Peter Fenn (born Peter Joseph Fenn) is a Los Angeles-based record producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose writing and production credits include Laufey's “Slow Down,” a Grammy-winning songwriting credit on Fred again..'s Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), and the majority of British singer-songwriter Myles Smith's released catalogue, culminating in Smith's 2026 debut studio album, which Fenn executive-produced. He also co-produced and co-wrote “SHREDS” for Christian Gates's 2024 debut album No Strings Attached. He is not the Washington, D.C.-based political strategist of the same name who runs Fenn Communications Group, nor the British actor and composer Peter Fenn (1931–2011).
Fenn's own account of how he became a musician centers on a teenage breakup. “I started playing the guitar and wrote my first song when I was 18… I had just broken up with my high school girlfriend (first love) and picked up a guitar that summer,” he told Voyage LA in 2018, describing roughly eight hours a day of practice that first summer and an inability to stop writing songs afterward. He echoed the same origin in a separate interview with Shoutout LA: “I remember writing my first song and feeling such a crazy rush and becoming addicted.”
He studied philosophy in college, not music, and by his own account it was only after graduating that he discovered production and began recording demos of his own songs. In the interim he took a corporate job at Dropbox in San Francisco. At 25 he quit it, a decision friends have since described as a genuine risk, and moved to Los Angeles to pursue music full time. A 2024 tribute posted after his Grammy win summarized the arc directly: “Six years ago he was working at Dropbox and said he was going to move to LA to pursue music… Now he's a Grammy winner.”
In Los Angeles he built a dual career, releasing his own solo material (briefly under a duo project called “small talk” as well as under his own name) while writing and producing for emerging artists. He also founded a commercial music-scoring company, Sunny Productions, which has scored advertising campaigns for brands including Dropbox, Thumbtack, Dr. Seuss, the Red Cross and Baptist Health Care, a pragmatic income stream alongside artist development. His early breakthrough as a writer-for-hire came via a placement with the artist GrizzRivers, whose single “Let Me” reportedly reached No. 1 on Spotify's US Viral 50 chart, a result he has cited as the confidence boost that led him to start releasing solo music of his own. By 2020, outlets were introducing him as a journeyman better known through other people's records than his own name: “Whether the name Peter Fenn rings a bell or not, it's almost guaranteed you've heard his work,” wrote Ones to Watch.
Fenn's documented sonic signature is warm, guitar-and-piano-driven alt-pop and folk-pop built around confessional lyricism, sitting adjacent to the Ed Sheeran/Niall Horan/Lewis Capaldi lineage that Myles Smith occupies. A 2026 review of Smith's debut album, which Fenn produced, describes the sound directly: “the album sits firmly within the contemporary folk-pop sound Smith helped revive, built around acoustic guitar, wide-open anthemic choruses, and plainspoken introspective writing. Production by Smith's long-standing collaborator Peter Fenn keeps the arrangements grounded and warm, letting the vocals carry the emotional weight throughout,” per Vinyl Report.
Instrument-level credits confirm a hands-on, multi-instrumentalist approach. On the single “My Mess” alone, Fenn is credited for piano, electric guitar, background vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, programming, mandolin, composition, engineering, production, vocal production and synthesizer. Across the full album he adds drums, percussion, sound effects and banjo to that list, the signature of a producer who builds songs from the ground up himself rather than relying on outside session musicians, a hallmark of the modern bedroom-to-major-label pop producer.
His earlier solo output, released between 2018 and 2020, leaned toward bedroom pop and R&B-inflected songwriting. “My sound now is a blend between vintage sounds and modern production, and all my songs are about my own life, so they're honest… the production draws from old school hiphop drums, feel good piano, and funky bass lines,” he said in a 2018 self-description. His Grammy-recognized credit on Fred again..'s “Nathan (still breathing)” places at least one credit inside electronic/dance production, broadening his range past guitar-pop, while his writing and production on Christian Gates's “SHREDS,” described by press as one of the “aggressive” standout pre-release singles on a “genre-blending” alt-pop/dark-pop album, is the closest documented example of him flexing into harder-edged territory.
Public documentation of his physical studio setup is limited to a 2020 “Studio Tour” video and a home-studio Q&A appearance, consistent with a home/project-studio production model rather than a large commercial facility. His most detailed recent process documentation comes from a 2024 Sony Electronics-sponsored content series, “SoundClub Presents: Ben Goldsmith and Peter Fenn,” in which he is filmed producing and mixing Goldsmith's song “High in Colorado” using Sony's MDR-M1 Professional Reference Headphones as reference monitors. Goldsmith describes him in the video as someone who “brings so much creativity.”
