We Have Begun.

The album has, in most senses of the word, begun.

We released Waiting to Begin on May 20, 2014.  That day, we saw it appear on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and all other online music sites.  People were posting it, tweeting it, giving feedback.  People sent cards and flowers.  People said "Congratulations!" all day.

And most times, I had to think for a moment why they were congratulating us before it sunk in.  I wondered why there were flowers on my desk when I got to work.  I truly wasn't sure what they were talking about for a good 10 seconds each time.

And then it would hit me - oh.  Our album is out in the world today.  So am I told.  Is that real, though??!

I think about 35% of those blank stares were because it hadn't hit me yet - each time someone asked how it felt, I answered, "Surreal."  I think the other 65% of those looks were because we were planning for the release show, happening a mere 10 days after the digital release.  A release date can be a huge deal, but when your eyes are locked on the next thing, it can slip by almost unnoticed.

Anne Lamott has a very humorous, very true narrative about the publication date of a new book in Bird by Bird.  This is the only book of hers I've had the pleasure of reading, but I adore her style - she voices all the crass humor and self-maddening lines inside my head, assuring me I'm not the only crazy person out there.  Her experience was a bit opposite of mine, for which I owe her and several wise, warning musician friends a debt of gratitude.  

"There is something mythic about the date of publication, and you actually come to believe that on this one particular morning you will wake up to a phone ringing off the hook and your publisher will be so excited that they will have hired the Blue Angels precision flying team to buzz your squalid little hovel, which you will be moving out of as soon as sales of the book really take off.

...I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day.  We talked about it all summer.  We each pretended to have modest expectations...  The week before, we talked almost every morning about how excited we were and what a long time we had waited, and how it was just like being a a little kid waiting for Christmas Eve.  Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming.  I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt... Then I waited for the phone to ring.  The phone did not know its part.  It sat there silent as death with a head cold.  By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves.  Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day.  I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring.  Finally, finally it rang at four.  I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we had to be sedated.

...This is often pretty much what it is like... I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy." - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Truly, Anne, as well as Jeremy from Willet, thank you.  Your anecdotes and cautionary tales saved me from being a curled up, hysterically laughing centipede on the living room rug.  Expectations are everything.

From this, I take two big things.

1) "If what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy."  Chris has been very purposeful about the definition of success for Chris & Jenna.  We have seen too many musician friends focused on the idea of "making it," whatever that means, and dried themselves up in the process of attaining something they'd never truly defined or fleshed out for themselves.  Chris & Jenna's success is not based on gaining nationwide radio play.  It is not on becoming famous.  It is not on being affirmed that our music is good.  There are many goals like this that are not wrong to pursue; they are simply not ours at the moment.  Right now, success for us means that someone hears a message of hope in a lyric and is changed.  And that is happening.  And we are humbled to the core by it.  This, in part, is why our release day did not come with as much pressure as it might have.  We made art, we wanted to share it with the hope of speaking truth to people, and we did.  Therefore, it was a successful release.

2) When we are so focused on the next big thing, it is all too easy to miss the joy of what is happening now.  The release show was by far the biggest musical undertaking we have done, and it showed.  We were overwhelmed, we made a hundred mistakes and omissions in the planning process, we spent every moment between our day jobs and sleep on it.  So when the digital release of the album came, we were in a bit of a fog of preparation for a real live show.  Thus my incoherence and incomprehensible responses to folks' "Congrats!!"  Thank heaven for these excited people - otherwise, the whole day might have slipped by unnoticed.  With the weight of two years work on my shoulders, I think they really were more excited than I was in the moment. 

Let it be known that it all sunk in the night and day after the release show, and it was a beautiful, cathartic weekend.  All of the emotion and energy came rushing out, and we felt loved and blessed beyond measure.  It is not always this way when a creative project is unveiled, and we do not take it lightly.  Thank you to each and every person who came on board and made it so special for us.

So, the record has begun.  Keyword: begun, not finished.  We knew, and were reinforced by other musicians, that if we completely spent ourselves in the process of release, we would have nothing left to propel forward.  We did not make this album for 1,000 copies of it to sit in our spare bedroom.  We made it to share it with the world and impact people's lives.  The release of it is a beginning, a launch, to go and do that.

