Water Tower Sessions: Zach Pietrini

[Editor’s Note: Zach Pietrini is a singer-songwriter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For his entry in our Water Tower Sessions series, he performed unreleased song “Long Distance Phone Call” at Wire & Vice Studios. He also penned an artist essay for us, explaining the session and the backstory to the song. ]

This was a one shot, one mic, one take version of an unreleased song titled Long Distance Phone Call.  Andrew Feller shot it, Kyle White engineered and little ol me performed it.  It’s a pretty brutal song and we wanted to capture the raw essence of it, so we decided to let the performance speak for itself.  There is no studio magic, just a mic placed in one spot, I was responsible for controlling dynamics and Andrew took to capturing the spirit of the performance.

This song is about as personal as it gets.  It’s about the revelation that no matter what you say to someone, you won’t truly be heard.  Specifically by those closest to me.  It was a hard song to write.  It’s often hard to sing.  So I wanted to shoot a video to lessen that pain but document the truth.  I’ve also noticed a continuously waning ability of an audience to hang with quiet, slow, sad songs.  As a way to protect myself I decided to release this on my Patreon and nowhere else.  I’m not gonna sit here and thank streaming services for miniscule pay and unfair treatment, especially with a song that means so much to me, so I refuse to let them have this. I don’t think this song is for everyone.  And I don’t think everyone deserves this song.  Only those willing to honor it with their attention.

You can find it, and other similar songs at www.patreon.com/zachpietrini.  In many ways, this release (with about 5 other songs that are slowly rolling out of Patreon) has become a way to say what I want in a safe space.  It’s not really a Zach Pietrini Band release.  It’s a Zach Pietrini release.  It’s stripped down, it’s quiet, it’s largely about recovery from trauma, which is not an easy thing to sell on a Friday night.  But it is important and it is important to me.

Zach Pietrini

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Zach Pietrini is a singer-songwriter based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.