Fenn's most extensive and longest-running working relationship is with British singer-songwriter Myles Smith, whom he has produced and co-written with since Smith's earliest independent releases through his 2026 major-label debut. Credits include “Stargazing,” Smith's 2024 breakout single co-written with Jesse Fink; the EPs River (February 2024) and A Minute… (November 2024); the You Promised a Lifetime EP, on which Fenn produced or wrote nearly every track, including “My Home,” “River,” “Solo,” “Behind,” “Sweet Love” and “Betting On Us”; “Drive Safe” featuring Niall Horan, released in February 2026; and executive production of Smith's full-length debut album, My Mess, My Heart, My Life, released via RCA/Sony on June 19, 2026.
Smith has described Fenn as “my main guy, who's been with me since the start,” language rarely used for an artist-producer relationship this far into a major-label career. Upon the album's release, Fenn publicly thanked Smith in kind, writing that it was “a dream to get to work with an artist with such conviction, talent, and who is genuinely a great human and close friend.” The album's process has been documented on the Tapenotes podcast, in an episode devoted specifically to Fenn and Smith discussing the writing, recording and production behind the record, in contrast to the far thinner session-level documentation available for most of Fenn's other work.
Fenn is credited as a songwriter and producer, alongside Laufey and Spencer Stewart, on “Slow Down,” “Lucky for Me” and “Dance with You Tonight,” all from Laufey's 2022 album Everything I Know About Love. International songwriting registry data lists the credited writer of “Slow Down” under his full legal name, Peter Joseph Fenn.
He is also a credited songwriter on “Nathan (still breathing),” a track from Fred again..'s Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), the album that won Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, held February 4, 2024. His publisher, Prescription Songs, promoted the nomination ahead of the ceremony as part of its slate of nominated writers and producers that year, and the eventual win made Fenn a Grammy-winning songwriter roughly six years after he left his corporate job to move to Los Angeles.
Fenn's catalogue includes a recurring collaboration with producer and engineer Zachary Knowles, with whom he worked as producer and recording engineer on “WRONG SIDE” (2022) alongside co-producer Cooper Holzman; Knowles is cited across multiple of Fenn's own bio blurbs as an ongoing collaborator. He is credited as a co-writer on Canadian band Valley's “Break for You,” which earned a SOCAN No. 1 Song Award in 2023. Earlier in his career he collaborated as singer and producer with the artist VALNTN on the 2018 single “Mona Lisa,” and multiple bios cite developing-artist production and writing credits with BabyJake and Rence as part of his working roster during the same period. He also has a co-production credit, with Mike Robinson, on Adrien Nunez's “Wild,” released through the Warner Music Nashville/Warner Records system, and press bios list additional cuts with Ava Max among his broader body of work. His most recent listed songwriting credit is “California Sober,” a 2026 release co-written with Matt Schuster; as of that release, his Spotify for Artists songwriter page lists 185 songs written to date.
In July 2024, Fenn co-produced and co-wrote “SHREDS,” released as a single ahead of its inclusion as track nine on Christian Gates's debut album, No Strings Attached. The song's writing credits list Christian Gates, Dave Gibson and Peter Fenn, while its production credits list Fenn alongside Elation, Gates's regular in-house producer. Press coverage of the album described “SHREDS” as one of several aggressive, standout pre-release singles, alongside “Food Poisoning,” “Toxic” (featuring Dutch Melrose) and “Secrets.”
Gates has spoken publicly about building the album's cohesive sonic identity primarily with Elation, tracing that in-house partnership back to the song “Freak.” Fenn's role on “SHREDS” reads as an outside co-production brought in for a single track rather than a full-album relationship, a pattern consistent with the rest of his catalogue: he has repeatedly worked as an outside collaborator on individual songs for developing and established artists across pop, folk-pop and dance music, from GrizzRivers and VALNTN early on to Laufey, Fred again.. and Christian Gates later. No interview or press feature discusses the writing or recording of the “SHREDS” session directly, a contrast to the well-documented Myles Smith sessions.
Fenn is a signed songwriter on the roster of Prescription Songs, the independent publishing and licensing company founded in 2009 by Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald. Prescription Songs publicly promoted his 2024 Grammy nomination for “Nathan (still breathing)” as part of its slate of nominated writers that year. He is also affiliated with BMI; the performing-rights organization's Los Angeles office hosted a “No. 1 Party” in his and Jesse Fink's honor in May 2025 for the success of “Stargazing.”
His most consistent creative circle centers on the Myles Smith project, including songwriter and producer Jesse Fink, songwriter Steph Jones, songwriter and producer Will Bloomfield, and songwriter and producer Gabe Simon, alongside additional outside producers such as Joshua “Ammo” Coleman, Oscar Görres, Rami Yacoub and Steve Mac on Smith's debut album. On “SHREDS,” his direct collaborators were Christian Gates, co-writer Dave Gibson, a Scottish-born, LA/London-based songwriter with credits including James Arthur, Louis Tomlinson and Lukas Graham, and co-producer Elation.