We've had our rest.  We have taken band work days and spent them guilt-free eating food and laying on the couch.  We have watched more episodes of Parenthood than I care to admit.  (I lied.  I'll admit every one of them.  I want to live in Berkeley with them, where everything is hilarious and achingly beautiful.)  Now, it is time to get back in the driver's (and passenger's) seats and move forward with what we've made, so it can fulfill its purpose and the definitions of success we set.  They may change.  We want to hold them loosely and prayerfully at all times.  But having clear definitions of what success is and being present in it are both preciously crucial.  To our music, to our mission, and to our very lives.

-Jenna

The Eye of the Storm.

All the feelings.  I (Jenna) don't know where to start.

Today, I got home from work to find two giant cardboard boxes sitting, soaking wet, in the pouring rain.  What did they hold?  Only 1,000 precious little CD babies of our new album.  After lugging them inside and facing the immediate dilemma of "I need to get these out of the cardboard mush ASAP before moisture gets into the CD packagings" and "Chris is not home.  I cannot open these album boxes without him.  That would be wrong..." I compromised by putting them up on their sides, opening the soggy tops & bottoms, and clawing a few smaller box corners open to let air in.  Or something.

 (Chris then got home.  And we opened them.  They look ok.  The peasants rejoiced.)

First order of business?  Open one up and start playing it, because something could have happened to the master we sent and the songs could be in the wrong order or there could be terrible sounds or something could cut off too soon.  (No, I don't have anxiety or trust issues. Obvi.)

(P.S.  The CDs work just fine.  Praise the Lord.)

So, as we started to take on other tasks while keeping an ear in the background to make sure Track 5 is indeed Track 5, I hopped on Facebook, like any good inefficient user of time.  Scrolling through the newsfeed (I gave that up for Lent this year.  I'm allowed to look now.  Often, it doesn't bring me enough joy to warrant how much I do it.  Go figure.), I saw this blogpost that a friend shared.  It has been raining for days, and flooding is starting to plague our area.  This is moments after seeing news reports of the wave of tornadoes that hit the south.  Truthfully, I haven't read much about it to this point.  I've maybe been slightly distracted by other things.

But I read this post.  The writer tells of being near the tornadoes, how the giant EF5 tornado hit the street they had just moved away from, and how her dear friend had just moved TO that area.  She writes about their frantic search for their friends and their children.  I will not do the author injustice by badly summarizing the ending and aftermath of their search.  But it talks of both incredible anger at God at loss of life and His apparent "plans," and of incredible faith that is not shaken even by the deepest grief - indeed, what is likely my greatest, deep-seated fear.

As I journeyed through those words, our album got to the song "Night."  It is a song about desperately trying to cling to hope when everything seems dark.  The chorus sings:

"Promise when all is said and done You'll be true
And that You're gonna make all things new."

My eyes did not stay dry.  This world is broken.  This is NOT how things were meant to be - homes being wiped clean from their foundations, children being taken, losing everything we hold dear.  Can everything really be made new??

...That's just it, isn't it?  It depends what we hold dear.  If it is things on this earth, then yes, we can lose everything.  But if it is something Deeper, something Greater, than it is impossible to lose everything.

The next song continued, "Far Beyond."  It was like I was hearing it with fresh ears, someone who hadn't played a part in its creation but just an earnest listener.

"Two things that I trust you will restore - 
The world, and my ever-broken heart;
knowing that I'll count them all the more
Beautiful for having once been torn apart."

The tears continued.  Is it really possible that one day this earth will be fully redeemed?  That in its radiance, every tear and woe from this life will make the new life that much more glorious?  Sometimes it seems too much to dare to hope... and then, at the same time, it seems too much NOT to trust it.  The pain we feel here is not the end of the story.  It is not meaningless.

I am grateful.  Grateful for an album that is complete and sitting here in our living room.  Grateful that as lightning crashes outside and rain pelts our walls, we are dry inside them.  Grateful that this album is not merely a business or a marketing venture - it is timid, firm Hope, in song form.  Grateful that technology can be used to help us rally around those who are despairing and struck down, however far away they might be.  And grateful for the sobering reminder that every last bit of our life could blow away tonight, yet we would still have more than we ever could have imagined for ourselves.

