Multi-Dimensional Musician Living in His Glory Days: A Chat With Pete Muller

Well, I think that the thought really is, if you're talking to somebody, you meet somebody, a stranger at a party, and the stories they tell you are all things that they did 15, 20 years ago. My impression is, well, okay, what are you doing now? What are you excited about? What gets you out of bed now? You can't get out of bed and be excited about what you did 20 years ago, no matter how great it was. I think that's why some artists that hit highs in their career early really struggle because it's like, "Oh my god, I hit this amazing thing. I was playing arenas and now I'm back down to here or whatever it is." I think you've got to be excited about something that is going to be happening in the future. If you do that, I think you're really energized. If you're simply talking about what happened in the past, that's kind of fun sitting in a rocking chair, reminiscing.

Jason, great to meet you, too.

Huge fan. Huge fan. I've heard they might be doing a fourth season, but those first three seasons were just amazing. So heartfelt, so funny. It was something our whole family enjoyed.

That's where the curious goldfish comes from. Gotcha.

Oh, wow. I think at this phase in my life, I think I'm the most curious about the spiritual, about the transcendent, if you will. It's something I haven't really dived into. I was raised with no religious background at all. We were told we were agnostic and I've kind of always had that belief, but there's something about the spiritual and the mystical that I haven't dived into. And music is a connection to that. It's a gateway to that. So I think as I think about the next 10 years, that will be a major focus, something I'm definitely going to be exploring.

I'll give you the background.

So I was always, I have two sides. I love music. I love math. I've always been a math nerd. I had absolutely no interest in finance. I was bored by money. But I always loved games and mathematical games and figuring things out. I was in California playing piano for a rhythmic gymnastics team. I was delaying a job I had as a computer programmer in New York, working for a company I'd worked for some in college. I just didn't want to do it. I wanted to live in California. So I looked for a programming job and I even applied to IBM. I'm not a corporate kind of guy and I was turned down, but I found a small company run by an econometrics professor from Cal Berkeley, a guy named Barr Rosenberg, and they were looking for a programmer. I came in and started doing some programming for them and I realized that the finance they were doing was all math and I was really good at it. I got curious and I learned it deeply within a couple years because I was giving talks at their conferences to clients and writing articles. I just got into it. Then a few friends of mine at the company and I got into poker. We got really into poker competitively and decided that we wanted to combine that knowledge of poker and finance and maybe start a little hedge fund inside the company. We pitched it very badly to management. They said, "No, we don't do that." When Morgan Stanley came looking for somebody to do what I was already doing, which is writing articles and talking at conferences, I pitched it a little bit better to them and they said, "Sure, we'll let you start a group to do this." That was in the '90s. I started the group. Knock on wood. It was very successful, more successful than I ever dreamed of. It was also harder than I ever dreamed of. I was incredibly obsessive. I put music to the side for maybe six years mostly, and even though I was very successful, I burned out because I didn't really feed that side of myself. So I cut a deal to leave and really pursue music. I started writing because I went through a heartbreak, a breakup at that time, and my heart was broken. I started writing and then I managed to kind of combine the two things. In 2012, there was a rule that said Morgan Stanley couldn't have groups like mine, and we spun out and became independent. So now I'm still in charge of the group, maybe closer to an executive chairman than president and CEO, although that's still my title. And I'm still pursuing music passionately. So I have both sides.

It's fun and challenging. It's not about what you've accomplished, right? It's always about what you can be building or growing or how you're learning. That's what keeps people alive and young. So that's my goal.

That's true.

I did. I know Will Shortz pretty well.

I'm also in that community. I started, I've always loved doing crossword puzzles and I started creating them a number of years ago. I published a whole bunch in the New York Times and about 12 years ago I started my own monthly music crossword which appears in the Washington Post. The answer every month is a song or a band and my band will cover whatever the answer is. Sometimes that makes us need to learn unusual songs because the answer to the crossword might be something we never would have learned except for that. So that's a lot of fun. I have a few thousand people that love doing it on my own site. The Post is going through a change on their crossword site, so they haven't had it up for a little bit, but hopefully they get it back soon. Usually we get 10,000 people or so at once doing it on the Post. So it's a fun side hobby.

