I thought it was a clever name because The Nowhere Men don't exist except in my head and in my music - plus, I like that Beatles song.

This is multi-track studio stuff, but I might do a solo acoustic guitar gig now and then.

It's a digital democracy.

I'd be a studio musician, but I mainly want to license my music to other artists.

I, and various incarnations of The Nowhere Men, have played nightclubs, coffee houses, street corners, garden parties, kindergartens and college campuses since the Summer of Love.

This collection sounds somewhat like Bill Frisell, and I admire Marc Ribot's work with Tom Waits. The music of Chet Atkins, Jimi Hendrix, John Renbourn, and my uncle Wilbert Leppanen has informed my musical sensibilities through the years, but then again so has Grandpa Jones, Leonard Bernstein, Kenny Burrell, Big Bill Broonzy, and the entire British Invasion.

I enjoy Santa Fe, New Mexico. Also Paris, Rome and stops in between. The Spoleto (Italy) Art Festival is meraviglioso! I still like Motown.

My first guitar had a cowboy painted on it. I also owned a 1961 Gibson Les Paul Custom (proto SG style) "fretless wonder" with ebony fingerboard, triple gold-plated humbucking pick-ups, and a Bigsby tailpiece, but traded it for a Gibson B-25 flat top during the last great folk music scare. I also play my own handmade Peterson acoustic, a Fender Strat or a Godin on these tunes. The drums are Pearl Exports with generic cymbals (but recently upgraded to some decent Paiste's), a bass guitar from Wal-Mart, a Hohner harmonica, dry rice in a tin cup, AKG dynamic mics into a Tascam DP-01 recorder. Nothing fancy.

Check out the vocals in The Interstate of My Mind, and the most recent instrumental entitled String Theory above. My latest offerings (April '09) can be found on my new SoundClick page, Gary Peterson