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This is where you can purhase downloads of Midday Sun (see right) and read an article about the making of the album

Midday Sun - an overview
Extract from Stix Magazine article, May 2007 - by Robyn Jarman

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 had a very long gestation period. A lot of the songs came about after travelling overseas, 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). I'd been playing in bands for nearly 15 years by then, and ideas of success I'd had in my twenties were being replaced by a sense that perhaps it was time to get my shit together. I moved to the mountains in 2003, wrote some more material and booked studio time at Megaphon in Sydney to put down bed tracks for an album. This was at first in conjunction with Pat Hayes (ex-Falling Joys), who approached me about that time to put together another 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... absolutely! There's no-one to explain to how certain parts go, though what I do miss is the interaction, which is really the whole joy of creating music for me, the interplay between musicians. Doing this project solo has been more out of necessity than anything else, and it's 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? I think it can't help but influence musicians, so long as there's people out there who still want to write melodic, interesting, inspired music. It was such a creative period, it touched 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 musicians were pushing boundaries both in the creation of music and production, especially in that whole psychedelic period around '66-'67. Compared to what we can do now, some of the production is a little crude, but it's amazing the stuff the Beatles, Pink Floyd etc. were coming up with on four-track tape machines... 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. I 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.

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 To hear some tracks from Midday Sun, head on over to the MySpace page - myspace.com/peterglong

Midday Sun (PGL 001)

Track listing

Stay Until Sunday
Misdirected
Sunrise and Sleep
Fall Into Me
Melody's Fate
Fall Away
Nothing's Changed
Midday Sun
Coming Home
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.