Peterborough-based composer David Kowal, who may be best known around town for playing at the Bagel Mill, learned Monday that his original song, “Yours,” has been submitted for Grammy consideration in the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance Category.
The first round of Grammy voting will take place from Oct. 12 to Oct. 22.
“I’m absolutely thrilled my song was accepted for consideration,” Kowal said. “The song came to me about a year and a half ago. The first line just came to me, and I knew I had something really cool there.”
The song, which is from Kowal’s newest album, “Long Haul,” is the composer’s paean to 38 years of marriage. One line, “I’ll be yours until the cranes take flight,” refers to the fact that cranes mate for life.
“It means ‘I’ll be yours forever,'” Kowal said. “People who have been married a long time get it. It’s ups and downs. ‘Yours’ is what you give to someone in that kind of relationship; it means ‘I’ll be yours, what do you need?’ And the line, ‘I’ll be yours through the darkest night;’ anyone who has been through it knows what that means.”
After recording “Yours,” Kowal put the song on Spotify, where it started to gain traction. In 2026, he submitted the song to the NPR Tiny Desk contest, and it was selected as a competitor.
“After that happened, the song got a lot more attention. It didn’t win, but it’s great that it got selected, because it’s still up on their website and has gotten a lot of exposure,” Kowal said. “People seem to like the chorus when it goes into that section, ‘I’ll be yours,’ because it goes into a different tempo and a different key.”
Kowal credits his creativity to “some kind of channeling from the universe.”
“The music just comes down from somewhere and comes through me, and I really believe that,” he said.
Kowal considered recording “Yours” with his band, but decided he wanted to create something more intimate.
“I wanted to do just solo piano and voice, and I recorded both at the same time. It’s just a recording of me singing and playing,” Kowal said.
Kowal’s recording of “Yours” can be found on YouTube.
Kowal calls himself a “journeyman composer.” For 28 years, he and his wife, Barbara Murphy, who are originally from Pittsburgh, PA, lived in Los Angeles, where Kowal wrote music for hundreds of television shows and movies.
“The first TV show I wrote for was ‘That ’70s Show.’ I wrote the music for ‘Eric Foreman Christmas,’ when he directs the Christmas pageant,” Kowal said. “A lot of music is background or incidental music; I wrote for ‘Good Morning America’; I wrote ‘Oprah.’ I’ve had a great run.”
Kowal also recently wrote the score for the independent film “Kissing Raindrops,” written by Robert Mann and directed by Matthew Espenshade, which he hopes to screen locally.
“It’s a serious story, a sad story. It’s about loss, and going to the darkest place, and how do you recover from that,” Kowal said.
Kowal is a lifelong musician and has been in a band since high school. He credits his parents and his high school band teacher with supporting his passion for music.
After graduating from Berklee College of Music, Kowal spent several years writing music for corporate training videos for Raytheon, Polaroid, and Digital Equipment Corporation.
“There was all kinds of money for music back then. It was a great gig,” Kowal said.
After the economic crash of 1989, in which Kowal lost 60% of his business, he and his wife returned to Pittsburgh. He found new opportunities in his hometown, including writing music for the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Kowal also taught at Berklee School of Music and taught middle school music for five years in Los Angeles.
“I loved teaching. It is amazing to be able to give back to kids the way my teachers and role models helped me,” he said.
Kowal and his wife moved to Peterborough in 2021, when Los Angeles was in the grip of COVID.
“Once everything went to Zoom, we started to think, huh, we don’t actually need to be in L.A. anymore,” Kowal said. “If you’re an actor, or working on the set, you have to be there, but as a composer, you don’t need to be there. Not with the technology we have now.”
The Kowals started to look at property in New England to be closer to his wife’s family in Nashua.
“My wife remembered hiking Mt. Monadnock as a kid, and she said, ‘ Let’s look around that area,” Kowal said.
Once they decided on New Hampshire, Kowal started researching the Peterborough area, was impressed by the depth of arts in the region.
“Then I found out about MacDowell, and I was just amazed. Aaron Copland was there. All these major composers were there. I found out Thornton Wilder wrote ‘Our Town’ about Peterborough, and I thought, this must be an amazing place. There’s something here that just draws creativity,” Kowal said. “There’s the Peterborough Players, there’s the movie theater, there’s the Art Tour, there’s live music at Harlow’s and Coopers. It’s just great.”
The Kowals connected with realtor Dan Petrone, explained what kind of house they were looking for, and Barbara’s sisters came to see the property. The Kowals bought it “sight unseen.”
“We moved from California to New Hampshire in February, and everyone thought we were nuts,” Kowal said.
Kowal has enjoyed getting involved in Peterborough, attending meetings and staying on top of local issues.
“My question is, why don’t more people vote? Why don’t they come to Town Meeting? They don’t understand how precious it is that you can go, talk, and help make the laws in your town. That is so unique. More people should be involved,” he said.
Kowal says that after five years in Peterborough, he can’t think of a single negative.
“The people here are so friendly, it’s an amazing community, and we just love it. I was astonished, when we moved here, to see children playing at the playing in the park without parents around, or just walking around downtown,” Kowal said. “You don’t see that in big cities. You don’t see kids just out playing baseball. It’s paradise here.”
For more information about David Kowal go to davidkowal.com.
