Peter Himmelman

Peter Himmelman is a singer-songwriter who since the early 1990s has maintained a thriving second career as a composer and scorer of films and TV series. In fact, Himmelman started in television, writing and hosting a live sketch comedy show in the late 1970s on a local cable access channel in his native Minneapolis; one of his recurring characters was named Sussman Lawrence, a name he co-opted for the band he started in 1980. After two independently released albums, Himmelman was signed as a solo artist to Island Records and moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles. Although he gained a certain amount of success as a singer-songwriter, he also began working in film scoring in the 1990s, starting with an indie romantic comedy, "Pyrates," starring Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick as a pair of young lovers with a fire fetish. A 1999 adaptation of an early Anne Tyler novel, "A Slipping-Down Life," found Himmelman writing all the songs that co-star Guy Pearce sings in his role as small-town North Carolina rock singer Drumstrings Casey. That same year, Himmelman began scoring the popular TV series "Judging Amy," for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award and won four ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards. When that show's former executive producer Hart Hanson created the police procedural "Bones" in 2005, Himmelman was brought in to provide the score. Himmelman has also scored the series "Men in Trees," "The Ex List," and "Scoundrels."