Campfire Chronicles Mark Pearson Music

In the summer of 2004 I released a solo CD called “The Missing Peace.”
At the same time my lifelong friend, Mike McCoy, joined me in The Brothers
Four and during the 2004-2005 concert season The Brothers Four did a series
of performances in the US with The Kingston Trio and Glenn Yarbrough and
his group. In 2006 McCoy and I released a 25th anniversary edition of “Between
Friends.” The 41st Campfire talks about how those events put me
on The Road To Going Home. 

The 40th campfire talks about the spring of 2004. That season I successfully
completed the vocals for my most ambitious solo album, there were significant
personnel changes within The Brothers Four, and I had a life altering moment
with my older brother. Together those experiences propelled me on “The
Road That Leads Us Home.”

In the 38th Campfire the long held and deep-seated fears that resided so long
in my unconscious were found and freed and soon running wild. In this, the
39th Campfire, those fears begin to be given names and faces and in the naming
and facing them I am able to begin claiming them. 

It has been a while since we have lit a campfire…this 38th campfire
talks about events in 2001. In the spring of that year I shared a book I
created with a few family and friends. The manuscript contained my journey
for “authenticity, belonging, and confidence” or, put
another way, “a search for truth, home, and to find myself.”
Somehow putting that quest into words freed a number of fears that were unconsciously
lodged inside of me. This campfire ends with The Brothers Four in Japan the
week after 9/11 with both the country and me wondering what all may await.

Between September of 1998 and October of 2000 The Brothers Four performed more
than 150 times in the US and in Japan. It was the only time the group ever
traveled around America by tour bus. It still amazes me the group is going
strong after 55 years. Some years the phone rings more often than others.
Those years were one of those times.A correction: The performance at NHK
Hall was attended by 3000 people not 300.  

My father died on May 28, 1997, the day before my mother’s 75th birthday.
It was heartbreakingly unexpected. A month or so after he died I made a decision
to make him the focus of my work for one year. At the end of the year I had
created a musical memoir entitled Season of the Heart that explored the spring
of 1997. A year to the day after he died I performed the 40 new songs for
the first time in my mother’s living room in front of a lifetime
of friends. The next week I performed the memoir four different days in Seattle
at the Richard Hugo House. When it was over I knew it was time to move on.
It was what my father would have wanted.