Endings and Beginnings 85 & 86

By the time 1985 arrived McCoy and I were running out of ideas on how to find an audience for our music. McCoy rightfully remained committed to his teaching career, which made going on the road difficult. It was impractical for us to continue working with a band. Although we had enough good new songs there wasn’t enough demand to make a new album worthwhile.

My hopes for success as a songwriter continued to be fueled by positive feedback from publishers though no well-known artists ever recorded any of my songs.

The most significant and lasting song from that time may be "Part of the River." The day his father died McCoy talked about how he was going to scatter his dad's ashes on Mt. Rainier, a place his father had explored as a young man. That evening the song simply appeared to me.

The biggest change for me came in the spring of 1985 when I officially rejoined The Brothers Four.

There is a single camera video of a concert that McCoy and I did in the spring of 1986. It is just the two of us with a single guitar. The quality is not great but I believe it does capture the spirit of who we were back then. In this and the next couple of posts I will be sharing individual songs from that performance.

"Now That You've Gone Away" talks about easing the frustration of not being able to deal with big things by focusing on small things. "Find to Love in Me" asks big life questions before arriving at that basic human one, "What does someone like yourself find to love in me?" The audio recording, "Some New Mountain to Climb," was inspired by Gary Drager's dad who dreamed as a kid he could swim across a river and emege on the other side as a new person.

If you’d like to join McCoy and me as we celebrate 50 years of friendship and musical partnership tickets are available at Brown Paper Tickets. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2055269