I have to admit this interview was particularly difficult to write given some of the subject matter. It’s one thing to have a conversation with someone about music, grief, and healing. It’s another to write it out, knowing there is beauty in some of the details that have to be lost to make the interview a readable length. I encourage you to read the books and listen to the albums. I also love what Nathan has to say about his desires for our music scene, and wanted to make sure to include that as well.
I hope readers will take the time to watch all the videos that are incorporated in the article as well.
Let’s just jump right in here. Tell me about your family.
Heather and I have been married since 2001. We have a 13yr old boy, 11yr old boy, and a 6 year old girl, Olivia would be 4 now, she passed away when she was one and Benjamin is 2. Very busy.
I’m sure! And, I know these last albums were solo albums, but you have a band, right?
Yes. My band’s name is Hello Industry. We’ve done three rock albums. Then I did a side project with my bass player, an album of old hymns. These last two were just me and the guitar.
When did you start playing music? Do you have musicians in your family?
Both my parents, my dad is a really great guitarist. He was in a band that was on a label, Capitol maybe? The Dirty Words – they were a Chicago Blues Band. Both my parents grew up in Chicago. He taught me a little bit, got me going on guitar. Then I just sort of stopped for awhile. My mom sang too. She sang with a country band for at one point.
Nathan Peterson with his band Hello Industry. Blind.
Then when I was 18 or 19, I was part of this college group called Campus Crusades and they had a band. For some reason, I don't know why, I thought I should volunteer. I asked if they needed a guitar player and they did. Then they were like, “Oh, we also want you to sing.”
I was not very good. I was trying to learn all the guitar chords… all three of them… and within pretty short amount of time. I was doing a lot of the lead singing and just took to it pretty quickly, and realized that I had something to offer in that arena. The whole time this is happening, I’m also writing on my own.
When you say your band, do you mean Hello Industry?
Yes. This was at Northern Illinois University. Heather was in that band before I joined. She was the keyboardist. We hit it off and got married and then moved to Cincinnati so that she could finish school. I had been writing my own music the whole time, and really wanted to keep making music with the band I had played with at Campus Crusade, but I wanted to do it outside of school. So I kept in contact with them. That two years was like a boot camp for me. I learned about recording and really honed my skills. And when I came back, I connected with our drummer and bass player. Our drummer lived in Peoria and our bass player in Chicago. So we moved to Peoria and he would drive down for gigs and that’s when we started playing at worship conferences. Our band started playing conferences, and then bigger and bigger conferences.
So this was a Christian band? Tell us about your music.
Yes. We were playing at Christian conferences. But the music I was writing, well… I’d say 5% of what I’ve written is overtly Christian. Everything else is definitely spiritual. It has been a progression over the years. Each album written about where I was at the time I wrote it.
I’ve never liked Christian Culture. I believe most of the things that people in that culture believe, and I felt good about playing at conferences and reinforcing these ideas we are created and God loves you and Jesus. The facts were never a problem for me, but I hated that there was a separate culture, separate from the rest of humanity. What I really hated the most was that it felt like there was this purposeful removing of all things human from it, like they were evil. I feel like there’s so much good that is being ignored when we stick to this very narrow view of what it looks like to be a person. It sort of felt like it was trying to make us all the same. That just never resonated inside me. If we're all created different, why are we trying so hard to all be the same?
After spending a lot of time at these conferences, I realized many of these students we were playing for, High School, some Junior High, a lot in college, so many of them were feeling the same way that I was feeling but slowly losing touch with those parts of themselves in order to put on this certain identity.
Our first album, “Fooled” is about not having to believe everything we are told. Our second album, MaryAnn, was this person I created who doesn't feel happy all the time and isn't believing everything every day and is struggling to figure things out. And so that second album was all about this person that I was noticing wasn’t just me, but was a lot of us. Maybe all of us. And then I progressed to Matter which was no longer explicitly Christian. It was all about personal identity. Who am I?
It was a great feeling for me personally to realize that God knows I’m human and the separation I was feeling doesn’t have to exist. I think it’s great that you figured a lot of that out so early. I was 35 before I had that revelation… I remember at one point writing that I had learned more about God in the last year and a half than I had in my first 35 years of life. It would have been nice to realize that sooner.
Olivia’s diagnosis and arrival disrupted the plans to move to Chicago. I asked if moving is a possibility, and Nathan shared an insight that I think would be good for everyone who lives in Peoria but finds themselves wishing they could be elsewhere.
So, I want to talk about your most recent albums. They were inspired by your daughter Olivia. Can you tell us about that?
I got to the point where I realized I didn’t want to play other people’s worship songs any longer. I just wanted to pour our energy into the music that was on our albums that we hardly ever played. The band members had all changed, except for our bass player, James. He had been wearing a path between here and Chicago, where he still lived, for a long time.
