Dog's Eye View - interview with music group leader Peter Stuart - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1997 by Tracey Pepper

His song "Everything Falls Apart" was everywhere last year, but you may not know the singer's name. We'd like you to meet Peter Stuart

It's official: Sensitive Guy Pop is back, and it's a whole lot sexier than James Taylor. Singers like Jakob Dylan, Maxwell, and Babyface demonstrate that not only can showing a softer side boost album sales, it has become a contemporary ingredient of manliness. In fact it could just send you to the top of the charts.

Dog's Eye View leader Peter Stuart is the product of a Long Island suburb - a nice Jewish boy with a Northwestern University education who's probably too smart for his own good. Fiercely ambitious and career-minded, Stuart writes wryly funny and unflinchingly honest pop songs that detail his neurotic obsession with relationships and his own resistance to love. Onstage his warm baritone and energetic charisma have been winning over fans since his early days performing as a solo acoustic artist, like his folksinger friends Jewel and the late Jeff Buckley. Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz liked Stuart's act so much that the Crows took him on tour for six months in 1994 as a support act and roadie, which led to Stuart's signing with Columbia Records as Dog's Eye View. Happy Nowhere, DEV's 1995 debut album, spawned the massive hit "Everything Fails Apart," with its accompanying "Buzz Bin" video, as ubiquitous on MTV as the single was on the radio.

Now that Dog's Eye View (Stuart and his three-member band) has just released its second album, Daisy, we thought it was a good time to talk to the singer about not apologizing for being yourself.

TRACEY PEPPER: So, Peter, how do you feel about being part of the "sensitive male" trend?

PETER STUART: I feel great about it. There are other sensitive male songwriters out there - people like Ron Sexsmith and Joe Henry. I'm happy to be lumped in with them.

TP: Just how sensitive are you?

PS: I'm actually completely insensitive. I'm just jumping on the "sensitive" bandwagon. No, just kidding, ladies. I'm not as sensitive as Cat Stevens, but I think I'm more sensitive than Mike Tyson.

TP: What is your main objective when writing a song?

PS: Mostly just to finish it. There's so much mythical crap constructed around art. People give songwriters godlike status because they've created this piece of work. And we play into it! I get aggravated when I read interviews with songwriters and they say, "I don't want to talk about the meaning of that because it's too personal." It's more like, "No, you don't want to talk about the meaning because it doesn't mean anything."

TP: How do you know when a song is working?

PS: I only know once I'm standing there singing it in front of people.

TP: Let's talk about the new album's first single, "Homecoming Parade," which was inspired by your high school reunion on Long Island.

PS: I was talked into going, even though I knew it was a bad idea because I didn't get along with anyone at my high school. I don't know why I thought it would be any different ten years later. In fact one guy at the reunion actually tried to beat me up. A couple months after, I started writing this song about trying to escape and make something of yourself, but realizing that as much as you think you make of yourself, there are still people that keep you down. You can be the most alternative-lifestyle, badass rocker in the world, but when you go home to visit your parents, you're still fifteen. It's still, "Go clean your room!" I don't know - I always see weird Jewish guilt in things. I'm going to write a book on Jewish guilt.

TP: You seem to embrace, rather than reject, the stereotype of the upper-middle-class, well-adjusted suburban kid. You've never accepted the notion that one had to be from a poverty-stricken background, or British, to be a musician.

PS: That was the claim of the first punk movement. Of course in 1977 I was ten, so the Sex Pistols didn't make me realize that I could play music - they just made me put underwear on my head and run around at my sister's parties pretending to be a punk rocker. What I remember growing up is huge bands like Jethro Tull, Kansas, and the Who; they were larger than life. Part of their appeal was that there was no way, sitting in your bedroom, you could ever be one of them. Slowly, as I met some of my favorite bands, I realized that they were just people.

TP: Like your friend Adam Duritz from Counting Crows.

PS: Adam and I are both Jewish kids from happy families. There's actually a great legacy of Jewish songwriters - Bob Dylan, he was Jewish for a while, Leonard Cohen, Gene Simmons - which is very confusing, because there are absolutely no good Hanukkah songs.

TP: You certainly don't fit the drugged-out, groupie-shagging rock star image. Parents wouldn't worry about their daughters bringing you home.

PS: Unless they heard the music.

TP: Are our rock stars becoming safer now?

PS: It depends what you mean by safer. You have to be pretty naive or stupid to live the "rock life" today. If you fuck lots of people or do lots of drugs, you run the risk of dying. I've seen people dive into the underworld to prove something. They're like, "I know I was given all these advantages, but I'm going to do heroin and live in a flophouse because that'll show that I'm really down with the counterculture." To me the most rebellious thing is to actually care about your life.