Oh, I don't know if I would agree with that analogy. I would put it very differently. When you're building a crossword, the answer is not ambiguous. There is an answer, but what you want to create is, and I'm paraphrasing Mike Shenk who's the editor of the Wall Street Journal crossword and a fabulous constructor himself, he says he wants to create a battle with the solver where the solver struggles mightily and eventually triumphs over it. So the puzzle is hard but there is no ambiguity in a crossword. There is one answer. Interestingly, when you're doing modeling in quantitative finance, there isn't one answer. Nobody's going to be able to predict what the stock price of the S&P 500 will be tomorrow precisely. You might, if you spend a lot of time and have a good model, have a little bit of an edge in being able to predict it with a lot of variability. The statistics are good, the models can change, but there is no such thing as a correct model. You're always trying to build a model that forecasts a little bit better, but you don't need much forecasting edge in order to have something that works. It's very hard to find that type of an edge. It's a little like card counting in blackjack, where you keep track of how many face cards are left in the deck, and if there are more than the average amount of face cards, you have a slight advantage, but that doesn't mean you're going to win the next hand. That means you maybe have a 51% chance of winning the next hand.

Oh, I see what you're saying. There are a lot of clues that might have more than one answer with that number of letters, but there's only one answer that fits with the crossing ones. I see. Okay.

That's a great contrast. I actually don't play poker competitively. I haven't for a very long time. I completely agree. It is so important when you're playing poker to have emotional discipline. I would phrase it slightly differently, but you're hitting the nail on the head. You need to be aware of your emotions and ideally the emotions of the other players, but not react based on them. The best poker players these days are machine learning bots. They've figured out that the best players in the world cannot beat the best computer algorithm heads up, no limit hold 'em. The algorithms have gotten so good that the professionals are learning from them and adjusting their games to be similar. Emotional control is really important there. I would much rather be in situations where I don't have to worry about that all the time. I still find poker really fun, but you need that discipline.

Yeah. No, I do think that the through line for all of them is to be present. You may be referring to one of the songs on the album called Moments, which is about the danger of nostalgia. It's about whether you're living in the moment or in the memory. The message of the song is to live in the present. It starts out with a vignette of an older man hiking and a chance encounter, talking about life, and a reminder that the only thing we have is the present moment. That's kind of spiritual teaching. That's the center of yoga. That's the truth of if you're surfing or snowboarding, you just need to be there and present. If you're present in conversation, all we have is this moment. We're connecting right here. I think that's when one feels the most alive.

I say the moments. I do yoga every day. I have a yoga practice where I try to be centered and present. I also exercise every day and similarly try to just be aware and energized. But I'd say when I'm sitting at the piano and either composing or practicing, you can't create music that touches people without being fully in. That's why I do music. It just lifts my spirit up. If you see me playing or performing, I just have this smile on my face because I'm so happy being able to do it. It's been so much fun growing as a writer, performer, player, singer. Sometimes it's a little incongruous because if I'm singing a song about being sad and being very open and vulnerable, and there are songs like that in this current album, struggles that I've had, I'm playing these songs which are sad, but there's a smile on my face. That can be a little weird sometimes. But the reality is that I'm remembering that emotion, but I'm also enjoying the fact that I'm playing on stage and connecting with the audience.

Well, I think that the thought really is, if you're talking to somebody, you meet somebody, a stranger at a party, and the stories they tell you are all things that they did 15, 20 years ago. My impression is, well, okay, what are you doing now? What are you excited about? What gets you out of bed now? You can't get out of bed and be excited about what you did 20 years ago, no matter how great it was. I think that's why some artists that hit highs in their career early really struggle because it's like, "Oh my god, I hit this amazing thing. I was playing arenas and now I'm back down to here or whatever it is." I think you've got to be excited about something that is going to be happening in the future. If you do that, I think you're really energized. If you're simply talking about what happened in the past, that's kind of fun sitting in a rocking chair, reminiscing. But it's a different life. As I get older, I want to be energized and curious and doing new stuff all the time.

Exactly. Bruce Springsteen sang it a lot better than I did. It's a really great song. But it's the same sentiment.

That's awesome. Yeah. I would say that every day gets sweeter as you get older. You just appreciate the fact that you're alive.