So Heather and I decided it was probably time for us to move back to Chicago area. We put our house on the market and started hunting for apartments up there in the city. I just thought, if I’m close to James and close to the city energy, that’s what I want.
While we were doing that, we were pregnant with our fourth child. Heather came home from a routine visit with this news that this child was going to have a chromosomal defect. It would make her, “incompatible with life” is what they called it. It's called Trisomy 18. It’s fairly rare, but it does happen and there's not really anything to tie it to. They they let us know we'd be probably saying goodbye to her in the in the in the operating room.
All of our visits became so much different than with the other kids. It was all about “What are your wishes?” and “Where do you want to bury her?” and “Here’s what will happen when she’s born.” Even the basket we’d put her in. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I didn’t like that basket. We were walking towards this due date and it was so scary. But at the same time, Olivia was moving and kicking and we realized this was it for us. These sonogram visits are our chance to see her. These kicks are our chance to feel her. We lived a lot of life those months, because we had to.
And then she was born. And she didn’t make any sounds. I thought, “This is it. I’m living my worst nightmare.” and they said, “No, she’s alive.” She had survived the birth and we sat there and soaked in every second. She lived for hours and hours, and then the rest of the day and through the night. And we realized we couldn’t stay awake anymore, but we were afraid she would die if we went to sleep. Finally a friend came and held her while we tried to sleep. And that became the picture of the next lots of months. We brought her home. That was a surprise. Our house wasn’t even set up for a baby because we didn’t plan for that.
Taking care of her became a 24 hour job. She had to always be held skin to skin because she couldn’t regulate her body temperature. She’d have these episodes where she would lose all her color and stop breathing. We’d gather around and tell her goodbye and telling her it’s okay to go. And then she’d turn pink and gasp and be alive again. We were exhausted. Friends did everything for us. Food, laundry, helping with her. After six months of living like she could die any second we realized this just wasn’t sustainable. Heather said, “We need to know what it looks like to live. What if she lives to 16? We don’t know.”
I started writing music again. I played some house shows at friends’ houses. But I never left town. My whole goal, the whole time, was don’t miss her death and my chance to say goodbye.
Your title track and first book are called So Am I. Why did you choose that?
I wrote a song when I was frustrated with church culture. It was two people talking to each other. One says they are unhappy and the other says “So am I.” The chorus is “But we’re still here, breathing out, breathing in, we’re alive, maybe life is still ahead.” It didn’t give any answers. It didn’t quote scripture. It just said, “Me too. We’re here together in this.” I had put it aside a long time ago.
One day I was sitting in bed holding Olivia, it was like an eight hour day of just taking a shift holding her skin to skin while nurses would come in and do something. I was feeling so worthless. I thought, I know this is good. I know it's good that I'm holding my daughter. I know it's good to not miss your life. My music career is going out. I have no chance now. Thinking about all my insecurities about never becoming someone notable.
That song came to mind while I was sitting there. Some of the words are “You’re counting days, you’re killing time.” And it occurred to me, these are things for me and Olivia to say to each other. We’re just in this room, we’re not notable. We’re just breathing in and breathing out and alive and maybe no one else in the world knows we are here, but we are here. And that’s when I decided to finish that song and look at it a different way.
So, after being told she wouldn’t ever come home from the hospital, she survived quite awhile. And it doesn’t sound like you were in and out of the hospital with her.
The Peterson family, including Olivia, at the Pumpkin Patch.
Photo Courtesy Nathan Peterson
Yes. We chose to use hospice care from the beginning. I think if we had had her in and out of doctors’ offices she wouldn’t have lived as long as she did. She would have caught colds. Instead we filled her life with love. We took her to the beach on our regular family vacation. She was literally in someone’s arms almost all 14 months of her life, mostly Heather’s.
We celebrated one week birthday, two week birthday, then one month and two months, and we actually celebrated her one year birthday, which was just amazing. All our friends came over and it was a huge celebration.
She knew that she was loved and I think that was a that was her experience of life. It was, “I'm born. Someone loves me and is holding me.” And then she passed away. I think that was her whole life. How many people have a lifetime full of love from start to finish?
Nathan Peterson talks about the day Olivia died at 14 months old.
You’ve said that these albums and books are about healing. I can tell you that the comments you made about how you felt when she died, just the fact that someone else said them out loud, can help other people realize that these are normal and take away some of the guilt of some of them. How else do believe there is healing in what you’ve created?
During her life, a new a new definition of what it means to live came from her. Living is breathing and loving and being.
When she died we had a concert already scheduled and we did it, maybe a month later. I almost pulled So Am I from the set because I thought it wasn’t true anymore. She’s not here, breathing out, breathing in. But I left it in and Heather and I started singing it and I realized, this is now a song for us to sing to each other. The worst possible thing has happened, but we’re still here breathing out, breathing in, we’re alive. Maybe life is still ahead. That gave that song a whole new meaning.
