Great Profiles

The dining area of the Hot Club Coffee Shop in Troy, Mont., is already packed to the gills at quarter to seven. Although the concert isn’t scheduled to begin for another 15 minutes, latecomers will have a difficult time to find seating. The buzz of discrepant conversations among the various patrons fills the area. Waitresses, unaccustomed to the flurry of business, hurry back and forth with drinks and dishes.

The venue is a simple green building in need of a new coat of paint with a gray metal roof. However, the plain exterior belies its true spirit. Guitars, music posters, and landmark rock and roll records line the walls of the shop. The walls are painted with warm colors and the lighting is generally kept low. A large stage is located to the left, while patrons can order food and coffee at a small bar in the far right corner. The Hot Club markets itself to music lovers and reveals an unexpected undercurrent of culture within the small town’s borders.

At 7 p.m. sharp, the lights dim down and the conversation quiets. Spotlights turn to the stage, where Peter Mason has taken the center, sitting on a stool with his acoustic six-string guitar on his knee. Behind him, Angelo Chiverinni, the son of the coffee shop’s owners, leans forward in a folding chair with a djembe between his legs.

“Hey, everyone. It’s great to see you all of you here. We’ve got a few songs to play for you tonight, and I hope you enjoy them,” Mason says in his typically understated fashion.

Mason is of average height and build. He keeps his shoulder-length, light brown hair out of his eyes with a black bandana and dresses in a simple, button-up shirt and khakis. When he begins to play, he strums his guitar with a steady rhythm and an intent look on his face. He sings in an unrefined, stripped-down manner, sometimes evoking Bob Dylan in his tone.

The crowd of around 80 people is a significant upgrade from the numbers that Mason usually entertains in Missoula. Performing primarily in coffee shops and other small-scale venues around the city, his audiences typically consist of the shop’s current clientele plus the few dozen friends and fans he’s accrued in his two-year residence. Hot Club effectively used advertising, not to mention a healthy dose of word-of-mouth, to fill its seats.

An avid bass and guitar player since high school in his hometown of Libby, Mason considers himself to have only recently taken up any artistic mantle. “I think the passion- you know- the passion for music was always there,” he said. “But I think that it was only about a year and a half ago that I really applied that to my life and started doing something that mattered to me.”

Mason attributes his mother Ann as one of the primary influences on his love of music. A talented guitar and mandolin player herself, Ann derived great satisfaction from teaching her son and watching him evolve as a musician. “It was one of my great joys, both as a musician and as a mother, to have this common interest with Peter. To see just where our guitar lessons have taken him has been a wonderful experience,” she said.

Religion is another key influence to his music. Raised in a Christian family and a lifelong churchgoer, Mason’s music aptly reflects his faith. “I wouldn’t call myself a Christian musician per se, simply because I’m trying to write on a larger scale than that one isolated topic,” he said. “On the other hand, I’d say that my beliefs are directly tied to the way I see the world, so anything that I produce is going to have that element attached to it.”

More than simply contributing to his songwriting, religion has oftentimes played a direct role in Mason’s development as a musician. During high school, he cut his musical chops playing bass in his youth group worship band. The experience taught the basics of stage performance and collaboration with other musicians.

Mason’s involvement with the Christian college group Chi Alpha proved a natural next step. He soon found himself periodically contributing guitar, bass, and vocals in a similar worship band. “Chi Alpha was a great help in transitioning to college life,” Mason said. “Musically, it built from everything I did in high school, but also brought me in the middle of a lot of other talented people.”

His fraternal twin brother, Kevin, was by his side the entire time. Kevin and Peter Mason have shared experiences from little league to graduating as co-valedictorians of their high school class. A fellow student at the University of Montana and guitarist, Kevin enjoys jamming with Peter, reminiscing and planning for the future. “Even when we were younger, I knew what kind of things Peter was capable of. …And I’ll say that I think we’ve only seen the beginning of what he can do,” Kevin said.

Mason started writing songs in earnest shortly after leaving to attend the University of Montana. That led to his first public performance at a coffee shop open mic night. “I was feeling pretty jazzed and good about myself after finishing my songs there, which, thinking back, probably wasn’t that warranted,” Mason said.

That only served as a beginning for Mason. Since that first performance, Mason has written around a dozen songs.

“My songwriting is basically just an extension of the season of life I’m going through,” Mason said. “I try to funnel all the emotion and the impact of the period into a few minutes worth of music. For me, it’s a pretty challenging experience, to say the least.”

His songs cover a broad range of topics. “Beautiful Life” reflects on Mason’s own brushes with death and his gratefulness to be alive. In contrast to such optimism, “Why Do These Good Things End?” serves as a dirge for all the times and people that have slipped from his life. “Down” is a haunting tune that contemplates a deep dissatisfaction with material living. The song opens with Mason’s despondent view of our material culture:

We don’t win, because no one wins.
We don’t lose. We don’t even get to choose.
We all fight, because everyone fights.
We all drown.
And we’re sinking, sinking down.

Mason marks a missions trip to Eastern Europe during the 2006 summer as a major turning point for his songwriting. Traveling from town to town in rural Slovakia continues to impact his perception of man’s place in the world. “There’s something about flying halfway across the world and being thrown in the middle of a foreign culture and language that really puts things into perspective,” he said.

In addition to his original material, he supplements his performance set-lists with a healthy collection of covers. Some of these songs, especially those by his favorite bands Switchfoot and Death Cab for Cutie, force him to transform their elaborate, full-bodied band sound into a simplified solo act. Others he can reproduce chord for chord, like those of his friends in the music community Marshall Mclean and David August. “Marshall in particular has been a huge inspiration to me,” Mason said. “He has a gift for songwriting that is just unbelievable, and I’d strongly urge anyone to check him out.”

Mason’s life as a musician intersperses with his life as a student, oftentimes to a disharmonious end. Originally enrolling at the University of Montana with the intention of studying biology, Mason later expressed interest in forestry and now is unsure of his academic future. “I understand that education is important and I want to pursue it,” he said. “But sometimes, it seems so completely separated from what I really want to be doing that it gets difficult to find the motivation. There are some days in class that I’m completely apathetic to what I’m learning, and that’s never good.”

Mason’s Nov. 23 performance at Hot Club represented a milestone in many different capacities. It is the first major concert he’d performed in his home county of Lincoln since leaving for college, giving many friends and acquaintances their first encounter with his music. The concert also occurred on the eve of his and Kevin’s 21st birthday. Mason debuted several new songs, and with hopes of recording an album complete with guitar, drums and bass in the near future, Mason’s Hot Club performance may well find him on the threshold to unbroken ground. “I’ve already been talking with Pete about different possible arrangements to some of his songs,” Angelo Chiverinni, one Mason’s frequent percussionists, said. “It’ll be exciting to see where this goes.”

“Peter and I have worked on music together in the past. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep that effort up and continue to influence each other. As long as we stay as close as we are now, I’ll be happy,” Kevin Mason said.

In spite of his passion for his art and the support of his friends and family, Mason himself is unsure of his ultimate goal for his music. “Right now, I really have no idea what I really want to do with my life, or what I want my so-called career to be,” he said. “But I can definitely say that, whether I’m making a living off of it or not, music will always be a major part of my life. …Right now, I’m just waiting to see where I really belong in life.”

As the final strains of Mason’s music fade to quiet and his audience rises in applause, his barely-repressed smile only confirms his commitment to his art.