Working closely with producer Tim Kevin, That’s What the Music Is For is The Apartments’ eighth album. Peter Milton Walsh began recording it in 2023 like a master pointillist, one touch at a time, one song at a time. In between shows that took him from Mexico City, Sydney or San Francisco to Lisbon and Marseilles, Walsh had access to studio time without real constraints.
Talking about That’s What the Music is For, he says: "Since I didn’t go into the studio with an album ready set of songs, but instead took pieces in to record as soon as they were written and worked on the music in the studio whenever it was available, it wasn’t clear that I’d get to that rainbow’s end—a world of songs that feel like they belong together: an album.
Yet, over the course of recording and as the songs gathered with one another, they began to reveal a story about time—of how past and present so often trade places and that in music and in memory, the people who have gone keep moving in and out of our lives—where can they live now, except in song? We will be saying goodbye to them in bits and pieces for the rest of our lives".
A world of smoke, gin, and regrets; one of melancholy, brass, and strings. A world of refinement and integrity. Life as it comes to us, with its share of joy and sorrow. Peter Milton Walsh’s compositions are true songs in that they tell stories, stories that stay with us, stories we can each finish in our own way. That may well be the essence of great art.