Album Notes

The Peter Nevland Story

I never conceived a career in creativity was practical or even possible. It was completely outside my laser guided life plan when I came to the University of Texas in 1993 to study Mechanical Engineering. I had always loved performing and being in front of an audience, but I could do that in my spare time for fun if I wanted. Why starve trying to perform for people when I could have a guaranteed income in the world of science and math? Acting, liberal arts and music were for people who weren’t smart enough to handle a real major, or so I thought. Sometime during the spring of my freshman year, some words popped into my head. I started writing as I finished my Mechanical Engineering degree, slowly finding the ways to get free of the boring analytical and poetry constraints locked inside my brain as I obtained my Master’s in Materials Science. This new outlet for my passion slowly developed into a style between a song and spoken word as I engineered computer chip manufacturing processes at Motorola. It wasn’t tied to a particular beat, but improvised around the rhythms generated by exploding imagery and creative word choice. I like to call it spoken groove, kind of like imagining “Dr. Seuss taking a walk through the ghetto and deciding to become the white, jive king.”

Putting pen to my inner thoughts is satisfying in its way, but writing isn’t enough. The words have to be released, heard, performed with the same intensity that I feel as they course from my heart. What’s resulted is a performance style and message so wild and untamed, it gets unleashed just about anywhere I am, from the engineering cleanrooms of Motorola or the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the streets of Austin’s party district, open mikes, or the Austin Poetry Slam. I’ve lived in Germany and Asia, traveled all over the U.S. and world, and I want to be a display of innocence and joy with a realization of and compassion for the tremendous amount of hurt and division in the world around me.