Peter Leidy, singing commentator

A Wisconsin Public Television contributor explains his puzzling parodies

by Scott Gordon November 3, 2008

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Anyone whose TV happened to be tuned to Wisconsin Public Television's Here And Now public-affairs program on Oct. 24 must've been dumbstruck by that evening's final segment. A friendly-looking, middle-aged bald man named Peter Leidy, decked out in tacky red, white, and blue, marched in place while belting out a satirical song about Wisconsin voters, Sarah Palin, John McCain, and just about every other related subject. He wore American flag boxer shorts over his jeans, broke into wavering falsettos, and even picked up a plunger, pumping it up and down like a baton when the song came around to Joe The Plumber. Leidy's been lending his "singing commentary" to the show since it started up in 2003. He lives on Madison's near-east side and makes his living in "human serviceland," working with people with disabilities, but he's also got a penchant for putting the news into parody songs. "Usually, it's last-minute, the show's tomorrow and I'm still kind of thinking about, what would be a fun song," he says. "What are people talking about—sometimes, what are people not talking about?" Yet for all the attempts at humor, his songs can also be almost dryly informative: "The point of what I do isn't just to come out there and say, 'This is what I think is right.' It's more like a different lens to look at the issue through," he adds. Just before Election Day, Leidy sat down with Decider to discuss some hot issues and how he's belted them out. (Both videos courtesy of Wisconsin Public Television.)

John McCain, to the tune of "My Way"

Decider: It sounds like you're saying McCain has become a wimp.
Peter Leidy: If I were to write the lyrics now, it'd be different. This was maybe a couple months ago. It must've been after the convention, because he had picked Sarah Palin. I didn't do this for Here And Now, this was just kind of my own thing. I don't know how well it stands as just a song on its own. My whole point with this is, he has said in the past that he's not comfortable talking about his experience being a prisoner of war. But then, a lot of his campaign and what he has said has been about that. The sort of joke in the song is that it keeps coming back. The other part of the song was that I really believed that Sarah Palin is not a McCain kind of a pick. I could be wrong. I'm not the only person who has suggested this. I just think he wanted Joe Lieberman or someone like that. I think that other people said, "You're either picking Sarah Palin or you kiss this thing goodbye, baby." But I still think it wasn't a good pick for any number of reasons. The people who she excites, when it comes down to it, were gonna hold their nose and vote for McCain anyway. That's just me. I'm not a professional strategist.
There's another layer of a joke with this kind of a song, which is that no one will ever confuse me with anyone who can actually pull this song off as a real vocalist. I've used this song for any number of things. My favorite "My Way" I ever did was one I never recorded. I wrote it after Larry Craig got busted in the men's room of the Minneapolis airport. I personally thought that was my best version of the lyrics for this song.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's voter-registration lawsuit, to the tune of Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Going Nowhere" (Here And Now, Sept. 19)

PL: There's so many different recordings of ["You Ain't Going Nowhere"]. I can't even remember the last time I heard the Dylan version of that.
D: Did you have The Byrds' version in mind?
PL: I'll tell you what I was thinking about. We do a thing in our neighborhood with a bunch of people who like to do singalongs, potluck, drink beer, and break out tunes. This is the way we normally sing it when we do it.
D: How do you determine when a news story offers enough material for a whole song?
PL: This issue with the lawsuit, to me, had a funny smell. It seemed to me like, this is another effort to suppress to vote. I don't care which party it came from. It happens to be the Republican party that tends to do more of that, or tries to, so the fact that the Attorney General is the co-chair of the state McCain campaign, and it was just after the convention.

The whole damn campaign, to the tune of "Stars And Stripes Forever" (Here And Now, Oct. 24)

D: You're cramming lots of subject matter into one song here.
PL: It was sort of a "We're coming to the end of this now, what have we been through, where are we at, how ridiculous is some of the stuff we've had to listen to and deal with?" I knew it would be the last chance for me to do anything before the election on the show. I knew there were gonna be tons of lyrics. In fact, I think this broke my record for how many lyrics in one song. It was a question of, "Am I gonna be able to get all the lyrics out?" and I barely managed to.
D: What's with the boxers over the jeans? Are you saying we all emerge from this looking a little ridiculous?
PL: [Laughs.] I wish I'd put that much thought into it. I basically took every piece of red, white, and blue clothing I could find—oh, and the plunger at the end—and just tried to put myself together.
D: What are you trying to express with these instrumental breaks where you're just open-mouthed?
PL: It's kind of like a Warner Brothers cartoon kind of, the Road Runner ran off the end of the cliff and he's about to fall down, and then miraculously doesn't, but Wile E. Coyote does. It's just ridiculous.