Bio

Peter Cloud Panjoyah

I’m an “adult onset” musician, in that my musical training, songwriting and commitment began well after the time many musicians have been playing for years. I’ve loved singing since childhood and feel like my voice is just getting more fluid and rubbery as time goes by.

My songs often come from a place of writing in order to come to grips with aspects of myself that I didn’t understand very much before sitting down to write.  Sometimes I start off by writing these parts’ stories and then the song takes on a life of its own, which I may or may not always have anything to do with literally. In other words, they start off being about me oftentimes, but don’t always end up that way!

I’ve been writing songs for over 20 years, but my muse kicked into high gear about eight years ago when I met Phoenix and started grooving on her amazing catalogue of songs. She was, in a word, inspirational! I found myself writing a lot more and more in depth,and for the first time, melodies started coming with the words, which was a shift.

Harmony singing and songs with strong harmony vocals are very important to me. My favorite vocal albums and bands nearly always have more than one singer involved. I feel it makes singing over the course of an album’s worth of songs that much more interesting and captivating of my attention and ear. Vocal harmonies seem to up the magical content of a song’s message, especially if standard third or fifth harmonies, which I love, share space with harmonies that are unexpected or even dissonant.

The whole of the multi-voiced song is way greater than the sum of the parts. That said, I love a good strong vocal line in and of itself! The passion in the lyrics, singing and instrumentation can make or break my interest in a song.

I didn’t grow up in a musical household per se, although my mother played classical piano from time to time. I was neither encouraged nor discouraged to discover my musicality, but there was always music on, and it was pretty diverse stuff, which I think has informed all the different styles I enjoy hearing, writing in and playing. My earliest musical memory is from about the age of two or even earlier, in my playpen at my grandparents’ house, where my grandfather would have the Ray Charles album with “What’d I Say” playing, or perhaps some Miles Davis, particularly “Sketches of Spain”.  My parents also listened to many styles of music, including rock and roll, but also jazz, latin, pop and R&B.

I first started really getting into music singing in school, and by taping songs off the radio at around the age of 10 or 11. I finally took up the drums when friends of mine and I all decided we wanted to learn instruments and be in a band together. The core of the drumkit I learned on is the same kit I play on “Deeper Than Grass”, a Yamaha Chrome. That first band never was, and those guys never stuck with their studies, but it got me going on mine, and I never stopped!