His manifest showmanship notwithstanding, Peter Stuart is, to his audience, more like a friend that a star. His songs, wry and trenchant and attentive to detail, articulate those thoughts and feelings that exist, for most people, just outside the reach of expression. Peter's gift is the ability to find exuberance in the simple things, to hear the music in a silent thought, to sing the multiplicity of a single moment. His music is a celebration of the day-to-day, an intelligence and irony without bitterness, a willingness to accept the paradoxical stuff of life.

Where the first album was the culmination of Peter's years of solo performing and songwriting, the new Dog's Eye View record, DAISY, moves the band's music into a deeper, richer emotional terrain. "In a lot of ways, this record is a kind of journey," Peter confesses. "Not that it's a concept record, but it's a kind of journey from 'The Trouble With Love'--which is this song saying 'if you actually like me, I'll run away,' which is what people do: when things are good, they bail on them -- to 'Umbrella,' which is the pursuit of something new, a kind of 'hey, wait, there's something on the horizon and I'm ready to deal with it, I'm ready to chase it."

The album's title itself comes from a kind of mental journey. First Peter intended on calling the album, "Falling In Place," after one of the new songs. And then, Daisy, a favorite canine aquaintance of his passed on and he began leaning towards using her name as the album title. "In the great world of coincidences," he marvels, "I happened to pick up The Great Gatsby again and I realized that Daisy Buchanan, a character in the book, is this symbol of unattainable love for Jay Gatsby. There's always that one thing that's outside your reach that you can never have and 'Daisy' was the symbol of that. So, I guess the title falls somewhere between a dog and a great novel."

DAISY, the album, is filled with those kinds of profound, perhaps even silly, conundrums. While one song "Homecoming Parade" illustrates how a "a return trip to your old hometown as a grown person instantly turns you into a scared little kid again," the flipside is "Hollywood," a full-bore electric riff-rocker castigating the allure of glitz and glamour while copping to the appeal of cheap seduction. "It's amazing what some people are willing to give up for attention, fame and love," Peter observes. "And depressing when you realize that you're not above such behavior." If one can neither go home again nor to run away to Hollywood, then the only respite is to look for the answers within, to build an authentic life based on who one really is. "Arrival," he writes in "Last Letter Home," is nothing more than stopping for a little while to catch your breath/Before you get moving...When you take on the world/The world takes you on." Peter Stuart's world is a place where anywhere you catch your breath is home and the journey through that world is what he writes about on DAISY.

Life's grim complexities and fearsome contradictions hit Peter when he was eight years old and his father died suddenly. "The years going around in an idyllic world where there's mother, father, family and everything that proceeds day-to-day...and then there's a huge shift in everything that you accepted as a given...," he remembers. "O.K., you know all those things you counted on? Absolutely? Any one of them can be taken away at any moment. I went from being completely happy-go-lucky to having a really dark edge ptryy quickly." Peter found a kind of solace in an album by Cat Stevens called Tea For The Tillerman. "I went home and put it on," he recalls. "Here was this song called 'Father and Son'; all of a sudden, there was this songwriter who talked about a relationship between a father and a son and that kind of blew my head apart. I've always felt that every generation needs to hear about the same things in a different way because times change and people change. Even though the roots of problems are sort of the same, the specifics differ. I've always sought out those trandscendent moments where you listen to something and it affects you very deeply."

With his acoustic guitar and notebooks full of songs, Peter Stuart worked his way up through the small club circuit to find himself spending a large part of 1994 on world tours with Counting Crows (his friend Adam Duritz contributes some guest vocals to DAISY), Tori Amos, and Cracker as a showstopping scene-stealing opening act. He wound up selling some 6,000 copies of his homemade demo tape on the road; the demo led to his signing with Columbia Records. "everything falls apart," a track from the first Dog's Eye View album, became a radio smash in the summer on 1996, bringing Peter, his band, and his music into the public eye. "everything falls apart" was a riff on the way people sabotage their own lives to have something to do," Peter offers by way of explanation of the way DAISY reaches beyond his debut efforts. One of the tracks on DAISY, "'Falling In Place' was a maturation," says Peter. "It was this idea of 'hey, maybe it's O.K. that everything's alright. Maybe it's fine that everything feels good right now.' And, I'm not going to subvert it.'"