That's very perceptive. I actually wrote that song about me. There's this thing called the Antisocial Camp, which is a gathering of different songwriters and producers that happens every summer in New York for 5 days. They pair you with random people and you have three hours to write and record a song. I'll tell you the motivation behind it, but it was about me. We did it in 3 hours and wrote it from an individual perspective. Then I thought about it and it sounded a little too boastful or self-involved, like "Hey, I did all these great things and now I just want to do small things." So I made up a character, an actress who had a fantastic larger-than-life life and just wasn't happy about it and decided to take a step back. I think it worked a lot better there. For me, I'm lucky enough because of what I did in finance, because of the group that I have, and I work with some incredibly smart, wonderful people. Having resources to do anything I want is there. I've done some pretty cool, spectacular things, but I find the moments that I love the most are the smaller moments. Playing ping pong with my son, playing a board game with some friends, composing a song with a friend, things that don't require money, that are just available. Walking in nature and appreciating the beauty of some flowers or whatever it is that spiritually lifts me up much higher than anything that might be crazy and expensive. It's not like I don't like to do fabulous things too, but it was this urging, and I guess it was the beginning of my journey towards the more spiritual and the more connected. I've always calibrated how to make choices by what gives me energy. If that's the north star for me, is this energizing? Am I open, loving, my best self? Okay, let me do more of that. Am I closing up? Is there something wrong here? What's the resistance about? Maybe I'm just feeling numb here. Maybe I shouldn't do that. It's an opening up for me. I realize that the opening up might not be about doing bigger, larger things. It's about doing smaller things. That's the genesis. We had an Italian firm do a really great cutout paper stop-action photography video of that song, which came out great. That's one of the fun things for the album, getting to make very different videos for each of the songs.

It's a fair question. I have busked in New York City subways. Typically when I do my shows, I don't tell the story because I want people to judge me on my music. I'm the opening act. If I'm traveling around the country, I'll open for my friend Livingston Taylor. I get on stage, it's a great audience, but they don't know who I am. They just know I'm playing a 30 or 45 minute set before the guy they came to see. Typically, if there's a green room in the venue, great, but typically I'll be changing in the bathroom. I can travel a little more comfortably when I get there. If people are buying CDs, I give 100% of whatever people give me to a music charity that I started. I give it all away. I travel better, so logistics make it a lot easier and I have a crew that can help me. But at the end of the day, when I'm on stage playing the songs, it's the same as that person playing for tips. They don't have to run a company too. It's about how good is the song, how good is your connection to the audience, are they identifying with the emotion you're giving them? That is the challenge and that's what keeps me alive. I remember when I made my third record with a friend of mine who's no longer here, a guy named Rick DePofi. He figured out something about my background. He said to me, "You know, Pete, there's this guy that hires the best musicians in the world and goes around opening for big rock bands and flies them around on his jet, and that's how he gets to open for them and play with his rock band in these arenas, but he gets no respect, no credit." I'm like, "That is the opposite of who I want to be. I want to play a song and have people go, 'Wow, that's amazing.'" Some people know something about my other background, but if they don't know who I am, they go, "Wait a second, you're not the same person, right?" So it is all about the music and creating the music and how you touch people and the journey. For me, the journey of continuing to get better has been such a great growth part of my life. It's been so fun.

So, my goal when I first started doing this was to be able to play a show for 100 to 200 people in 20 different cities across the country headlining, in a quiet listening room where I'm playing my original stuff. The challenge is that people go see cover bands and well-known artists, and in the folk world it's a little hard to do that, so it felt like an ambitious goal. I feel like I'm on the path towards being able to do that. My albums are getting some good reviews. NPR came out because the album was released November 14th and they have this top 10 Americana albums of the week thing, and we made that. I was like, "Oh, this is really cool." So it's fun. I want to keep getting better, keep growing, touch people more. Steve Martin has this quote about how to succeed in comedy or music, he plays both, and it's just be so good that they can't ignore you. In the coming year, I plan to put out a solo cover album, maybe a cover album with my band as well, and then get close to another original album. This one was really fun. We ended up, I can tell you the story of how we made One Last Dance if you want.

I had to be in England and it turns out that Peter Gabriel's studio called Real World was available for a week. So I brought the band over. The idea was we were just going to workshop stuff, but we met their engineer, a woman named Katie May, who just won a Grammy. I think she's 27. She's the head engineer there. She's been doing this since she was 16. We were totally simpatico with her. She was amazing. We ended up recording 10 songs that week that basically became the album. It was this wonderful time when we were in the middle of nowhere in England, just writing and recording. It was fantastic. I hope to have another week with the band somewhere this coming year, probably closer to home, but we'll see. That was really fun. One of the things that was really great for this record was I got my friend Allison Russell to sing a duet with me on the lead track. I originally recorded it just myself, but then I was like, "Hey, do you want to do this?" She graciously agreed and we had a lot of fun doing it. She is an amazing artist and a real sweetheart. So that was really fun.

