To play or not to play? Following a calling.

We’re nursing cups of tea in a mellow down-town café when Pete Heimbold enters. His voice is low, careful. His demeanor one of quiet confidence. Pete, who performs under the name Pete Francis, is one of the three members of Dispatch, the cult East Coast band that captured all of our tortured teenage souls and gave independent music new meaning at the turn of the millennium. Though Dispatch is officially broken up, they recently played three sold-out shows in Madison Square Garden. And, perhaps more tellingly, one still cannot go through an orientation at many-a-college without hearing an earnest youth playing a Dispatch song on his stereo, or his guitar. The Lattice Group met with Pete to learn what it’s like living the life of a musician; the glitz, the glamour, and well, the day-to-day.

After a leisurely hour of chatting, Pete leaves us with a pot of peppermint tea and a sense of puzzlement. We are struck by how radically different his high-energy onstage persona is from the soft-spoken newly-wed we breakfasted with. We realize that like the black and white of Pete’s private and public characters, a career in the arts has two contrasting sides. On the one hand is the liberating independence of being self-employed. No boss, no hours, no facetime. The backside is no benefits, no regular schedule and no job security.

And yet, there it is: the open road, the fans, the undeniable adrenaline rush of the live stage. Try it only if you dare. Or, as Pete avows, if you are compelled.

How did you start playing music?
"When I went to college, I was very interested in playing soccer. For a while I thought about playing professionally. But during the winter of my senior year of high school I had an ankle injury…and essentially my ankle never got better so I couldn’t play soccer. It was at that time that I started to get more involved with the guitar. I really delved into playing. I played a lot in the stairwells, because you sound good when you’re singing in a stairwell, sort of like singing in a shower. I probably bugged my roommates playing a lot. Music started taking over my life. And there began my career. I really didn’t think of it as a career. I just thought that this is what I loved to do. And I think that’s the most important thing that I’m realizing now: I love to play music, I love to work with musicians. There’s nothing like being able to say that your work is your love. So I feel really fortunate."

How was Dispatch formed?
"In January of my freshman year at college I met a guy named Brad Corrigan, who was two years above me…we became friends and musically it was just a perfect mix…there was something about the harmonies and the songs that really worked. And then in February I met Chad Urmston, who was a really great songwriter, and who played the trombone. He and I started a kind of rock band. As time went on, I really wanted all three of us to be a band together. But it was kind of hard to get them to work together and say: 'Okay, we’ll be a band.' But finally it did happen. I remember us going down to the college concert hall and playing and singing and realizing that we really did have something. Something that could be a band. The band came together in 1995 but we didn’t start filling houses until about ’98, 99. I guess it kind of reached a boiling point: the work we had done sort of shot out of a canon and the audiences went from a couple hundred to a thousand, then to couple thousand."

The band had broken up, but then came more shows…?
"After putting out 4 studio albums, a live CD, and a DVD, we took a break. Because creatively, after working with your friends for a long time and then being on the road, it just reaches a point where you’ve got to take a break. You think to yourself that it isn’t working the same way it did those first couple of years; it kind of lost some of its appeal. We took a couple of years off and then we returned to do what we called 'The Last Dispatch,' because we though it would be our final show. We were going to do it at the Hatch Shell in Boston, and we heard that bands would get ten to twenty thousand, maybe thirty thousand in the audience. We hoped we would get something of that amount. Little did we know that by ten or eleven o’clock in the morning there were 50,000 people there. And by 1 or 2 there were 70,000. And when we got onstage at 5:30 there were over 100,000 people there. It kind of shut down Boston. That was extraordinary, it really was. I don’t think we really thought about playing together again after that.

"Cut to three years later, Chad and Brad brought to my attention the real problems that exist in the country of Zimbabwe, made me aware of the famine, the HIV, and the economy that was spinning out of control. They proposed that we do a benefit concert. Chad spent some of his freshman year in Zimbabwe, and we sang a song called 'Elias,' which I always loved. Elias was a friend of his in Zimbabwe. I thought it was a great idea. So the show was for Zimbabwe as well as for some local charities. The show was planned to be at Madison Square Garden. I was a little nervous about how many people would come because the show in Boston was a free show, and in Madison Square Garden it would be paid tickets. It was in January and I remember my friend Ryan calling me and telling me it sold out in 15 minutes, the first show. So, they added a second show that sold out the next day. A couple of weeks later they were like let’s add another show, and then that sold out in 20 minutes…"

What are you working on now?
"To date I’ve done 5 solo records, I’ve toured around the country, and I’ve worked on some videos with my brother Eric, who’s a filmmaker, and that’s been great. I’m continuing with that, performing a lot on my own, and also working as a producer."

