hey peter,

this is beautiful – much respect to your Pop.

john

like father like son

Peter, I’m not sure if you’re still here, I know you always go further, but I was wondering what does yours lovely dad thinks about your cover and all the idea about giving a new life to this wonderful forgotten song?

the whole album – a masterpiece!

Hi Peter,
I have never heard of you or your music up until tonight. I play the piano, along with a few other instruments, and I am always trying to find ways to be innovative or surprise myself in some way. Anyway, this album of yours is really inspiring, and I really enjoy what I’m hearing so far. It is wonderful to read through these notes and listen to the songs – I almost don’t know which is accompanying the other (I mean between the song and the text).
Thanks for sharing your creations,
Stephen

This is such a nice thing to do, I love the story behind it and the fact that it’s an old, almost forgotten piece of music, gives it a kind of haunting feeling. Great track. Your story reminded me of when I was young and my Dad used to play his nylon string guitar in the evenings. He did used to sing as well, but funnily enough I remember once he tried to record himself on a dictaphone, and in the background you could hear my voice shout “Stop the singin’!”. Haha, I was too into the pure guitar sound and didn’t wanna hear his voice with it! Harsh! Poor Dad… Thanks Peter your music (and your dad’s!) is beautiful.

i really like the story and the song. visiting everyday(at work!) and listening to your amazing songs here in korea.

you always feel alive. somehow. here , honest and sincere. not afraid to pour out. and you really touch souls. thanks for providing this platform to connect to others&to you(r songs). a cyber platform can hardly feel any more cosier and sincerer than this.

No comment … I want to just listen. Excellent!

Debbie Ortiz, escucha la musica… la oscuridad no va a tocarte.

My fav track of the year so far and a strong contender for CD of the year luv it

So many tanks to share with us this piece of your intimacy (and I didn´t pay atention to the words – I always hear the music and the sound of the words, the ). Beautiful.

I’ve only dreamed about finding rare recordings like your father’s song. To hear the work of a private musician in 1979, a recording I would have never been able to hear if it weren’t for your promoting it, is something special indeed and seems like it becomes more so over time.

Beautiful layers as usual Peter. The bass progression comes in so nicely. So colourful.

Thank you.

Gorgeous. Really, gorgeous.

