Harder lights beacon with EP

When Peter Harder learned how to make music, his mother taped the notes on the piano keys.

“She would always play something, and I would mess around on there,” says the 27-year-old Winnipeg pop artist, recalling his earliest attempts at musical expression.

“I sometimes find old songs and they’re terrible. Like, the old music is so bad, it’s crazy, but I love knowing I was doing it like forever, my whole life.”

But Harder, who earlier this month released the independent five-song EP Lighthouse in the Water, certainly isn’t dismissing his first single, Fungus, released to YouTube in Grade 6.

“We had to write a song about something we hated, and I hated mushrooms, and I think I always will, unfortunately, so I wrote a song about that and then I went home and produced it,” he says. “And then I made a music video the same night and put it on YouTube, and then the whole class had to watch it. So that was the first time that I used it. It was on Garageband for iPod Touch.

“I always thought growing up that everybody on the radio produced and wrote their own music. I thought that was what you had to do, so that’s what I was trying to do. And now I’m so glad that I did that.”

From that digital toolkit — one Harder doesn’t take for granted — the songwriter honed his approach to independent production, inspired by the music of Lana Del Ray and Lorde, particularly the latter, New Zealand-born pop star’s song Ribs, released on 2013’s Pure Heroine.

Harder, whose prior releases include the 2018 EP As the Universe, 2020’s eight-track collection Crystals, and 2023’s Phosphene, continued to find inspiration in those artists on Lighthouse in the Water, which will be feted Saturday at Sidestage with opening sets by Scarlette Alexis of Solaire and Lana Winterhalt.

The bedroom-pop songwriter says he used to observe from a bird’s-eye position for his lyrical content, relying on the aerial vantage to contextualize himself within — and differentiate himself from — a comparative crowd. But on the more introspective Lighthouse, the messages were outward bound.

The idea behind the project was “to say things to my partner that I feel for him that maybe I have a harder time saying out loud,” says the artist, who’s also inspired by the music of U.S. singer-songwriter Ryan Beatty.

“There’s a song called White Teeth and every time I listen to it, I almost start to cry,” Harder says, referring to a cut off Beatty’s 2023 record, Calico.

Lighthouse opener Disinhibition was written in hindsight, and Harder calls the track — which opens with the lyric, “Sorry to love you like I wouldn’t wanna be loved” — the hardest one to write and perform.

Citrus — not a B-side to Fungus — is a song about attachment styles that takes lyrical inspiration from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel Near to the Wild Heart in its first lyric, “A little citrus, a little lime in my ears, open the cut, tell me your fears.”

The lovely, stripped-back and sewn-up More of You seems set on a cohabitated desert island, a location that feels most directly aligned with the EP. “I’m dying just to see a fraction of your mind,” Harder sings on the track, a bridge connecting two sides of shared territory.

On Lighthouse in the Water, the Winnipeg singer gives more of his own mind, and listeners can hear the fulfilled promise, the surreal depth and the buoyant quality of Harder’s crystal-clear voice as it lifts and falls through changing winds.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman