Kemp Harris, a retired Newton Public Schools teacher, has recently recorded an album, “The American Chronicles,” and he’s accepting donations to help him release it to the world.

This will be Harris’s fourth album.

He was performing at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, when producer Daniel Friedberg (better known as Freebo) approached him and asked him to record an album.

“I had a bunch of tunes I had been working on and looking at what goes on politically in this country, it gives you so much to write about. I thought it was a good time to put this out,” Harris said. “It’s a reflection of how I see things in this country these days from the perspective of a Black gay man.”

Harris performs regularly, primarily in the Boston area at venues like Club Passim in Cambridge. His music is inspired by Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell as well as folk, gospel, and R&B.

“I’ve always written about the world,” he said.

Harris started playing music when he was 14, and in the 1970s and ’80s performed in coffee houses in the Boston area. He also was involved with musical theater. But his primary career was teaching. He taught kindergarten and first grade in Newton Public Schools for 38 years, mostly at Bowen Elementary School.

When he announced his retirement in 2012, the principal convinced him to stay on as a building aide, which he did for another five years.

“It was a really cool time,” Harris said, adding that he enjoyed teasing fifth graders about how they’d behaved in kindergarten and is grateful for all his time in Newton.

“There are so many lives in Newton that I’ve touched. The kids and what they provided for me are one of the best gifts that I’ve gotten,” he said. He loves when his former students find him online and tell him how they’re doing. “I’m grateful that I get to see what I did mattered.”

One of his former students is now his teaching assistant at an annual conference in New Hampshire. Harris also appreciates that he was in front of a group of people every day for decades, even if those people were six-year-olds.

“The basic psychology is the same,” he said.

You can learn more about Harris and his music on his website.

And you can find his GoFundMe page here.