We had tons of friends who were touched by Olivia who came to our shows who needed to hear that too. It was even picked up by some Soundcloud algorithm and played over 100,000 times, mostly on the other side of the world. And I love that I wrote this song wishing this is how people would connect to one another and gave up because it wasn’t going to happen, but through the living of life, it did eventually naturally serve that purpose.
Your second album and book both go by the title, Dance Again. There was a lyric on that album that stood out to me, “You’re not saving anyone.” What is that one about?
All the songs for both albums are in the order that we experienced them. Those five songs and the book were written in parallel to our life without Olivia afterwards, for about the same amount of time. At one point I knew I needed to write again and I didn’t want to. Dance again is actually a song about not wanting to write a song. The next song is a really really dark and angry song. The middle one on the album, the one you are referring to is Don’t Rush to Get Up.
That song is directed at this person who is just a pile of parts on the floor. He can't do anything. And it's in a gentle voice just saying to that person, “It's perfect. You're just right where you need to be. There's no rush for you to get up.” And the you're not saving anyone was directed at a part of me that is always feeling like I need to do something to save somebody to help somebody. In the verse it mentions, “You're not going anywhere. She's not going anywhere. You're not saving anyone.” It’s saying that the worst thing that could happen happened, your daughter is dead. There's no saving for you to do and so it is okay for you to be a very non-heroic, non-functional person right now. That song is all about not just giving permission, blessing the perceived uselessness of this person, who is me.
It sounds it almost sounds weird to say, but that's really beautiful, giving permission to a grieving person to just be where they are, with no other expectations.
As you said, the books and the albums are parallel to each other and talk about the books bringing healing for grieving parents. Did you specifically write them for grieving parents?
Just this one. (Points to himself.) The books and albums are the same practice on two different mediums. There were days when feelings were too big to write music to or wrap a song around, so I would dump words on a page. I didn’t ever write them thinking, “I’m going to help someone else with this.” At the most I’ve thought, I know I’m not the only one to have these feelings. And, as an artists, I feel like part of my work is to make those connections. It just feels right to me. It’s part of what drives me.
You mentioned early on that your whole goal was to be home to say goodbye when Olivia died. But you were on a bike ride with the other kids at time. How did that affect you?
When I was writing the first book and album, I didn’t know I would write a part two. But it was shortly after she passed away that I had to wrestle with the idea of the things I learned from her life. You can only be where you are. Living looks like what is. I knew that was true when Livvy was alive. But after she died it would have been easy to get consumed with stuff that kept my focus from what was going on inside me… which was some really nasty stuff. I could be consumed with work. Or, I could be consumed with hate. Heather and I could have spent our time hating each other to avoid our other feelings.
The tears weren’t a problem. They made sense. There was a little part of me that asked how long I was allowed to cry, but most of me knew it was okay. But then a friend of mine asked me what I was doing about the anger. I told him, “There is none. She lived 14 months longer than she was supposed to. Who would I be angry at?” He was really gentle about it but told me to think about it, to look around and see. And I couldn’t see it.
Then one day I was out for a walk and I had this really vivid violent picture of Jesus on the sidewalk there in front of me, and I pictured taking Him to the ground and choking Him to death. And even right now I’m like, why would you think that, what are you going to do? And that became the second song on this album. “Is it a sin to want to choke the life out of the lungs of Jesus Christ? To watch his last breath, since I missed when my daughter closed her eyes.”
I had done everything up to that moment to not miss that moment when my daughter closed her eyes, and I took my kids on fricken bike ride like a good dad. And I couldn’t believe that happened after all that work for 14 months. So I wrote that song. Very dark and very angry.
There was a lot of anger there. There were a lot of parts of grief that didn’t feel as good as the crying parts. And sometimes I couldn’t keep them from coming out. And these songs are about don’t rush to get up. Don’t rush to change this experience.
How did you decide to stop where you did?
The album doesn’t end with everything being okay now because Livvy is in Heaven. It was about how this process, very part of it, even the parts that you hate about yourself, this is part of your healing. It’s not only okay for you to be there, but it’s actually very good for you to be there.
I was trying to come with a tagline for the book. For awhile I said Dance Again: Grief and Healing. And then is occured to me one day, grief is healing. They aren’t two separate things. If I try to skip the process of the grief, I am denying myself the healing process. I realized during this process that by giving in to the process, I wasn’t just being healed from the loss of my daughter, I was being healed from things 20 years back, 30 years back. I was being healed from things that had to do with my childhood, maybe things that went back through generations.
