hear you say you were questioning the aesthetic value of that line about a “heart in heartless times.” It poses an interesting question about deciding when to let the cracks show a more earnest core.

Yeah, I tend to overthink bits where, maybe it’s not too earnest, but where, if there’s a crack that’s showing, it’s in that where I feel I could have spent some time looking at that line and figured out something that was clever to fit in there instead. But in the case of that line, I didn’t really want to. At some point, you have to decide that you trust your instincts a little bit to not overwrite or overedit, and you have to leave those things in because they’re examples of a moment in time when you were obviously feeling that way.

And trying to respect that it’s valid to allow yourself to be a little cringey or be a little heart-on-your-sleeve or on the nose or something. And that’s allowed, because, you know, there’s the classic thing in filmmaking or literature, where it’s like, there’s no new story under the sun; every story has been told. The only thing that’s really new is that you’re telling it. So sometimes you have to trust that the thing that’s making this music or writing special is that I’m the one doing it, which is really hard for me as somebody who is constantly telling myself you’re not special, you’re not any better or different or more unique. It’s just a hard, hard line to walk for some reason for me. And so it’s been nice to see people respond in a way where I can realize, oh, I guess that’s true. So I think that stuff pops up and you just have to let it go. 

That’s the flipside to that theme of resignation or acceptance: taking ownership. Saying, okay, these are my words. It’s who I am and it’s going to be imperfect but that’s who I am.

I think that kind of vulnerability, where you put something out there and people respond—that can be hard. Like at the show in November, we played “tough talk” at the end. And this person came up to me afterwards and was like, “I cried that whole song.” It still blows my mind. That aspect of people responding in their own way. It’s hard to put into words how cool that is. It just makes me think about it differently, where I’m like, oh, this has power. Art has power. It can do things. And I didn’t really make this music thinking it would do anything for anybody. 

You can find Peter’s music on Bandcamp now.