Some artists are destined for fame, wealth, and mass adulation, and others have to settle for being cult figures, often because their music is just too difficult to categorize. Peter Ivers falls squarely into the latter category, though even by the standards of a cult hero, fans and admirers have a hard time explaining what he was doing. Ivers was a talented pop and rock songwriter and a world-class harmonica player with a melodic sense that could be thoroughly engaging when he wanted it to be. However, he didn't always want it to be, and his lyrics were surreal in a way that sounded reasonably normal on the surface but turned beguilingly peculiar once you started paying attention (plenty of people have written paeans to the joy of Friday and Saturday night, but none of them came up with anything as grooving but off-kilter as "Miraculous Weekend," for example). Add in the confident but curiously high-register vocal style Ivers embraced and you get a guy who was too weird for the room, no matter how firm his grasp was on pop formalism. In his lifetime, Ivers was best-known as the host of the entertainingly eccentric cable television show New Wave Theater and for writing the song "In Heaven" that appeared in David Lynch's Eraserhead, but he also managed to land two major-label record deals, cut five studio albums, and write music for numerous television and film projects before he was murdered in 1983 at the age of 36 (a crime that's still unsolved). 2019's Becoming Peter Ivers was compiled from studio sessions, rehearsal recordings, and demo tapes (most previously unreleased) with an eye toward creating a concise introduction to his artistry, while also giving longtime fans a treasure trove of rare and unreleased material. Decades after this music was recorded, the glorious paradox of Peter Ivers' music remains unchanged -- he was too weird for the normal people, but weird in a way that made plenty of weird people uncomfortable, too, in part because it was remarkably close to normal. At a time when it's a lot harder to make music that seems genuinely odd than it once was, Becoming Peter Ivers is a heartfelt tribute to a guy who seems far closer to the mainstream than he did in his lifetime while still seeming like a complete wild card, despite his obvious talent. Wounded Bird's 2018 collection The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings is the best sampler of Ivers' work as a recording artist, but if you want to dig deep into his work as a songwriter in its purest form, Becoming Peter Ivers is essential.
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