When you operate on wounds that deep, it’s going to be painful and messy. But I also have a picture of a physician just patiently doing His work and asking me to be okay with the process and trust it.
That is definitely a difficult process. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I hope that just sharing this much will give people some hope, but also that they’ll reach out to get the albums and books as well.
You are vocal about the fact that the local music culture doesn’t have all of the elements you’d like to see. What can we do to promote the elements of the culture you think Peoria is lacking?
I think it’s a matter of leadership. Kim Blickenstaff has been doing some great things as far as structures go. He bought the Scottish Rite, built the Betty Jayne, and he’s invested in other physical structures in a way that says “It’s not okay to just keep knocking down beauty and putting up practicality.” That’s an important message in a CAT town.
If all that happens is that Kim keeps preserving these spaces, it won’t be enough. Right now, the only way for those spaces to be used, for his investment to pay off, is to bring in great artists from around the country. That’s not the community I want to be a part of because that means Peoria requires non-Peoria to make it a thriving artistic expressive community.
Really what I think is needed leadership-wise in addition to what Blickenstaff is doing, is help for the people who are here, who are artists, by giving them the courage and the space and the resources for making what they have in mind to make. And I don’t just mean money, I mean attention. For many artists, the highest form of currency is attention. And by attention I mean saying to an artist, “I am here because I want to receive your voice. I want it to change me.” That takes a lot of courage on the part of the recipient.
“I’m not interested in bringing all these awesome bands to Peoria to make Peoria awesome, I’m interested in bringing you up, up out of the ground, for you to emerge out of the soil as whoever you are. I’m interested THAT making Peoria awesome.”
I think if you put 300 people in a room and told any artist in the city, “Hey there are 300 people here who are ready to receive your voice, would you like to play your songs for them?” They’d start crying and fall over themselves to get on that stage as fast as possible, even if there was no money involved. But that’s not the case here. The community needs that, and I don’t even think they know that they need it.
As someone who is not from Peoria, when you tell me there is live music somewhere, I immediately think of receiving. Most people here think of going and talking to friends and having drinks while people play music in the background. There’s not really a lot of context for telling ourselves that we need something different.
I went to a good friend of mine, Sarah Mooberry, about six months ago because she’s really plugged into the singer-songwriter community and asked her where can I go to just play music. She named six places. And I looked into them and I came back to her and said, in all of the pictures I found of these places, it looks like the musician is just in the corner and everyone is talking. She’s like, “Yeah, that’s kind of the deal.” And I said, “Well we need to find a way to change that.”
I don’t know what comes first, getting artists on the stage to teach people to receive music, or teaching people that they need to receive music so they’ll get the artists up on the stage. I really don’t know. What I do know is that those artists exist and I’m working to connect with those artists and tell them their voice is important, and that as a leader, I’m not interested in bringing all these awesome bands to Peoria to make Peoria awesome, I’m interested in bringing you up, up out of the ground, for you to emerge out of the soil as whoever you are. I’m interested THAT making Peoria awesome.
I love that. There is so much talent and potential in Peoria. It is going to take great leaders to get it out of us.
Again, thank you so much for being here. I like to end on a lighter note. I’ve got 10 questions I’d like you to answer off the top of your head. Then we’ll finish off the post with links to where people can find you and a couple of videos of you playing from today.
What’s your favorite food?
Some sort of Thai food. Good Pad Thai. Thai Express at University of Cincinnati is the best I've ever had.
What food could I not pay you to eat?
I would eat any food, probably for free. Maybe Shepard’s Pie. Potatoes and tomatoes shouldn’t go together. It’s wrong.
What popular song you could live the rest of your life without hearing again?
Popular songs. All of them. No, I like some of them. Oh! The Macarena
Favorite Peoria Landmark?
There is bench on Grandview, that probably lots of Peorians have sat one to think. There’s a circle drive and path that goes down from it. That bench.
What is something you wish Peoria had more of?
Music venues where people go to really receive music, not like background music, but foreground music.
What is something you wish Peoria had less of?
Churches. I have to give a why though, because I don't just hate churches. It’s because I think the more of something that's important that we have, the less important it becomes. I think we can oversaturate ourseles with the activity of something that has a heart of importance but because of all the activity of the thing, it starts to lose the heart.
Favorite swearword?
Fuck. I don't know why, but every time I say it my whole body is like “Thank you.” It's like a release. I think there is something scientific in that.
If success was guaranteed, and you had to pick another profession, what would it be?
Acting. It just sounds fun.
Name another local artist I should have in for an interview.
A lot come to mind. I’m going to say my wife, Heather.
If you could choose a superpower what would it be?
Flight. I wouldn’t need anything else if I could do that.
You can find more from Nathan Peterson, including his albums and books here:
FACEBOOK
YOUTUBE
NATHANPETERSON.NET
SOUNDCLOUD