Peter Long - biography

Midday Sun track listing:

1. Stay Until Sunday
2. Misdirected
3. Sunrise and Sleep
4. Fall Into Me
5. Melody's Fate
6. Fall Away
7. Nothing's Changed
8. Midday Sun
9. Coming Home
10. Gently

Produced by Peter Long & Steve Fieldhouse

Bed tracks recorded and engineered by Steve McMillan at Megaphon Studios, Sydney.

Mixed by Steve Fieldhouse and Peter Long at Earsight, Alstonville.

Mastered by Don Bartley at Benchmark Mastering, Sydney.

This is where you can listen to audio samples from the Midday Sun album - click on the titles of any of the songs in the left hand column to hear MP3 previews of each song. Each preview is approximately 1 MB.

Midday Sun - an overview
Extract from Stix Magazine article, Issue 019, May 2007

Peter Long plays the sort of music that will catch you unawares. One minute you're wondering what you're going to have for lunch, the next your mind has been hijacked away to childhood imaginings of cities in the clouds. That's not guaranteed for all listeners, but you get the idea: it's transcendant stuff. Peter has honed his skills as a songsmith in numerous bands over the years but Midday Sun is his first solo outing. The response so far has been excellent, with one of his songs winning the Best Alternative Song at this years Blue Mountains Music Awards.

Why so long to make the debut long player?
This album has had a very long gestation period. A lot of the songs came about after an overseas trip, which brought up a lot for me to do with identity and a sense of place. I came back to Australia basically broke, so there was a lot of soul searching and 'why the hell am I still doing this music trip, who am I fooling?', that sort of thing (laughs). You know, I'd been playing in bands for nearly 15 years by then, and all the ideas of success I'd had in my twenties were being replaced by a sense that it was time to get my shit together. It was a good kick up the arse, and good creatively too. I moved to the mountains in 2003, wrote some more material in the meantime and booked some studio time at Megaphon in Sydney to put down bed tracks for an album. This was in conjunction with Pat Hayes (ex-Falling Joys), who approached me about that time to put together a band and an album, but it never materialised, so I was left to my own devices. I finally got Pat's blessing last year to just do this myself and finished off everything over a few months. It's turned out to be a bit of an epic, but it's been worth it.

You have quite a history of releases and band history. Is it easier doing it by yourself?
Easier... definitely! There's no-one to explain to how such and such part goes, though the one thing you miss is the interaction, which is really the whole joy of music for me. Doing this project solo has been more out of necessity than anything else, and it's just been fortunate that I happen to play a bunch of different instruments, so I can fill out the arrangements pretty easily.

A lot of the influences you reference are from the 60's. Do you think that that period of music will always have a strong influence on musicians?
It can't help but influence music, so long as there's people out there who still want to write melodic, interesting, inspired music. It was such a creative period, it reached so many people, and more than anything it encapsulated the idea that popular music didn't necessarily have to be throwaway, it could be art in it's own right. A lot of people were pushing boundaries both in the creation of music and music production, especially in that whole psychedelic period. Compared to what we can do now, a lot of it can sound a bit crude, but it's pretty amazing the stuff the Beatles, Pink Floyd etc. were coming up with on four-track tape machines around that time.... some of it still flips me out.

A few of the songs on Midday Sun have a very mesmerising quality, should music always take the listener to a different place?
I guess... yeah, hopefully it should. Music can have a great deal of power, it can transcend the ordinary and take you somewhere else... really, any art form should be able to do that. That's not necessarily to say that it's going to take you to a good place... it could take you off to Barry Manilow land, which for me is not a great place to be! I think I just enjoy exploring what can be done in the realms of audio, and in the case of my songs it's just being open to possibilities, hearing where something could go and trying to create that in an auditory sense.