On our first Tuesday work day of January 2013, we went to an Indian/Mexican combo restaurant (weird, right?) in our town with a notebook and pen to set some goals for the year. Included in our conversation was an attempt at a timeline for our then-imaginary album. It looked like this:
It felt like we'd already made progress, and made the "How on earth do we do this again?!" feeling shrink for a day or three.
That day feels like it happened in another era. Two dreamers, eager to be a "real" band, embarking on a voyage on a very misty morning, where all we could see were a few feet of waves in front of the dock and no hint of land on the other side. And here we are, a year later, with so many miles sailed that the shore we left is but a memory now.
Realistically, our time frame got adjusted several times, which was to be expected. The April scratches (= a basic version of the song everyone can listen to while they record their actual parts on the song in the studio) became more like demo versions, trying to pass ideas around friends and colleagues to embody the little souls in each song. We played our last C&J shows in May/June so we could buckle down and focus on the record. Summer saw the scratches created, changed, and finished, with the help of musicians around us.
August finally brought the beginning of the recording process itself. First, the drummer laid down the foundations in the beginning of the month. Then, the day we packed our ideas and clothes into the Civic and drove the 15+ hours to Port St Lucie, FL (note to selves: next time, do not go NEAR 95 south on the last Saturday of summer vacation, as everyone in the vicinity of VA will be doing the same thing to get to Virginia Beach). We spent a week pouring every ounce of energy (and our blessed, saintly engineer's energy) into a tiny vocal booth, running into the wee hours of the morning and sustained only by the Lord, Mama Douglas's cooking (best. host. ever.), banana-peanut butter wraps, and Throat Coat tea. Definitely mostly the Lord. When the week was through, we hopped back in the car, drove straight through to Maryland, and woke up to our day jobs (Jenna's return to teaching from summer break!) the next morning. We also managed to drag ourselves out to dinner to celebrate Chris's birthday that day!
Geoff (both guitarist and engineer) began work laying down guitar tracks as we worked on piano ideas. Then, on September 10th, we got word that our dream mixing engineer had time to squeeze in a lil' ol' band like us in about a month. Cue SUDDENLY RECORDING THE REST OF THE ALBUM ASAP. We grabbed our bassist and our programming writer (also the drummer) and set up a makeshift studio in our church to track bass and piano parts. As soon as we finished, we sent the tracks down to Geoff in Florida so he could get them edited and ready for mixing.
We also realized that, if we wanted the album mixed and mastered properly like we'd been hoping, we needed to start our Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, like, yesterday. Chris put footage together and we launched the campaign to raise the rest of the funds we needed to make this step of the project happen. We were able to set our goal comparably small to our entire budget, thanks to many private backers and donors who believe in this ministry and have partnered with us along the way.
At the end of October, Shane D. Wilson started work mixing our tracks. We got the first 2 tracks two days later, went out and bought a pair of quality speakers so we could actually hear them, sat at our desk in our music work room... and listened with our mouths open, eyes shining, silent. Until they finished, and we giggled like giddy schoolchildren. We could not BELIEVE the quality he was bringing to our songs. That week and the next were spent listening on as many sets of speakers as we could, taking notes, sending small requests for changes (and they were indeed few!), and listening more.
In the process of this, we had been communicating with our mastering engineer, Matthew Odmark, since early October. (We may have geeked out slightly when we realized he's a member of Jars of Clay. Maybe.) He received all of the mixed files in November so he could master the album for us... at which point he needed the name of the album and track listing. Which we had spent approximately 15 seconds thinking about to date. So, we spent a slightly crazed evening creating every possible mutation of an order for the 10 songs until we finally agreed that we'd found it.
Jenna works in sticky notes rearranged many ways.
Matthew mastered the album for us, we gave him a few tiny requests, and he finished it off. Whew.
After 2 1/2 whirlwind months of much faster progress than we expected, December became a month of working on album artwork and building a new band website to help us reach more people when we release the album. December also became a month of holiday crazy times, so progress has seemed more snail-like compared with the preceding months.
But, here we are, on the very last day of the year. We have a tiny piece of notebook paper to look back on, where we took our best guesses at setting goals for how we could expect an album to develop. And now, we could listen to the mastered version on a set of car speakers as we drove home on Christmas Eve, tearing up at the marvel of what has been created. Not that we or the album itself are so wondrous - only that God can breathe His creative spirit into community and can birth something that seems impossible to two small people in northern Maryland.
We are tired. We are proud. We are humbled. 2013, you have been a challenging and stretching year. We are grateful for it. We look forward to completing the rest of the artwork, website, PR work, and distribution necessary in early 2014 to finally give this album flight, and then to plunging back into shows where we can do what we love: playing music together and hopefully ministering to people in small ways.
Blessings to you in 2014. Could not say it better than this:
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| This is attributed to Brad Paisley. But the image that had his name also had an incorrectly placed comma after the word "Tomorrow." I will not abide such things. |
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