Eric Peterson — Music

Byafest, 2025

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:30:00 GMT

One Thread

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 23:00:00 GMT

Originally planned as a series of singles, the first (dubbed Polaroid in Reverse) was released in 2010 as a limited edition of 7” lathe-cut records. Roger, Roll co-headlined the release show with future collaborator Corey Teruya’s Hello Kavita, and was opened by future household names The Lumineers.

Now 15 years later, from the hushed beauty of Sweden’s forests, and featuring Teruya and James Han (Landlines, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Wheel), One Thread finally sees the light of day—the 5-song EP emphatically closing the door on Roger, Roll’s first two decades, opening up for more music to come.

One Thread’s reflective songs are a blend of a type of Americana tonally illuminated with incandescent keyboard melodies, spare rhythm guitar and Peterson’s expressive and commanding vocals. Peterson spent many of the intervening years abroad and these tracks feel like he’s reconnected with a neglected part of himself, giving voice to that specific range of emotions experienced after taking stock of one’s life and rediscovering a part of your psyche that tenderly needs nurturing now.

~ Tom Murphy, Queen City Sounds, Birdy Magazine

FAWM 2021

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 23:00:00 GMT

A successful attempt to write and record 14 songs in 28 days as part of February Album Writing Month, and a pleasantly surprising success at that, given it has been over a decade since I’ve written new music (and I recently made a big move rooted in finding the energy to do so again).

Given the quantity-over-quality nature of the challenge, the songs ended up spanning genres (bossa nova, surf-rock, and everything in between), though revolved around the same instrumentation (classical guitar, piano, drums, and vocals).

Stream or download the demos below:

Uneasy

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 05:00:00 GMT

As this EP’s premiere aptly demonstrates, a spoonful of sugar, and an unbeatable rhythm, help the bitter pill of romantic reality go down — and get down.

~ Seattle Weekly

Stream, Purchase

Get You Alone

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Stream, Download, Buy

Excuses

Sun, 22 May 2016 21:40:49 GMT

Download

Corcovado

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 23:21:25 GMT

Although the tropical climate it was conceived in is a far cry from the cool, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest, I believe the rhythm of life in the urban PNW is a perfect match to its swaying style and melancholic air.

Download

Curse Us All

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 04:46:05 GMT

Stream, Download

Oh, Annie

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 20:58:54 GMT

Stream, Download

KVDU Live: Vol. 1

Tue, 26 May 2015 00:10:04 GMT

During my time at the University of Denver, I worked part time at the university’s internet radio station (KVDU) as a “webmaster,” managing much of the station’s technical operations. In addition to maintaining the website and server, I also maintained the streaming radio server and trained new hosts.

After a working a year or two at the station behind the scenes, I partnered with station manager Whitney VanCleave to co-produce a show called KVDU Live, which featured live performances and interviews with prominent Denver bands and musicians. While Whitney manned the microphone, I handled engineering, live mixing, and recording. The show’s goal was ostensibly to help integrate the University of Denver’s student body with the wider Denver arts culture, but the results of that were dubious at best.

What did end up coming out of the show, however, was a fairly thorough collection of in-studio recordings of some of Denver’s best musicians at the time, mixed live and direct to two channels. The compilation, entitled KVDU Live: Vol 1 (of which there is and probably will only ever be one volume), was pressed to CD and given away to students of the University and distributed to local record stores.

Today, the compilation remains available to listen to and download for free, online.

Free Download

Your Ghost

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:00:00 GMT

It’s been thirteen and a half months since we last heard new recorded music from Houses. …Still, this one’s a beauty.

~ Westword

Stream, Purchase

New Wives' Tale

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:00:00 GMT

Alternately measured and overwhelming… One of the more sincere indie-rock albums of the year, for which we are grateful.

~ Westword Moovers and Shakers

Stream

Polaroid in Reverse

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:10:26 GMT

Everyone dreams, in the literal sense. Most of us are familiar with the experience that follows when we awake: as our morning progresses, we forgot more and more of last night’s dream until eventually, we barely remember we even had it in the first place. From 2006 to 2010, in an experiment to preserve my dreams, I documented them in writing with as much detail as I could. Despite logging my dreams as soon as I awoke, and in great detail, I quickly realized even my written accounts were only incomplete fragments. They were like polaroids, but instead of having developed into clear images out of nothing, they’d degraded from a perfect picture into only a dull memory.

Memory too fades with time. We do our best to resist this tendency through documentation: photographs, videos, journals, blogs. But we rarely stop to ask: is there value in documentation or is memory’s degradation insurmountable?

Polaroid in Reverse explores some of these themes through not only the music and lyrics themselves, but also in its presentation. While traditionally pressed records are stamped out using heavy duty industrial equipment and have relative longevity, lathe cut records such as this are individually carved in real-time, one-by-one, and last only a fraction of the time pressed records do. Each time you play this record, the quality degrades slightly, until eventually, it’s rendered totally unplayable. The cover art was also hand printed using a technique called wood cut reduction printing which is similarly destructive.

Eric Peterson’s final record in his brief but influential career as a Denver musician was lathe-cut rather than pressed in the traditional manner. As a consequence, the record is more delicate and will bear the marks of repeated listens; the songs will become fuzzier and eventually disappear entirely into white noise. And in that way, the record embodies its message: Polaroid in Reverse offers a contemplation on the world’s ceaseless entropy.

~ Westword Best Use of the LP Format 2011

tangled; we weave

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:10:26 GMT

An experiment in blind collaboration as well as creative and personal synchronicity, tangled; we weave is a repository for our collective, ineffable experience, one week at a time. “Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.”