One of the first things I was drawn to in my MWS coursework was the revelation that the Bible is a great and complete narrative. It tells God's Story from Creation, to the Fall, to Israel, to Christ, to the Church, to New Creation. It's an all-encompassing story that never ceases to amaze me. His Story has informed and molded my worldview, and it is the reason for the story I live out day by day, which is a sentence (maybe) within a paragraph, within a chapter, within a volume, within the epic Story that stretches beyond time. Heck, a sentence gives me too much. My story is like a punctuation mark. Hopefully an exclamation mark.
Living in awe of the Story has led me to desire to tell part of it. Over the past few years, most of my songs have revolved around this idea. Which is why I'm releasing Story Unfolding, a 7-song EP that will be available on January 27.
Take a look at the artwork for Story Unfolding.
The smaller story, the story of this album, started in the spring of 2012. Mark Hansen had been encouraging me to do a recording for a while, and I finally committed to a start day a few months away, in August. It's amazing what a deadline will do. Suddenly I was creating scratch tracks, rewriting lead sheets and rewriting songs and lyrics.
The start of the recording process was a pretty full Friday and Saturday of tracking drums, guitars, and a couple vocal tracks. From there, almost every Monday and Thursday night I'd help put the kids to bed, then show up at Mark's studio around 9 and record for 60-90 minutes. Mark would add guitar and keyboard parts to the songs as he had time, and slowly each song began to take on a life and style of its own.
Tracks and stems were then sent to Eric Medley in South Carolina. Eric mixed them down, advised on changes or additions, and added his own parts. Eric also mastered the tracks.
Some songs were finished quickly. Some went through changes and tweaks. One song was nearly finished when we decided to go a different direction and had to throw out some hours of work. The process has been sometimes fun, sometimes grueling, sometimes tedious, but always worthwhile. As with most good things, it took time and work.
I'm so proud of the results. I've poured much time, energy and resources into this, and I feel it's a worthy effort.
I'll have CDs on sale for $10 at the CD Release Concert on January 27 (also featuring Daniel Christian releasing his full-length album Speak), and I've also put up a BandCamp page where the tracks will be available for download for $7 on January 27. But limited budget means I didn't have a chance to print any liner notes. Starting tomorrow, I'll post some notes on each of the songs here on my blog.
Stay tuned.
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