I found LaPeer while listening to Deezer's flow mode.
It recommended to me '90s Kids (Uj4XXza414Y) with a neat album cover.
I liked it, so happening upon the album page and then the artist page I realized that I had just been directed to possibly the most indie artist that I had ever naturally found.
He had 16 Deezer fans.
Even with this revelation, I didn't listen to the other tracks he had yet. I tried one or two but they weren't nearly as upbeat as '90s Kids.
Regardless, the track made its way to the top of my playlists, and after enough listening I gave the other tracks another try, and yet again struck gold.
In the same album, another track, California (vkFf4qovfFk), I liked even better than '90s Kids, and Pretty Girl (_J87f9i1axs) was also great.
It wasn't until that I finally started listening to all of his other music. I imported all of his albums into my collection and since then have heard everything he's put out.
His music describes a scenario that you can completely lose yourself in. If they aren't absolutely full of imagery, they have so little that the imagery comes from any of your personal experiences that the song's hyper-specific mood would fit. Pretty Girl is the perfect example of this, every time I listen I imagine the same place where I feel that the song is set. I'm transported there.
The About Page
A descendent of some of Lapeer's earliest settlers, 24‐year‐old LaPeer's roots run deep into the heart of the Michigan city that bears his name. The son of a brilliant violinist, LaPeer grew up on music, classic literature and travel—exploring over 30 countries. Of all the experiences that have marked his songwriting, it was a season of wrestling with a relationship trapped in ambiguity that resulted in over a hundred new songs. LaPeer is releasing four EPs to tell us what became of his story; one of love, loss and everything in between.
His first fall EP, When Lands Are Golden, debuted in Oct. 2016. These six tracks were written simply—all on one guitar—then brought to life by producer Gabriel Wilson (Bethel, Kari Jobe, John Mark McMillan). With instrumentation from musicians Jesse Proctor (John Mark McMillan), Jason Barrows (Josh Garrels), Kendall Fowler, and Jeremy Larson (Sleeping at Last, Violents), the EP features thick 80's synth pads, rich string arrangements, and effortless melodies. "Heart Haunting," the debut single, was recently added to the Starbucks "Coffeehouse" Spotify playlist and can be heard throughout Starbucks locations worldwide. LaPeer continued his EP series with In Blistering Cold on Feb. 24 featuring the single "Torchlight." Now fans can get the third installment titled To Brighter Dawns everywhere featuring the track "Men Without Lungs."
Fresh off the heels of tours with the Grammy-nominated artist Gungor, John Mark McMillan, Kings Kaleidoscope and Propaganda, LaPeer is set to release a brand new EP on June 15. iTunes pre-order begins May 25.
Gallery
I found these images by inspecting the network requests on his "media" page. While almost none of the images were archived when the site was up, Squarespace didn't delete them. Digging into the source code, I found that Squarespace adds a comment into the head of the HTML which led me to the canonical URL, nate-lapeer-f3hx.squarespace.com, proving my suspicions that the site has expired but not yet been deleted. Hey, if Squarespace ever suffers a hash breach...
2022
While I haven't looked too deeply into his current endeavours, it seems that he's now a wedding photographer (Squarespace again, chameleon-poodle-a5st). The latest update I can find writing this is .
You could definitely say that I’m passionate about stories… for one, I worked full time as a song writer for nearly a decade of my life.
To me this is a loss of one of my favorite artists, but it's more important to me that he's happier with his current work.
I'm just grateful that I was given the best music.
This shrine
Everything you see here was archived in one way or another, and a few images even have multiple different sources as fallbacks, so you'll hopefully only see broken images if Squarespace and Wayback are both permanently down.
I don't trust any of this media not to leave the internet, though, so I ask that, if you can, mirror this page and its contents. Use wget -m -p -E -k -np on the URL to attempt to save a local copy of everything here, or use some kind of extension to download the images that your user agent rendered.