The thing that I've gotten for this record is that it's clearly my best work to date. I felt that on each of the last few albums, but people have said this is the one. I'm working with a new friend who produces theater and some musicals with the idea of creating a one-man show where I somehow weave my story into the songs and tell the story on stage. There was something called The Lion that she did, a singer-songwriter guitar player that did this, and she shared it with me. I'm like, "Oh, that's really cool. Maybe we can do something like that." We went through my whole catalog because this is my seventh record, and she was like, "You know what? I think you should just use songs from this record and do new ones to create this show." I don't know if that's exactly what we'll do. Maybe we'll take a few of the other ones from the past, but it'll be fun to just keep on creating. People have really liked this record.

Oh, it's much more the latter. You want to align incentives. Philanthropy is hard because you want to motivate people to do really great things, and capitalism is actually really good at that, but it's hard to do capitalism with philanthropy. If you can figure out a way to align incentives, you have a step towards that. I'll talk about the two things you're mentioning. The first one, my friend Rick DePofi, who told me not to be the guy who buys his way into arena touring. He worked with me on my third album and really helped me take a huge leap forward. At the end of it, I said, "I'd love to get a place in New York, a studio apartment, and maybe make that a studio for me, and you could build it." He said, "Great." We started looking, and then he came to me because we had recorded at a place called Avatar, which previously had been called Power Station. It's an amazing recording studio, kind of on par with Abbey Road, probably one of the top 10 or 20 studios in the world. We had done a little of our recording there. He told me, "I just heard that Avatar is going to be sold and they're going to turn it into condos." I said, "No, that's too bad." He said, "I had this dream that maybe you, with your resources, could buy a building or something and maybe put your studio there, and maybe get Berklee to come down there because I was on the board of the Berklee School of Music." I spent some time in this place that was full of asbestos. It's very tough to make money in the studio business. This Japanese guy had owned it for 20 years and it was a labor of love, and he finally was throwing in the towel. They had leaks on the fourth floor and the way they dealt with the leak was like the movie Brazil. They would duct work all the water down to the ground through the different floors. It was a disaster. When Rick mentioned that, I was like, "You got to be kidding me. This is crazy. No, I'm not going to do this." Long story short, I ended up doing it. I realized, "What am I gonna use my money for if not to do this?" We went to New York City and it was actually one meeting. It was really fortuitous because Bloomberg at the time had just created a new department that added music as one of the things they wanted to do. I said, "Hey, you can do two things. Save an iconic studio and get Berklee to New York City. You guys kick in some money. I'll kick in the rest. What do you say?" They said, "Great." It took five years to build it. A friend of mine named Steven Weber spearheaded it and made it happen. It was challenging, and now it's thriving, and I have a studio there too. So it worked out brilliantly. The other one, when I first started getting more serious, my wife at the time said to me, "Hey, if you're getting really serious about music, you should go play in front of strangers, as opposed to just playing for your friends in Santa Barbara or New York." She had a point. So I signed up for an opening tour for a fellow named Steven Kellogg, who's been doing this for a very long time. We did an agreement where I opened for him for 20 consecutive days and we went around the country playing for some of these venues that I want to eventually come back and hit. I was blown away by how amazing these places were. The people that own them truly were devoted to music, wanted to create a place that traveling singer-songwriters could come have a great meal, maybe a shower, put them up in a bed if need be. They would support them, treat their staff really well, do this thing for the community where people could come and listen to wonderful songs. They were not making that much money. They were struggling because it's very hard to be a small independent music venue. So I thought, what if I started a charity that could help these venues out? I put up the capital and talked a number of my friends into joining and helping evaluate. We started right before the pandemic, and it was really fortuitous because we had funding. As soon as the pandemic happened, live music venues were completely threatened. There was some money that came from the government through the NEA, but that took a while. We managed to save quite a few places initially. Live Music Society is still going strong. We give away seven figures a year to probably 150 clubs around the country now. It's worked out great. We've made a lot of friends, helped a lot of places. They apply for grants. I'm not involved at all in the evaluation process. We have a bunch of volunteers that come and say, "Okay, does this make sense?" If you have a venue that's no more than 200 or 300 capacity and you have music most of the time and you pay your musicians well, we will be happy to support you. That's been really fun. You asked me about return on investment. The psychic return is everything. That's the main thing. It was so fun in the beginning days because people didn't know about us. The head of the society would call up and say, "Hey, we've got some free money for you, all you have to do is apply." They'd say, "Never mind, really, this is not a scam. We're actually trying to be helpful." That doesn't happen anymore, but it's just a joy. If I can make the world a little bit of a better place with my resources, what else am I going to spend my money on?

Exactly.

Two or three times we played Eddie's Attic. Love Eddie's Attic.

Oh, Jason, it's been a pleasure doing this and a lot of fun. So thanks much.