Songs about love, life and T.P.: Heather Pierson expects to sing it all at Godfrey Daniels

• The Heather Pierson Duo will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20, at Godfrey Daniels, 7 E. 4h St., Bethlehem
• Tickets, at $19.50 advance and $24.50 day of show, remain available at GodfreyDaniels.org.
• After topping the Folk radio charts, Pierson is most recently known for her COVID-19 pandemic song "The Toilet Paper Song"

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Over the past 24 years, pianist/singer/songwriter Heather Pierson has released 14 albums worth of original material in a widely varied range of genres.

She has performed in various configurations, including bands, trios, duos and solos. Her Heather Pierson Acoustic Trio hit No. 2 on the Folk Radio Charts in 2015 with its song "Still She Will Fly" and No. 1 on the Folk Radio Albums chart with its 2017 full-length debut, "Singin’."

Yet these days, Pierson may be just as well known for her silly 2020 coronavirus pandemic lament "Toilet Paper Song," which went viral and racked up 60,000 views on YouTube.

The song chronicles the anxiety of dealing with toilet paper shortages during the COVID-19 era.

"Well, it certainly brought the most eyeballs," Pierson said in a recent phone call from her car while driving on Interstate 81 in Roanoke, Va., heading from a short tour of Florida to her home in New Hampshire.

"It’s so funny to write all of these songs about peace and love and all that, and then what’s gotten the most attention so far is a song about toilet paper."

Pierson expects to perform songs about all of those deeper topics — and just perhaps T.P., too — when she and bassist Shawn Nadeau perform as the Heather Pierson Duo at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20, a Godfrey Daniels at 7 E. 4th St., Bethlehem.

Tickets, at $19.50 advance and $24.50 day of show, remain available at GodfreyDaniels.org.

'Just a kid who couldn't decide'

Of course, Pierson also will offer songs throughout her extremely varied catalog, which includes Americana, blues, New Orleans jazz, vocal chants, instrumental piano and folk.

“I often joke that I’m just a kid who couldn’t decide what she wanted to do when she grew up," Pierson said.

"But I think the truer answer is that I find music to [be] such an incredible language and it’s spoken in so many different dialects. And I just like to bring my skills to as many of those dialects as I can.

“I love the exploration of that. And just, ‘How can I bring my skills to bear on writing this kind of a thing or composing that?' kind of a thing. I just take inspiration from so many different songwriters and different ones.”

Pierson had perhaps her commercial peak in 2015-17 with The Heather Pierson Acoustic Trio, with Nadeau on bass and Davy Sturtevant on assorted strings and cornet.

The trio’s debut EP, "Still She Will Fly," had a folk radio hit with its title track and three other songs in the Top 100 singles on Folk radio in 2015.

"Singin’" followed in June 2017, and debuted at No. 1 on the Folk radio charts.

But the pandemic temporarily slowed Pierson — except for "The Toilet Paper Song."

Career on a roll

Pierson said, "I can tell you exactly where and when" "The Toilet Paper Song" came about.

"In March of 2020, the trio I was touring with, we were actually halfway through a six-week tour to promote the album I had released in the fall of 2019, which was ‘Live Mistakers.’

“So we were halfway through this tour and we were in Florida when everything started shutting down, and so we had this really long drive, this very strange, surreal trip back to New Hampshire.

"And I was just scrolling on my phone and just mining the humor or whatever. And I found there were these reports that the stores were running out of toilet paper.

"So I wrote this poem — it started as a poem — while Shawn was driving, and I read it to him and he was, like, ‘Oh, we have to get home and record this thing!’ And I was, like ‘Oh, I got to write the song first.’

“That was pretty much the focus during the long drive home. Just writing the song and recording it.

"It definitely brought some humor at a time when everything just was so scary and strange. And it still gets a lot of views on YouTube ... And I still get comments once in a while.

"And it definitely brought a lot of new people into the fold."

Tim Shellmer

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Courtesy of HeatherPierson.com

More musical journeys ahead

Pierson has since continued her musical journey.

In 2021, she reunited with Leah Boyd, with whom she had played in bands early in her career, to form Peaceful Means, a duo that plays original and cover songs nurturing nonviolent consciousness.

"She and I kind of reconnected in recent years and a colleague of hers suggested, well, you’re both so musical and have [a] wonderful sense of this nonviolent consciousness, wouldn’t it be great if you wrote music that sort of lifts up those ideas?'" Pierson said.

“And so that’s what we’ve done."

Pierson said Peaceful Means is working on its first studio recordings — it has nine songs recorded, she said — and recently launched a Kickstarter campaign "to get our project over the finish line" that reached 30% of its goal in its first two days, she said.

In 2022, Pierson also revived a nearly decade-long idea: A group called The Potboilers that adds to her trio vocalist and guitarist Rafe Matregrano for "an immersive, collaborative, spontaneous, multi-genre musical experience whose motto is 'Groove plus melody equals joy.'"

"It’s a project I’ve had in mind for a long time and, coming out of the pandemic, we’re finally finding its feet," Pierson said. "It’s kind of a pet project to express myself in ways that I haven’t done."

But Pierson also still is proud of "The Toilet Paper Song."

“It even got played on Dr. Demento" — the popular longtime national radio show that focuses on novelty songs, she said.

"Which, if my father had lived to see, he would have been so proud. Cause he loved Dr. Demento when I was a kid.”