Peter Breinholt

Peter Breinholt (born March 31, 1969 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) is a recording artist popular in the Salt Lake City, Utah local music scene.

Breinholt grew up in Devon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where his father Robert H. Breinholt taught at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is brother to Jeffrey Breinholt.^[1]

Career

Peter taught himself to play piano, guitar, and drums growing up. Around the age of 11 he began writing and tracking his own songs. Later, as a college student at the University of Utah, Peter began performing at local coffee houses and restaurants. The response was so positive that Peter was quickly pressed to track his compositions for release. The resulting recording, "Songs About the Great Divide" caused a sensation in Utah, eventually being described by Salt Lake Magazine as "an underground classic on Utah college campuses". It became the best-selling, independently released CD ever in the state, almost entirely by word of mouth. Groups like the marching band at Brigham Young University soon began playing the song "You Wear Flowers" on the football field at halftime, and local high school choirs doing their own arrangements of the song. Breinholt began selling out major concert halls in his home state of Utah and eventually in surrounding states.

Within a year of the album's release Breinholt & Big Parade played nearly 100 shows and continued building their fan base. It was during these concerts the expanded Big Parade road-tested many of the songs that later appeared on Breinholt's second studio album, "Heartland". The underlying theme of that record is travel.

Some of Breinholt's best-known concerts have taken place at the 1,500-seat Eccles Amphitheater on the mountainside of Robert Redford's Sundance Ski Resort in Provo Canyon, UT. Breinholt's live album, Live September, was recorded there over three sold-out nights days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.^[2] The album has become one of Breinholt's most enduring recordings.

Other projects

Peter's songs have also been heard in CNN stories, movie trailers, and feature-length films. His song "Lullaby" helped inspire Timothy Ballard, an FBI special agent, to leave the Federal Bureau of Investigations and create Our Underground Railroad - a private organization dedicated to rescuing children who have been sold into sex slavery internationally. As part of the effort, Peter recorded a new arrangement of his song (which had pervasively been released on his "Deep Summer" album) and gave it to Tim Ballard's organization. In 2008, Breinholt wrote and performed six songs for the movie Everybody Wants to Be Italian (2007). He also contributed two songs to the DVD release of the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Resolved. A song Breinholt wrote as a teenager is the current theme song for the nationally syndicated television show, BrideAccess.com. His music was also used in 1999 to launch computer company iOmega's Hip Zip, a technological predecessor to the iPod.

Breinholt has also produced albums for other artists, including "the YMAD album" which was released in August 2015.

Personal Life

Peter is married to Rebecca Pulsipher Breinholt and together they have four children: Nathan, William, Mary, and Jane. They live in Holladay, Utah.

Peter's oldest son, Nathan, is well known for his drumming debut in 2001, as well as his gift of imitating every variety of accent spoken in the United Kingdom.

Recordings

• Songs about the Great Divide (1993)
• Heartland (1996)
• Deep Summer (1999)
• Live September (2001)
• Noel (2002)
• All the Color Green (2006)
• The Best of Peter Breinholt (May 2008)

References

External links

• [peterbreinholt.com Peter Breinholt's website]