What are the best aspects of being a musician?
"Performing is incredible, just because there’s an energy you get from playing with people that’s indescribable, really. It’s worth all the hours on the road just to feel that people are receptive and love what you’re doing. And afterwards hearing them talk and hearing what a song has meant to them, how it’s inspired them. Probably my favorite thing that I’ve heard from a few people is that they said ‘your music made me pick up the guitar, made me write a song.’ When someone says that, it’s not just ‘oh, I love your song,’ it’s someone actually being inspired to do something that will affect their lives. And it’s almost like then what they create is going to inevitably affect someone else’s life."

How does the time you spend touring affect your personal life?
"Good question. It’s difficult to tour because it’s difficult to hold down relationships while you do it. I think with Dispatch, touring started to get old. We had a tour bus. Living on a tour bus might look nice, but there are 12 bunks on the inside and it’s kind of like sleeping on a ship…it’s sort of, not to be morbid, but a coffin-like space. And musicians are artists, and artists can have volatile personalities perhaps more than people in other careers. So it can be difficult. I think it was Duke Ellington who said that 'Music is my mistress.' I think that a lot of people are taken over by their art form and to them it’s more important than a relationship. But then I’ve also met a lot of artists that have a balance between both. That’s what I’m striving for. And I just got married."

How has getting married affected you and the decisions you make?
"Well, being married is great because you get to be with your best friend, pretty much. And you get to learn a lot more about yourself. I think it’s amazing how a good relationship makes one become a better person. I think it’s made me be more responsible. It’s made me think about how to spend my time in a more effective way. I am just really psyched that the person I’m with supports me 100% and loves what I do. I think that having my wife in my life really has opened my mind up to strengthening my work. I guess she has made me look at it in a way that I didn’t see it before. I can be very self-critical about my work, and then she says ‘What are you talking about? This is great.’ At the same time, it happens that I bring a song home and say 'Man, I’m so excited about this new song!' And she isn’t. And you think, there’s a good reason why. Women have a whole different perspective on life and art than men do, in many cases."

Do you plan on having children?
"Yes, I’d like to have children. And they’re going to be on the tour bus as little toddlers! I love children. Children are just so fresh with ideas, and it’s such a wonderful experience to be around them because they’re always excited to try the next thing."

How do you think having children will affect your career?
"It’s hard to travel with children, especially when they’re infants. But I think that my career will involve a lot of writing, which I can be at home doing, working in my office and my studio on new material. And so I can be home and not traveling, and in that sense maybe have more involvement in the child’s upbringing than a parent that may be working a full-time job. But there may be times when I’m going to be away from home and my wife will be with the baby. Overall though, I think we’ll both be very involved parents. I think that we’ll want to spend as much time as possible with them."

Do you think that having a very successful career and having a very successful family life – a real work-life balance –is realistic in your field?
"Well, I think that you learn as you go along, that’s what I’ve started to find out. I can’t say that 'I will have a successful musical career by taking these steps. And my family will be successful if I follow these things.' It’s a very creative process. And I don’t have any answers right now, other than trying to live— it’s a cliché— but trying to live one day at a time. I don’t know how be more eloquent than that."

Can you give some advice to young people who aspire to a career in the arts?
"I would say that there really are no norms, no set rules that one should follow. With Dispatch we did it in a different way, we did it based on what our instincts told us. I would suggest that people trust their instincts. There are going to be a lot of people that say to artists, 'you can’t do it that way. If you want to get to that place, you’re going to have to follow these steps.' When, in fact, that wasn’t the case with Dispatch. For instance, we played schools and colleges and that built up our audience while people would say that you have to get a booking agent earlier so you can establish more of a following earlier… I’ve found that so many artists that I really respect never paid attention to following a certain path. In the arts, it’s not necessarily that you have to go to this school and then to this school, and that you have to get these grades, and this will get you this job. It’s really about sticking to your ideas and what you’re creating. For instance, there were a lot of record companies that said 'you need to re-record these songs.' And we thought we didn’t need to do it. And we didn’t do it. We stayed with the material we had made. And I think that people appreciate that we stuck by our gut with the songs the way we did.

"I would say that to be an artist – to be a dancer, a musician, a painter, a sculptor – it has to be the only thing you want to do in the entire world. You have to be totally committed to your craft. Generally, I would say that if it’s your passion and you can’t see yourself doing anything but that, then you’ve found your calling."