Peter Lewis - Imagination (2023)

“We are all beings who want to live forever but know we won’t. Although this is a predicament everyone must learn to accept, the different ways in which we spend our time trying to cope with our mortality don’t always lead to a common sympathy between us, but to conflict and profound suffering. Yet in the end all we really have in the whole wide universe is each other and that is what this CD is trying to point out” – Peter Lewis

That comes through crystal clear on Imagination, a new collection of singular songcraft that could only spring from the creative consciousness of Peter Lewis. founding member of the legendary San Francisco rock group Moby Grape. Consider the driving, chiming “Path of Least Resistance,” as radio ready as a rocker can be despite its fierce philosophizing, and “If I Just Had You,” which spins incandescent longing into perfect doo/wop. Delicate guitars and lilting, uplifting harmonies are the warm embrace of “When You Come Back to Me” while pensive piano carries the earnestly heartening “Without You.” Impossible to peg, Lewis also lets loose with a country waltz (“The Garden Song”), a flamenco-influenced tragedy (“La Mujer”) and a jazzy, trippy nightmare (“Frank Zappa’s Ghost”).

With his voice in fine fettle, Lewis serves each song—bright and delicate here, gravelly and aching there, even roaring when required—through lyrical themes that ponder mortality versus eternity, illusion versus reality. The 10-track long player is his second release on OMAD Records, a follow-up to 2019’s The Road to Zion, and it marks a deeper collaboration with John DeNicola, main man of the bespoke label. “The songs on Imagination, like those on The Road to Zion, attempt to reveal a certain perspective about life,” Lewis says. “But on The Road to Zion, this perspective was highly personal, whereas working with John on Imagination, we sought a perspective we might share with everyone.”

“Any music I get involved with, I hope that people will relate to and be moved by,” says DeNicola, the Grammy-nominated, Oscar-winning songwriter and producer best known for his hits from the film Dirty Dancing—including “(I Had) the Time of My Life,” perhaps the most relatable, not to mention romantic, pop song ever penned. “A lot of the songs on Imagination will be right up there with classics Peter has written, back to his time as a founding member of Moby Grape—one of my all-time favorite ‘60s-era bands—like ‘Fall On You,’ ‘I Am Not Willing’ and ‘Apocalypse,’ His lyrics are always real, first hand and heartfelt, and I think people will feel his sincerity when they hear these new songs.”

They’ll also feel the musicianship. Imagination is a guitar-forward record, with both Lewis and DeNicola reaching out to such friends as Jonathan McEuen, Rob Bailey and George Adrian, whose top-tier talent rounded out their own playing. “The guitarists on this record were not chosen for the number of notes they can cram into one measure, but for being at the right time and place with the notes they played,” Lewis points out.

Also at that echelon are drummers Brian Delaney, Tommy Allen and Don McCauley, plus Alan Zahn on piano, Jeff Elliot on trumpet, Marc Muller on pedal steel and Randy Tico on bass. And though the record was largely achieved by trading tracks back and forth from the west coast to the east, the genuine emotion and immediacy of the sound belies technological quilting. “The process allows for on-second-thought chances to make the music better,” Lewis says. “The trick is in not overworking it, in keeping all the players in a creative mood until you’ve made your point and knowing when it’s time to move on.”

Now it’s time for listeners to enter Peter Lewis’s Imagination. What insights you glean from the words, what spirit you hear in the sound, what it makes you think and feel—about dreams, doubt and deception, life, love and the everlasting—will be yours alone. All Lewis will suggest, in terms of a shared experience, is a favorite line from Lost Horizon: “‘There are moments in every man’s life when he glimpses the eternal.’ I have been searching for this glimpse all my life and my sincere wish is that anyone out there searching for it too might find hope for their journey in this record.”