Peter Salett

photo by Glenn Wilson

It’s a still, summer night in Athens, Ga., and a subtropical storm has just blown in from the southwest, dropping a deluge of tepid rain before leaving in its wake two New Yorkers, far from home—Peter Salett and his touring companion Don Piper.

The show is at the intimate, warmly colorful Flicker Bar and Theatre, and, tonight, only about a dozen people have braved the weather. The duo eases into its trademark, laid-back, moody, almost-incidental singer/songwriter style. Salett’s modern-day Neil Sedaka, tender-yet-crisp vocals and melodic guitar are backed symbiotically by Piper’s lap steel, as they move toward a sound eerily reflecting wide-open, rural landscapes. Salett’s claim to fame, thus far, is the soundtrack to the film Keeping The Faith, starring Edward Norton (with whom Salett went to middle school). I momentarily ponder this, deciding it’s not at all strange that a soundtrack was the vehicle exposing Salett’s talent, because so much of his music has an evocative breeziness crying to have its mental imagery brought to fruition with equally beautiful visual stimuli. As Norton himself said, Salett has a great “old-school lyrical style.” This is particularly the case with torch songs like “Am I Still In Love With You” from Salett’s second album, Heart Of Mine. The songwriter’s talents stretch to somber keyboard melodies as he tackles the old Flicker Bar piano, with the Morrisey-sounding “With Anybody Else” from Salett’s brand new album, After a While, the polished follow up to Heart Of Mine.

Months later, Salett and Piper are back on the road touring the album. This time they’re playing for a bigger audience at Tasty World, a much larger club, back in the same Southern college town where cell-phone-gossiping students driving SUVs constantly threaten the lives of pedestrians. It’s raining again, but it’s much colder this time. Tasty World is known for hosting local and national acts, and pumping its sound recklessly out onto Broad Street, the town’s main drag. True to form the sound engineer has Piper’s pedal steel cranked to country-rock level, and for a while Salett tries to boost the vibe of his performance to match the venue. His first two songs long to be back at the tiny Flicker Theatre, but as he moves on to “With Anybody Else,” (which nowadays sports a video clip that’s been picked up by MTVU, a closed-circuit music channel for Universities and Colleges) the song’s joyous mood lifts everyone’s spirits in unison, and—in the spirit of the moment—a fan brings the smiling Salett a bourbon and coke.

Salett transforms one of his somber, probing laments, and with new verve he works the vocals in a much stronger, but controlled—and at times deliberately off-mic—fashion, bringing with it a whole new sense of heartfelt angst. This reflects the desire to strip his voice back to its raw essence, allowing feeling and emotion to bleed through rather than mask them with a rich, over-performed sound.

I notice the months of touring haven’t detracted from the fuzzy/curly haired 35 year old’s youthful appearance. Even though he mentioned before the show that touring has been a mix of intense highs and lows, the latter typified by having to play on bills where your sound is completely incompatible with the other bands. Given Salett’s soul-searching style, and the way it combines with Piper’s steel-strung melodies to soak straight into your subconscious, it’s not too difficult to imagine.

If anything, Salett seems more polished after this stint on the road, while Piper looks a bit subdued and weary. Nonetheless, his smooth slide playing can still wring a tear from the most hardened of souls. By the time “Heart Of Mine” comes around, the growing crowd is swinging between captivated silence and rowdy applause. Finally, “Colorful Dream” from After a While closes the set, and the philosophical ballad feels like a sweetly melancholic dream.

After Salett puts in some meet-and-greet-time with the crowd, I escort him through the rain where we foolishly stand in front of a closed nightclub, only to be interrupted twice by groups of students wanting to know if they can get in. Next we move to a secluded doorway in an old wooden shop front, only to be accosted again, this time by one of Athens’ many homeless, asking for small change. I toss him a few pieces of the shrapnel in my pocket, to which he responds by asking for the rest.

After the interruptions, Salett and I brace ourselves against the chill and settle into easy conversation. We talk about the lessons learned from touring through the same towns again and again. Peter says it’s fine, so long as the audience grows each time, which in this case it has. Thankfully, he says, he’s not yet at the stage where he’s worrying about the audience dwindling, and what that would mean.

The exposure gained from being on the Keeping The Faith soundtrack kick-started Salett’s career, but I wonder whether the minor commercial success is a two-edged sword, and whether he’s developed a love-hate relationship with the singer/songwriter genre. “A little bit, he replies, “there’s nothing that I hate about it. It’s just that, what’s interesting is—for example, tonight—I come to Athens and I’m not yet on the college radio here, and yet I have people driving two hours to come see me, and they’re very excited about that one song that came out four years ago, in a movie for which I received no additional push or publicity. There was no label push associated with that song, it was simply because the song was in the movie. So, in a way, it’s great that people are still into it, and they still really like it, and that it touched them. But the disappointment comes when there are a lot more people out there that know that song and responded to it, but that I’ve never been able to connect the dots to. Every time I play that song in a crowd, people come up to me and say “Oh my god it was you that wrote that song. I remember that song.” And [yet] still today I’m on my own label. I didn’t even have financing for my label. Now I’m on Ryko distribution, before that was Red Eye distribution, so it’s super indie. I have just never been able to connect those dots in a way that, even if hundreds-of-thousands of people downloaded the song, without that publicity push to connect it in people’s minds, it has dissipated to the point where I need something else like that. Because, quite honestly, if NPR isn’t going to pick up my record then the only way to get out there is through soundtracks.”

Peter thinks the reason filmmakers like his music is because, “It sits back a little bit, it’s mellow. It has vibe and atmosphere and depth. I think that’s why it works well with the moving image, because that depth adds something to a movie—an emotional layer—but, for whatever reason, radio stations want that dumb-ass drumbeat that’s on every major-label singer/songwriter record, and that’s really annoying and disappointing.”