Meet the Artist: Jeffrey Pyatt
We want to introduce you to our friend and client Jeffrey Pyatt and let you get to know a little more about the experiences, influences, and convictions behind his music. He just released a fantastic new single “History Lessons,” available everywhere you listen to music!
Here’s more about Jeffrey, how he found his way back to music, and what he hopes his songs leave with the people who hear them. We’ve loved getting to partner with him on his music and digital presence as he begins this new phase of his career!
What are some of your earliest memories of music?
Some of my earliest memories are riding around Denver listening to KIMN radio and singing along with my mom and sister. We would sing melodies and harmonies together, so music was part of my life long before I ever thought about writing songs of my own.
I sang in choir throughout elementary and junior high school and started playing drums when I was around 10. When I got to college, I sold my drums and bought my first guitar. Music was always there in one form or another, even during the years when life took me in other directions.
You came to songwriting later in life. What brought you back to music?
Just before COVID, I started playing guitar seriously again. I had spent a lot of years being busy with work, family, and life, and as I began thinking about retirement and what I wanted this next chapter to look like, music kept pulling me back.
I realized how much it fed my soul.
Songwriting came gradually from there. I’m still a relative newcomer to it, which is part of what makes this season exciting. It feels less like returning to something I left behind and more like the beginning of something entirely new.
Do you remember the first song you wrote?
Very clearly. It was Poor People Die Too.
My wife, Paula, and I were driving from Boise to Sun Valley, Idaho. She was asleep, and the idea for the song started forming while I was driving. That became the first song I really pursued from idea to finished recording.
From there, one thing led to another. I began working on the song, took voice lessons, started going to open mics, and slowly became more comfortable sharing my music with other people. What began as one idea on a drive became the doorway into songwriting for me.
Your songs often deal with social issues, history, family, and the lives of people who can be overlooked. What draws you to those subjects?
Music gives me a way to express things that are sometimes difficult to say in ordinary conversation.
I’m interested in people—their experiences, their pain, their resilience, and the things happening around us that we may not always stop long enough to notice. Sometimes that leads me toward social issues. Other times it leads me toward family, a particular place, or a memory.
I don’t want the songs to preach at people or tell them exactly what they are supposed to think. I would rather tell a story honestly enough that someone feels something and begins asking their own questions.
Your latest song, History Lessons, looks directly at some of those ideas. What do you hope listeners take away from it?
History has a way of repeating itself when we stop paying attention to it.
There are stories and injustices that can easily be forgotten, minimized, or left out altogether. History Lessons grew out of thinking about what happens when we fail to remember those things and what responsibility we have to learn from them.
More broadly, that’s what I hope my music can do. I want a song to make someone feel something—pain, joy, empathy, even discomfort—and maybe leave them thinking a little differently than they did before they heard it.
If the music can connect us more deeply to one another and remind us that we have some responsibility for the world around us, then it has done something worthwhile.
Follow Jeffrey on Instagram here and check out his website at jeffreypyatt.com.