Fenn holds a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album as a credited songwriter on Fred again..'s Actual Life 3 (January 1 – September 9 2022), awarded at the Premiere Ceremony of the 66th Annual Grammy Awards on February 4, 2024. He was honored by BMI at a Los Angeles “No. 1 Party” in May 2025 for co-writing Myles Smith's “Stargazing,” and received a SOCAN No. 1 Song Award in 2023 as a co-writer on Valley's “Break for You.”
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Releases early solo material and the VALNTN collaboration “Mona Lisa”; profiled by Voyage LA as a Los Angeles-based artist, songwriter and producer. |
| 2020 | Profiled by Ones to Watch and Shoutout LA as a behind-the-scenes producer stepping into his own solo spotlight; releases the single “Nobody.” |
| 2022 | Co-writes and co-produces Laufey's “Slow Down,” “Lucky for Me” and “Dance with You Tonight” (Everything I Know About Love); writes on Fred again..'s “Nathan (still breathing)” (Actual Life 3); produces Zachary Knowles's “WRONG SIDE.” |
| 2023 | Wins a SOCAN No. 1 Song Award as co-writer on Valley's “Break for You.” |
| Feb 4, 2024 | Wins the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album as a credited songwriter on Fred again..'s Actual Life 3. |
| Jul 12, 2024 | Co-writes and co-produces “SHREDS” for Christian Gates, later included on No Strings Attached. |
| 2024 | Myles Smith releases “Stargazing” and the EPs River and A Minute…, both produced with Fenn. |
| Oct 2024 | Appears in Sony Electronics' “SoundClub” series producing Ben Goldsmith's “High in Colorado.” |
| May 2025 | Honored at a BMI “No. 1 Party” in Los Angeles for “Stargazing.” |
| Feb 2026 | Co-writes and co-produces Myles Smith's “Drive Safe” featuring Niall Horan. |
| Apr 10, 2026 | Releases “My Mess” with Myles Smith and “California Sober” with Matt Schuster, his most recent listed songwriting credit. |
| Jun 19, 2026 | Executive-produces Myles Smith's debut album, My Mess, My Heart, My Life, released via RCA/Sony. |
No. That is Peter H. Fenn (born 1947), a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic strategist and founder of Fenn Communications Group, unrelated to the music industry. The producer profiled here is Peter Joseph Fenn, a Los Angeles-based songwriter and producer.
Fenn co-wrote and co-produced “SHREDS,” track nine on Christian Gates's 2024 debut album No Strings Attached, alongside co-writer Dave Gibson and Gates's regular in-house producer, Elation. It is a single-track credit rather than an ongoing collaboration.
His deepest and longest body of work is with British singer-songwriter Myles Smith, whom he has produced and co-written with from Smith's earliest independent releases through his 2026 RCA/Sony debut album, My Mess, My Heart, My Life, which Fenn executive-produced. His highest industry honor is a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album, earned as a credited songwriter on Fred again..'s Actual Life 3.
Sources differ: one profile describes him as a Bakersfield, California native turned Venice local, while another describes him as coming from Santa Cruz, California. He has been based in Los Angeles for the majority of his professional career.
Yes. Credits across the Myles Smith catalogue list him on piano, acoustic and electric guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, synthesizer, programming, drums and percussion, in addition to production, engineering and vocal production, indicating he builds most of his productions himself rather than relying on outside session musicians.
| Year | Artist | Title | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | VALNTN | “Mona Lisa” | Singer, producer |
| 2022 | Laufey | “Slow Down” / “Lucky for Me” / “Dance with You Tonight” | Songwriter, producer |
| 2022 | Fred again.. | “Nathan (still breathing)” | Songwriter |
| 2022 | Zachary Knowles | “WRONG SIDE” | Producer, engineer |
| 2023 | Valley | “Break for You” | Co-writer |
| 2024 | Christian Gates | “SHREDS” (No Strings Attached) | Co-writer, co-producer |
| 2024 | Myles Smith | “Stargazing”; EPs River, A Minute… | Co-writer, producer |
| 2024 | Ben Goldsmith | “High in Colorado” | Co-writer, producer |
| 2026 | Myles Smith feat. Niall Horan | “Drive Safe” | Co-writer, co-producer |
| 2026 | Matt Schuster | “California Sober” | Co-writer |
| 2026 | Myles Smith | My Mess, My Heart, My Life | Executive producer |
Fenn's catalogue sits at the intersection of Los Angeles pop songwriting camps and the folk-pop revival led by artists like Myles Smith, with a single, documented detour into Christian Gates's alt-pop and dark-pop catalogue via “SHREDS,” a track that also carries a production credit for Gates's longtime collaborator Elation. Readers interested in that album's full producer map can also see coverage of Gates's collaborators and sonic identity elsewhere on this wiki.