Respected Toronto based singer-songwriter Peter Katz spends most of his time of tour, so, with a little help from his 
friends, decided to document the hometown CD release show for his latest CD “First Of the Last To Know.” Hence Peter Katz and Friends Live at the Music Gallery.
“I realized I didn’t have a documentation of my live show, so I rented out my favourite hall in Toronto and decided to record it,” Katz said, in the middle of a solo tour which brings him back to the Slice In Lethbridge, Nov. 9.
He not only got some of his friends to play on stage with him, but also some other friends who are videographers who were happy to film the concert in high definition video.
“I hadn’t intended to sell it, but I watched it and realized I had a really cool product that I wanted to see and that others might want to see too,” he said. He noted his fans like his live show, so this was the perfect memento of it as it also includes his story behind the song banter.
“It was a cool representation of the live experience. That is where I was when I recorded it. That was the set I was playing when I recorded it. Those are the songs I had been playing for a couple years, so it is most of the new CD and a couple older one, ” he said adding the show is different now as he is playing songs from his up and coming CD.
“It feels pretty accurate. It’s a different experience, because after seeing it, people will come up to me and say they feel they know me better when they weren’t even at the show,” he said.
“But you never really know,” he said.
For now, his primary goal is completing the new CD.
“I’ve been getting more militant about songwriting. I wrote 30 songs for it, because I set a goal to write a new song by every Wednesday night. So I did that for half of the year,” he said adding some of them were completed songs, others weren’t that good, just a collection of melodies, lines and chord progressions.
“Some days I just wrote about what I did that day. But now, I have an abundance of material that I’m really excited about,” he said adding it was tough to choose the songs for the new CD.
“It was really tough. Some of them, not because they were bad songs, just didn’t fit. Some I really liked, but they just didn’t fit, so I put them aside for other artists,” he said. He narrowed down the songs to a short list of 16 or 17 and will whittle that down to a dozen.
He’ll be road testing the new songs in Lethbridge.
“Lethbridge is one of my favourite places to play and I’m not just saying that. It is one of the places that has always supported me,” he said, adding he will be testing out new material at the Lethbridge show.
“I like to road test the songs before I release them,” he said, noting the songs have been chosen for the CD and are in the process of being mastered.
There is a $10 cover for the show, which begins at 9:30 p.m. Amanda Michelle Forsyth is also performing.
