Best of What's Next: Peter Wolf Crier

Photos by Darin Back

Hometown: Minneapolis, Minn.
Album: Inter-Be
Band Members: Peter Pisano (vocals, guitar), Brian Moen (percussion)
For Fans Of: Grant Lee Phillips, Great Lake Swimmers, The Weakerthans

Last year, Peter Pisano was in a dry spell. His band Wars of 1812 had split up; he was spending his days playing it straight and narrow as a science teacher at a private middle school, and he hadn’t written a song in a long, long while. “There were several months where I just wasn’t in a good place with what I was doing creatively,” he glumly remembers. But then, as quickly as it had left him, music returned with force. In a single sitting, lyrics poured out of him and he scratched out a batch of songs he wasn’t quite sure what to do with.

He took them to a friend, Brian Moen, a drummer and recording engineer, who over the months that followed helped him lay down the tracks. But before Pisano closed the door on his would-be album, he asked Moen to add some percussive elements just to expand the arrangements. Moen dismissively says he “got kind of carried away,” but his saturating percussion, paired with Pisano’s gutturally honest words, brought a whole new tenor to the tracks and quite suddenly changed the scope of the venture. Moen calls it “a two-man project by accident,” but you can call it Peter Wolf Crier.

With their debut LP, Inter-Be (out May 25), Pisano and Moen present a collection of songs that forcibly combine acoustic intimacy with distortion-addled detachment; it's a paradox of sound that nods to country blues in arrangement, but sidesteps stereotypical sentiments for deeply personal expressions. “I think that there’s an intimacy and a beauty that comes with vulnerability, and I think that that at its very essence is what made this record what it was for me,” Pisano says, “It was just like a stripping away. There was an ending to whatever it was I had been carrying with me, whatever I had picked up for a number of years. I was able to kind of just take a moment to sit with all those feelings and just very earnestly let them bubble and boil however they were going to.”

Though his dry spell is behind him, Pisano is still teaching school. “I don’t think they have really an idea of what I’m doing or at what level I’m doing it,” he says of his students, though he admits, “Every once in a while I’ll get an email that’ll be asking me for, like, a tab or something like that for a song, and I’ll be like, 'Go do your homework.'”

Listen to "Crutch & Cane" from Inter-Be on the Paste & Starbucks Music Channel.