i listened to the song first, then read the lyrics. what i immediately thought (i hadn’t read the liner notes yet) was – and i am surprised how this arbitrary behaviour of me ends up in this feeling (is it a truth?) when i hear “blue” while reading the lyrics: i thought it was your dad in this song singing for your mother and it reminded me therefore of a letter that gustav regler (a totally unknown poet, he lied with hemingway in the trenches during spanish civil war) once wrote to peggy, his wife who was living in new york city while he was having a trip through europe.
i work for a literature archive and so i was transcribing it from the manuscripts. here it is:
“Thou – far away one, destructive one who wants to destroy my love, but I will not let you, not with the ax of circumstances or with the scissors of separations nor with the presence of subsecretaires or other ones nor with the doubts of your womanhood, all the pretexts that I wipe away and down the crater of the Paricutin, and I remember one evening when I telephoned you and rushed down between all anxiety not to hurt someone who died and met you at the corner of a little park and kissed you one long minute, then left you again: one minute was worth the charmed and overflooding of admiration and we found that we should fight the banality of any tiredness and should go ahead and love the persons who want to be loved and I stand now in the middle of the night debout at the designing table of Felix and it is the birthday of Dieter, the 23rd of August and midnight, and it is you I am talking to and I have written the most exciting pages of my life and all my beloved ones are in LOLA and she is you if you want it or not and I will continue to love you in spite of you and in spite of your efforts to kill that divine love which talks and smells out of me like an orchid of the court of Granada and if you don’t accept this love because you are poisoned by doubts, I will give you another calyx and it is full of poison too and the poison is my love that has not changed and we should keep it for us, and if you are walking up and down the streets of Manhattan thinking more of your children than of the only man who ever really and insanely loved you and knows how to love, then you should better remember the hills of Ajusco and the parquet de Hidalgo (and thos beefsteaks and your riding pants) and should remember the madona in that studio into whose face you looked when you were drunk of the storm over you that was me, and you should remember the hour of the blue Danube in Cuernavaca street and my memory has you in my veins – about whom are you thinking at this moment? Am I more faithful? I am going to ask the moon that stands above the Popocatepetl. And it will refresh even more my memory and I will remind you of the corner-bed under the pepper-tree where I broke down and wanted to give up to the darkness when you bent over my abyss and hauled me back; and your voice when through the long distance line I told you that Dieter had gone. And the beach of Macomba and the brim of the Papantla pyramid, parrots in the vanilla bushes, red serpents running over your way, the pyramid greeting you with a hundred eyes. And a drunken night in Pachuca-street that was the sister of the night on the roof of Cortes. Surf, surf on the eternal ocean; and you on the moon; do you retire your cosmic attraction? And the nights of Independencia and the nights of Triangulo, a thousand waves licking at the beaches of our souls. And the blue sky into which you stared when your king rammed you into the herbs of the Pedregal near the highway; and the nights of the tent of Atongo with the stars dropping their golden crystals in your delighted eyes while the master planted your body into the new soil that was ours. No town we ever touched is not a place of delightful memory: the ice-bear of Taxco Viejo, your full moons in roseate roundness rising from the white softness of the polar beast. Monte Alban at sunset, the high priest sinking with his goddess into the green ground; the sacred ground of all pagan gods and rushing through her like a lightening; at sunset with the infinite over us a roof, feeling the earth tremble and your womb opening like a source. Uruapan, the secret night when our bodies had still the heat of the most interior fire on their skins, that of Paricutin, and we did not know whether from one moment to the other we would not be transformed into lava and stay so. And the kissbirds of Ajijic stopped their provoking noise to listen to the singing of your voice when fresh from the lake’s waves you became wave yourself under the roof at which mangos knocked and where swallows nested. And the straw bed of the caves near Estrella where we returned to the times of goddess Xipe and were burning idolos and sacrificing our fire like the only priests of the earth. And the white swan of Cuautla, forcing me into the knees by sudden overwhelming desires. And the windy night in the Borda after the walk of miles and miles through barancas and barancas; two meteorites falling together; I stood over the abyss on the balcony and tried to hold sky and earth together, because myself was falling apart of happiness. And then the other continent, the flight out of the Mexican cage into the vast world that had no frontiers anymore: Europe. The nest down the ship that ploughed the blue desert: Frankonia. And we ourselves ploughing deeper than ever in the furrows of our souls and bodies for the seed of happiness. Being sure of it in the dusky room of rue Jacob, sometime still trembling of the storm of kisses when standing before the masters of the Louvre, of Watteau the painter of Pompadours shoulders and cushions. And the night of silent triumph in Munich in the hotel of the late dictator after the performance of Don Giovanni; Mozart allover your breast. Storm of visions and perfumes, scent of communion, you cannot wipe it away, and if you have to pass through another love, just pass through it; but come back to the ground where your real great soul was born; there was no one who ever loved you with more passion, craziness, tenderness, confusion, skin to skin, mouth to source, master near to heart, drinking the gleam from your lids, giving the waves of his boiling blood, always.

Aug 23/50 Gustav“

it is quite astonishing, but there is a huge difference despite all the similarity in honesty: your dad more decent, regler more flaming. and with “they” – i thought – he meant you and heather. saying that she (your mother) should listen to your music (heather’s and yours). and then, when I hear you singing in my ear “what message did they bring to you/ to let you see the other side of blue/ all you did was let them sing to you / and it made you true, instead of blue” my imagination dissolves in consequence of the beauty of the picture: it let’s me see – even feej the other side of the blue.
many thanks. jan

Today in Paris, your album was with me.
You’re right.
But if it’s starts here, where are we going ?
Merci beaucoup pour ces douces chansons, qui même si ‘all that you can do that can be done’ seems so fresh and hopefull !
A bientôt.
Nous arriverons peut-être au même endroit un jour.
Frédéric

Hi Peter, enjoying the new record – very inventive + inspiring! Was just wondering on this track what made you decide to add the effects to your voice, was this something you had planned/ always thought would work well on the song since hearing it when your Mom put it on again, or was it something you thought of instinctively whilst experimenting + recording in the studio? Hope to see you play live at Manchester Academy again or up in the North of England!
Joel

That was as good a song as any of those other cool & groovy 70′s fingerpicker tunes … “Laughing Water” … Perfect !

I heard this track, as I passed by a record shop, in town. I had a big smile on my face ,when I picked up my Daughter from her school.I always smile when I see her but she asked why I was smiling ‘so big’ today. I told her about the music I’d heard and we listened to this track while she had her tea. She put down her fork and announced, ‘it sounds like laughing water!’ Thank you , Peter, for the laughing water. I have’nt stopped smiling yet.

Your Dad wrote a mighty fine song good on him