As a student-body officer in charge of producing assemblies, he also learned the rest of the skills he would need someday. As an independent musician with no label, he does it all, booking recording studios and concert venues, assembling a band, designing album covers, arranging the music, designing shows, promoting CDs and concerts.

The Dobermans played classic rock music, but after returning from his mission Breinholt turned to his first love: folk music. He had been reared on the songs of Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Paul Simon, John Denver, Dan Fogelberg, Nanci Griffith. . . .

"When I came back from my mission, I lost my taste for the kind of things we had been doing as a band," he says. "I'd come away from the shows with my ears ringing, and my heart was just not in this scene anymore. I wanted to do acoustic music. I remember coming home to my CD collection and realizing I was only interested in a fraction of them."

He had begun writing music on piano as early as 12. He began dabbling with lyrics in high school but didn't consider them good enough for public consumption. After his mission, his writing matured and his confidence grew. The same boy who waited 3 1/2 years to talk also began to sing in public for the first time.

Peter — I am an officer in the Air Force and was stationed at Hill AFB. Now my wife and I are getting to see other parts of the world, but your music is with us no matter where we go. It is one of the things that my wife and I use to keep us in tune with what we want our lives to be like.

This is the way it really began: Friends invited him to a get-together at a cabin at Brighton, telling him to bring a date and, more important, his guitar. It became a weekly gathering, and more and more people showed up. He played popular songs that people could sing along to, and once in a while he would slip in one of his own songs. People noticed and began to ask for tapes of his original work. He obliged them by making a homemade tape that somehow found its way around campus.

Word spread. Breinholt was asked to play at a "battle of the bands" to kill time between acts while the next band was setting up for its turn. He wound up winning second place even though he wasn't even entered in the contest.

After graduating from Utah in 1993, he spent $1,500 to record his original songs. He and his small band knocked out 12 songs in two days, never doing more than two takes of any song. It was raw, unpolished acoustic music, which, it turned out, is one reason it proved so popular. Breinholt produced 500 tapes. They sold out in a few months. He made 1,000 more. They also sold out quickly.