Pete Muller Announces New Album 'Spaces'

Today, songwriter Pete Muller has announced his upcoming record Spaces, to be released on Two Truths Records & Santa Barbara Records on May 20th.

They have also shared a new video for the single "Tin Palace" which is currently streaming via Americana Highways who writes "The video is perfectly dove-tailed with Muller's pretty song that takes a deep dive into philosophy and time. His music will inspire you." Spaces is currently available for pre-save here.

Muller describes the inspiration for "Tin Palace" writing, "A few years back a musician friend invited me to take a weekend head-clearing break at a mysterious location. That journey inspired this song. The 'Tin Palace' is a real place. But it's more a state of mind."

Pete Muller is a problem solver. Whether he's writing songs for his critically acclaimed albums, revolutionizing the way Wall Street works through applied mathematics, or crafting crosswords for the New York Times and Washington Post, the hyper-talented renaissance man always seems to have his eye on unlocking some deeper level of understanding.

With his touching new album, Spaces, Muller takes on perhaps the biggest puzzle of them all: himself. Recorded with Emmy Award-winning producer/arranger Rob Mathes (Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Sting), the collection is lush and timeless, balancing head and heart in equal measure as it wrestles with questions of love and connection and purpose and identity.

Raised in New Jersey by hardworking immigrant parents, Muller first began playing piano as a teenager, and while an early gig performing accompaniment for gymnasts nearly took him to the Olympics, music was a passion more than a profession for the first half of his life. After relocating to California, he became fascinated with the connections between math and finance while working at a consulting firm headed up by a Zen Buddhist.

Seven years later, he built what he humbly describes as a "nerdy quantitative trading business" (though profiles everywhere from the New York Times to Forbes paint a slightly fuller portrait of his role as a pioneering figure in the field). Though he soon became more successful than he'd ever imagined, Muller steadily found himself drifting away from music and meaning in his life, and it grew painfully clear that something had to give.

"I was out of balance," he recalls. "I wasn't living the way I was meant to be living, so I decided to walk away and find a new path. And the only way I knew how to do that was through songwriting."

After releasing a pair of early albums, he returned to the studio in 2014 to record Two Truths and a Lie. It was during those sessions that Muller would be introduced to Avatar Studios, which, under its original name of The Power Station, had hosted the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan. Like the similarly legendary (and now lost) Hit Factory, the studio was under threat of being sold and redeveloped as condos at the time, and Muller decided to use his resources in partnership with the City of New York and the Berklee College of Music to save, renovate, and re-launch it as a world-class recording and educational facility.

"As a result of my role in that, I ended up meeting Rob Mathes, who'd worked on some incredible albums there over the years," says Muller, who also founded the non-profit Live Music Society around the same time in order to provide no-strings-attached grants to independent music venues around the country.

The pair found success right out of the gate with 2019's Dissolve-the album earned praise everywhere from American Songwriter to People Magazine, led to tour dates around the country, and helped Muller land festival appearances from Montreux to Telluride-so it was an obvious choice for the two to team up again on Spaces. Working once more out of the newly renovated and renamed Power Station at Berklee NYC, Muller captured the core of the record with his touring band, The Kindred Souls, in addition to recording with longtime collaborators like drummer Dave Silliman and bassist Skip Ward before heading to Capitol Studios in LA for horns and strings.
"The whole process was so fun and loose," says Muller, "and working with Rob is always great because he's as headstrong and obsessive as I am, so when we decide to go for something, we go all the way."

Watch the "Tin Palace" music video here:

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