Peter Mayer

Peter Mayer is a folk singer-songwriter and guitarist based in Stillwater, Minnesota, who has worked as a full-time touring performer for roughly three decades. His writing turns on nature imagery, interconnectedness and a strain of nature mysticism, set against lighter songs about ordinary subjects such as clothing and vegetables. He has released eleven full-length albums, among them Earth Town Square, Million Year Mind, Straw House Down, Heaven Below, Elements, Midwinter, Bountiful, Third Street, Novelties, Catching Rain and the download-only Uncrowded Sky, with combined sales reported at more than one hundred thousand copies. He holds fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Bush Foundation, and his songs have been recorded by Kathy Mattea, David Wilcox and Claudia Schmidt. Mayer is most widely known for Blue Boat Home, written in 2001, which sets his lyric about the earth as a shared vessel to Hyfrydol, the Welsh hymn tune composed by Rowland Prichard in 1844. The song was included in Singing the Journey, the 2005 supplement to the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition, and readers of UU World voted it their favorite Unitarian Universalist hymn in a 2012 survey. It has since travelled well beyond that denomination, appearing in songbooks, church hymnals and folk radio programming. In April 2025 Skinner House Books published Blue Boat Home as an illustrated children's book, with artwork by the Canadian printmaker Sue Todd, whose images pair an adult and a child looking out at stars, fish and neighbors while the text considers the scale of the universe. Mayer performs mainly solo with acoustic guitar, and occasionally in expanded settings: a September 2026 date at The Historic Auditorium in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, pairs him with the St. Croix Valley String Collective performing newly written string arrangements of his catalog, and is billed as that venue's first live audience recording.

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