PETER HIMMELMAN – PRESS ON (Single)
TRACK LIST
- Press on
ABOUT THIS RELEASE
Release Date: 2020
“PRESS ON,” THE FOLLOW-UP AND TITLE TRACK FROM PETER HIMMELMAN’S FORTHCOMING ALBUM, IS A JUBILANT, BOISTERIOUS, AND BLUSEY ODE TO PERSEVERANCE AND SPIRIT
Press On, Peter Himmelman’s forthcoming 13-track album, was recorded live in Los Feliz, Calif. in a total of three days. “I’d written a slew of about 40 new songs and eventually left them behind for the ones that appear on Press On,” Himmelman said. “I needed to make a record that was different enough to justify people listening to another Peter Himmelman record.”
The session involved the help of bassist/co-producer Matt Thompson, drummer Jimi Englund, keyboardist Chris Joyner, and longtime Himmelman collaborator/guitarist Greg Herzenach. Co-producer and engineer Sheldon Gomberg made sure the live takes were left as unadulterated as possible, with any overdubs kept to the barest minimum. The raucous, swinging gospel-blues of the album’s second single, “Press On,” has a mystic, confessional quality that begins with a stark vision.
“In the middle of the river there’s a brown and white pony stuck out on a rock with the current rushing by. The sun beats down and the wind whips up, as a murder of crows bursts into the sky.”
Himmelman wrote “Press On” on his acoustic guitar in a burst of creative energy in Santa Monica, California in the early spring of 2019. “Each time I sing the song,” Himmelman says, “I find something I hadn’t noticed before.” You can hear that sense of discovery as he tears into lines like …
The beauty and the folly, the insipid the enlightened, the sacred and insanely perverse
The flames start to crackle, sparks fly like devils, sometimes I wish I were living in reverse.
To have my youth ahead of me, clocks slowing down, summers that stretch on for fifteen years.
To have the sense of wonder I had at my bar mitzvah, to feel my body filling with hope so clear.
ABOUT PETER HIMMELMAN
