Singer shares how a serious fall changed his life,
Singer-songwriter found strength, courage after surviving fall from cliff
“When I went to the hospital, they told me I must have been guided by angels.” PETER KATZ MUSICIAN
Toronto singer and songwriter Peter Katz may like living on the edge, but even he never expected to literally fall off a cliff to reinvent himself.
Actually, according to the Juno Award-nominated Katz, he was in Alberta conducting a class when he accidentally walked off the ledge, fell approximately 30 metres and landed squarely on the soles of his feet.
“There’s a little bit of a back story that got me to the top of that cliff,” said Katz during a recent phone conversation to promote his new album, “City of Our Lives,” which came out on Friday. “In 2013, I did a show in southern Alberta in Fort Macleod and I was booked at this beautiful venue called the Empress Theatre.
“In my mind, I was wondering who was going to come to the show. I walked out on stage and here were 300 people who knew all the words to my songs and were screaming my name and I was sort of scratching my head as to what had happened.”
Katz, perhaps best known for “Brother,” his hit duet with Royal Wood, acknowledges that his career has been hitand-miss in terms of mainstream popularity, although various songs have amassed four million plays over the years on numerous streaming platforms. But he discovered that an Alberta high-school mentoring program called FACES Education was using his songs, hence the booking.
“They take teenagers out to the mountains where they go hiking and rock-climbing and whitewater canoeing. But it’s not so much about the activities but doing challenging things, facing fears and developing empathy by supporting each other.
“It’s a free activity for the students because they’re earning high-school credits. They anchored the learning by using my songs, which meant that hundreds of kids every summer were essentially being forced to learn my music.”
Katz was so enamoured with the program that he now runs it annually, although pandemic safety protocols have forced him to give 2020 a pass.
“It’s become a huge part of my life,” he admits.
And it changed his life in 2017, when he was leading a class through a rappelling exercise, and a student accidentally walked away with a piece of equipment needed for Katz to safely descend the mountainside.
Even though he was wearing a harness, the equipment that Katz substituted didn’t work.
“I wasn’t thinking, and I walked off this cliff,” he recalls. “I fell about 100 feet in three seconds.”
Katz credits the harness and loose gravel for helping him survive as he landed on his feet.
“When I went to the hospital, they told me I must have been guided by angels,” he recalls. “‘You’re not dead or paralyzed.’ Initially, they thought that I didn’t even have a fracture.”
But Katz didn’t escape injury: he endured four months of rehab thinking he had a sprain before an MRI disclosed this “hole inside of the bone that was growing and growing and growing” and his physician thought he might be suffering from avascular necrosis.
“It just kept getting worse from there, and at one point I heard the word ‘amputation,’ ” Katz recalls.
Katz was spared that solution, and eventually underwent surgery to correct the problem, wearing a leg brace and taking a year to recover.
“To be honest, I feel it all the time still,” he admits. “I can walk, which wasn’t necessarily going to be the case.”
Katz called the experience life-changing.
“It changed me in a whole bunch of different ways,” he says of the ordeal. “You go through these things that you never want to go through or never wish to go through, but when you go through them you discover these things about yourself where you’re like, ‘Wow — I’m actually stronger than I realize.’
“It’s made me more courageous and fearless in a way. And it’s made me a lot more grateful. I realized that my life was very privileged before this.”
While the ordeal isn’t explicitly covered on “City of Our Lives,” smoothly sung songs like “Paper Thin,” “KMOTM” and “Everything is Different” offers the emotional resonance of the incident and adheres less to the folk idiom from which he first set out.
“I wanted to make music that wasn’t navel-gazing. I wanted to turn it into something that could be of service … I’ve always been a singer-songwriter-folk artist, but for me I wanted to make something where you feel it in your body first. I wanted to make something where it would make you dance on the kitchen floor that you were just crying on.
“‘City of Our Lives’ is such a product of that willingness to move beyond myself. I had to get over myself and get out of my own way in order to make something that can reach others in a more visceral way.”
It also led to Katz discovering a new performance format that has done quite well for him during the pandemic: keynote concerts.
Even though he was presenting them in person to different corporate and non-profit entities prior to pandemic isolation, Katz is now offering lectures and four-song performances virtually.
Since the pandemic began, he estimates he’s reached 25,000 people over Zoom and Webex.
“That originated from the mentoring work at FACES,” he explains. “A guy that I worked with pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Hey, I’ve seen the work you do with youth and I’ve seen your show. Part of the reason we wanted you to work at FACES is because we love your storytelling.’ ”
The colleague was a teacher and told Katz that guest lecturers regularly appeared at the school he was working at.
“‘You can turn your stories and your songs into something that would be really impactful with people,’ he told me. So he helped me craft a talk that was originally aimed at youth.”
Katz said he found it to be a very powerful experience and ended up doing it occasionally. Then, after one performance, a woman who was in the audience pitched him to appear at a tech conference called Fireside that featured several bigwigs giving inspiring speeches.
“It just so happens that the guy who organized it — his favourite song of all time was one I wrote called ‘The Camp Song’ — and he placed me as the closing keynote to 450 people on a Saturday night.”
Katz said when he stepped out on stage, he felt 450 people “lean in” and listen.
“It felt like everything I had done in my life made me perfect for this,” says Katz. “It was such a revelation because I didn’t play a concert — I played four songs. I was up there talking about my life as a musician, but the impact was the same I try to create in my shows — really connecting and bringing people together. That one talk changed my life.”
Some members of the audience pitched Katz to a speaking agency and all of a sudden, he found himself in front of a myriad of audiences ranging from the Ivey School of Business, RBC and government agencies to Community Ontario Living and other non-profits.
These days, people seem to be appreciating Katz’s virtual keynotes.
“People are really hurting and struggling at this time and the messages of my songs are about resilience and dealing with change,” he says. “It’s been relevant for these times.”
Although he’s enjoying his work and able to continue writing and performing music, Katz longs for the time when concerts re-emerge as a regular habit in peoples’ lives.
“I would do anything to be back in a live venue, play different places across the country, have the band back together and have my sound people,” he states. “I’d drop everything to get that back.
“But I’m conscious about how I’m still able to do this in this context because it’s been heartbreaking to see what’s happening to the music business. It rips my heart right out.”