Video premiere: Peel’d (Lewis Pesacov), ‘What Nature Tells Me’

Kevin Bronson on September 27th, 2018

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Even if in self-deprecating moments he thinks he might be just “a guy in a band,” Lewis Pesacov has always been more. Pesacov, who played guitar in the well-respected Los Angeles bands Foreign Born and Fool’s Gold, is a producer who has worked with the likes of Best Coast, FIDLAR, Nikki Lane, Oberhofer, Guards, Happy Hollows and Valley Queen (among others) and a composer whose work has been showcased at festivals, museums and galleries (including the 2013 chamber opera “The Edge of Forever”). In addition, he has traversed the myriad guitar stylings of music from Africa and India.

In short, Pesacov is an explorer, even a seeker of the transcendental, but until now his explorations have never included himself.

On Friday, he debuts his first music as Peel’d, a solo project that has yielded the EP “Mother Father Sister Brother” (out on Nov. 16). The first single “What Nature Tells Me,” an atmospheric “note to self” that’s as soothing as any New Age anthem, marks the first time Pesacov has sung lead vocals.

As the lyric “Be still, know that you are / Yourself and nothing more” suggests, the music was born out of Pesacov’s identity crisis in the aftermath of Fool’s Gold’s hiatus after six years, three albums and a host of tours. Not too long before, in 2012, Fool’s Gold had played to a crowd of 65,000 people at sunset in Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv while supporting the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “I realized that I’d always identified as being a guy in a band. It was the story I told myself and the world,” he says. “I felt confused having suddenly lost the cornerstone of my personal narrative.”

At the time, many of his contemporaries were finding success in and out of music’s mainstream. Pesacov found himself in wrestling matches with his ego and dove into meditation and self-inquiry. “Suddenly, every time I sat down with a guitar or at the piano, a new song would emerge,” he recalls. “Music making became an act of devotion for me.” He wrote more than 30 songs in all, which languished for a time as he and his wife had their first child, a daughter. Yet through Vedic chanting and singing songs to his newborn, Pesacov found his own voice, and the idea that those songs could constitute a solo project flourished.

The lyrics of “What Nature Tells Me,” the songwriter says, are intended as mantras. The tune was inspired in part by the great naturalist John Muir: “When you tug at a single thing in nature, you’ll find it attached to the rest of the world.”

Director Jesse Fleming’s video for the song is another apt reminder.

||| Watch: The video for “What Nature Tells Me”