Peter Buffett

Omaha, San Francisco, Milwaukee, New York.

okay, maybe i should add a little to this...

i grew up in omaha. i left because i got into stanford university and figured i should probably go. so i drove across country with a friend in my 1958 triumph tr3 (i still have it!) and took every class that ended in 101 or -ology.

the next summer, i played around in a friend's studio in omaha and fell in love with recording. i had always played the piano, but never really took a music career seriously. i went back to stanford after recording a painfully amatuerish demo and shopping it around in l.a. to no avail.

i was in a friend's dorm and heard some guy playing guitar on the floor - he was really great and the songs were beautiful - and simple - and it struck me that simplicity was probably the key to the whole thing musically. *epiphany* (that guy was william ackerman, by the way. the founder of windham hill records)

i had a little money saved up. i moved to san francisco - put an ad in the classifieds - and started to record people in my apartment. i had no idea what i was doing. i also wrote music for anyone that would hire me (hiring me did not mean paying me...). i slowly built a business writing music for commercials and then got signed to a record deal to put out instrumental albums (yes...vinyl).

that led to kevin costner hearing my music (not by accident - i really put the records out to try and get into film scoring. i had watched people get film gigs by getting their music used as temp music in films). kevin liked what he heard and hired me to write the firedance scene in dances with wolves. a pretty darn good first film gig. of course, you don't know how the movie's going to do at the time. you just do the job. but what an amazing ride that was...

his friend then hired me to score the 8 hour series kevin executive produced called 500 nations. so i went from 2 minutes in dances to 8 hours. and at the same time i was learning a ton about the american indian culture. i was stunned by the history and the sense of what may have been lost in terms of collective wisdom.

i kept writing for commercials and CD releases and at the same time started formulating the idea for my spirit show. at first, it was a small concert i did at a benefit for jamie redford. that turned into a pbs special produced out of new york. it was the right idea but i felt it was the wrong execution. so after that ended i set out to try and produce it myself.

holy cow - i had no idea how hard that was going to be. but after many years, spirit - the seventh fire was born. the culminating achievement was when it was on the national mall in washington d.c. for the opening of the national museum of the american indian. you can learn more about spirit by clicking on the "friend" button below or visiting www.spirit07.com

after i closed the show i was physically and emotionally wiped out. i had to write some songs. in the past, i had written songs for other people to sing. but this time i realized i had to sing them myself. the last time i did that was way up in the second paragraph. a long time ago. and i was pretty bad, frankly. but life experience and studio experience taught me a lot. gold star was greeted with much enthusiasm. i was actually going to originally put it out under another name because i was scared to expose myself.

and now i am, instead, putting out vocal CD number two this summer. entitled staring at the sun.

oh yeah... i moved from san francisco to milwaukee (witness protection program - not really. the label i was signed to was based there and i really loved it. moved there for 15 years). and then moved to nyc two years ago.