Andre Pessis July 9th 2008

Songwriter • Producer

Perhaps one of the best Guest Lecture events of 2008 so far, Pyramind was honored to welcome ultra-successful songwriter and former President of San Francisco’s NARAS Chapter, Andre Pessis. After a few minutes of background information about his “Rock Star” dreams, and early performances with his rock band back in the late 1960’s, Andre told the story of how he hired a friend of his, the young Huey Lewis, to record a demo (for $20) of a song he wrote for a documentary about the Vietnam War titled “Walking on a Thin Line”. This song was never released as part of the movie, but turned out to be one of Huey Lewis and News’ biggest hits, selling over 10 million copies of the album it was released on.




Andre played the song and then went on to talk about his realization that he had to establish himself while he was “Hot” and went to many publishers and finally focused on writing a bunch of songs for many local bay area icons. One highlight he mentioned was writing a song for/with Bonnie Raitt with local songstress Bonnie Hayes. He also spoke about writing many country songs with various singers including a song that charted top 10 on the Billboard country charts with superstar Waylon Jennings. There were many aspects that Andre covered including the need to always be selling themselves as artists or songwriters. He also told the group of about 15 students that you can never sell yourself enough and that they have a chance to create art and make a living on it as long as they work constantly to refine their craft, and not get bogged down with the process, but rather to write whenever possible and to make time everyday to get ideas out.




Overall it was an amazing presentation that shows how anyone can be successful as long as they focus on what they love, and work hard to both establish and maintain their relationships now and in the future. We hope to have Andre back at least one more time before the end of the year!