On Thursday, October 24, several dozen Covenant students filed into the chapel, where, on stage, there sat two objects: a grand piano and a man in suspenders and patterned socks. The grand piano was a Steinway; the man was Mark Perry, a Covenant senior majoring in music. As advertised on poster boards in the week preceding, this event was a free concert (with animal crackers) and all were welcome.
“The purpose for the concert was three-fold,” said Perry. “One, I just wanted to let the student body know that I’m an artist who’s making music. Second, I’m releasing an album this winter, and I wanted to give people the chance to listen to some of the music from the album and tell their friends about it. But I also ended the concert by sharing a Kickstarter link so that people could not only listen to the music, but support it if they wanted to. That was the third reason.”
The album that Perry is releasing, “Leaden Fellow,” is a work of labor long in the making: Perry first started writing the album while in high school. Though many of the songs have been re-worked since then, the inspiration for each remains the same.
“At the time I was writing the songs,” said Perry, “they were primarily about the experiences I was having or observing with the close friends around me, topics like depression and self-harm and suicidal thoughts. I had no idea how to think about those things from my sheltered, Christian home-schooler background, and songwriting was a means of processing those things.”
A total of twelve songs long, “Leaden Fellow” is a concept album, each song telling a different part of the story of a man named Reid, a fictional character.
“Reid is living life as a very broken and sinful person,” explained Perry, “trying to find hope but not knowing what that looks like. Throughout the album, he goes through these different stages of depression and no sense of self-worth, and trying to meet someone and falling in love with them, but watching that relationship fall apart because of his own brokenness.”
Though the album finishes with a hopeful end for Reid, Perry recognizes that many of the themes and topics discussed on his album are serious, heavy subjects.
“Both during the concert and in the album, I wanted to be really careful and considerate of what other people were feeling,” said Perry. “Some of the album art is pretty explicit in what the songs are talking about, like [self-harm, for example]. Some people write that off as something people do in high school and then grow out of, but I wanted to recognize that that’s not always the case. I think that it’s really important for us to talk about those things.”
After the concert, people filed into the chapel lobby to congratulate Perry on his new album and to chow down on the long-awaited animal crackers.
“The overall reaction [to the album] was incredibly positive,” said Perry. “Humblingly so. One person afterwards thanked me, saying that one of the themes from the songs articulated their thoughts in such a way that hadn’t been done before. That was just a really humbling moment for me of, like, wow, some part of this was able to speak into someone’s life and give words to things that didn’t have words before. That was a big blessing for me to hear from someone else.”
For those interested in listening to “Leaden Fellow,” Mark Perry, whose artist name is Lead+Fellow, will be releasing his album this winter both as a CD (complete with CD art) and through online streaming sites such as iTunes, Apple Music, and Spotify. Perry hopes to release it by late December, but it may be as late as January. He can also be followed on Instagram @leadnfellow.