Peter Breinholt

What you need is another COVID virtual music performance ;) But this one is different. This is a song I wrote and recorded a few years ago but never really released. It's based on a poem called "The House By The Side Of The Road" (Sam Walter Foss) and the idea is that while some people prefer to live quiet lives off the beaten path, the writer chooses to build his house by the road where he can watch people come and go, befriend them and serve. 

Around the time I wrote the music, I was invited to go to Honduras to film interviews with people who had received micro loans from an organization called Mentors International to help them start businesses. I was so blown away by the stories that I came home and added this song to the footage and now Mentor's International uses it in their fundraising. The work they do is completely consistent with the spirit of the poem.

This is our final performance with the great Pat Campbell before his passing on Oct. 5, 2020. It's a video we made to be shown on the last day of my daughter's elementary school in May (instead of a live performance which we normally do during non-COVID times). Pat liked the idea of letting the students and faculty take the vocals and was happy to join in. There's also an interesting side note to this song involving Pat: In 1991, my friend Rex Griffiths and I saw Pat's ska band "Swim Herschel Swim" play at a music festival and we were so blown away that we went home and tried to write our own ska song. We called it "You Wear Flowers" and it ended up kick starting everything for us. We didn't know Pat at the time, but years later he would become our drummer and it was no surprise that the guy who helped inspire this song played it better than anyone. 

Peter