Again, the blogpost about The Cheerleader (the faithful) is here.  
And you can support the surviving family here.

-Jenna

2013 - The Final Moments

We have arrived.

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. 

Chris works in many lists and doodles. 

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:

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.

The illusion (maybe?) of "balance" in the battle for our days.

Readers, I come to you pretty undecided about this one.  So, I'm asking for your input.

 My brain right now.  In work + album mode.  Never.  Off.

We have seasons of life that demand different things of us, and seasons where we take different nuggets that we apply to the way we live.

In college, I learned what it means to overextend yourself to the point where you can do everything "well enough," but not really excelling or thriving.  To do everything simply because you can, and thus compromise sleep and relationships.  In the last semester of college, I gained freedom by finally saying "no" and quitting some things (gasp).  I was able to pour into people in ways I had not, and I felt more alive than when I was constantly doing work, hitting the pillow so late I couldn't even tell what time it was, and cramming more into my days than most would think possible.  I finally learned that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

I am a nightowl by nature.  It has taken me a while to get to a point where I can acknowledge that my mornings and days at my job are better when I go to bed sooner.  Sounds obvious, but it's totally opposite to my instincts.  So, at 29, I was finally going to bed at a slightly more reasonable hour in order to wake up and get to my job on time (ish).

But now, we are in album mode.  And for several weeks straight, we have gone to our day jobs, then straight to our recording site or home, eaten a quick (unhealthy) dinner, and plugged away until midnight-ish.  And then we wake up and do it all over again.

This is me when I think about my impending 1 am bedtime. But less of the athleticness.  Also less of the sculpted thighs.

(This is also me each morning when I show one of my kindergarteners an M and he enthusiastically says "T!"  No. This is an M.  It is the first letter in your name.  Just like it was yesterday.  And three weeks ago.  For the love.  I could write a whole separate blog... kindergarten teachers everywhere, you have my undying respect and loyalty.  This stuff is nuts.)

The going-to-bed-more-reasonably-and-pretending-I'm-a-responsible-adult part of me wants to die a little.  Ok, maybe more than a little.

But it's only part of me.  Because the other part of me that knows what our studio engineer/guitarist lives like, doing these crazy hours just about all the time, and how when he's questioned about his stamina/fatigue only points back to the Lord - that part of me is using him as a muse to get through it and questioning my approach to life.

I'm caught between the idea of rest, which God created, and "pressing on toward the goal" by going to bed when everything is done, not when I'm tired.

I definitely can examine what is unnecessary, what is wasteful, what fills my time but does nothing for the Kingdom, what someone else could do just as well if not better than me.  So, I know it's not helpful to fill time with superfluous things.

But what about when it's not superfluous?  What about when it's all related to things you feel called to do and things you don't feel like you have a choice about?

 Dude.  Gravity sculpture - no glue, no cement, no nothing.  I'm impressed.

I think "balance" is a common word in Christian circles.  We don't want people burned out on ministry, we get overwhelmed with our schedules, and we ask for prayer to help us get a better balance of quality time with our spouses, with children, with friends, with God, with ministries, with chores..... etc.

I feel like this is an art I have tried to learn through the past 5 years or so... and yet, Jesus doesn't talk about balance.  Ever.  Jesus talks about selling ALL you have and giving it to the poor, of a widow who gave all she had to the church, of a man who finds a treasure and sells all of his belongings to buy the field it's hidden in...  Jesus does go away from the crowds to pray, to be restored by his Father.  But those accounts are outnumbered by all of his healings, teachings, and traveling from place to place to love people and show them the way to Life.

And Paul?!  I'm fairly certain Paul wasn't refraining from traveling, writing his letters, speaking our in his jail cell because he needed some "me time."  And countless people are working tiring hours both here and overseas to reach people with the good news of Jesus and to fight for justice.  But we're told that we need to stay healthy with how we spend our time.  We're told "you can't be all things to all people."  Yet Paul says, "I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some."  Which is it?!

So, where do we come to rest in this?  This divide between creating limits to care for ourselves so that we can care for others in the name of the gospel, and "keeping on" through our exhaustion for the sake of the gospel? 

I know I can think of a few central principles:
-Relying on God for strength and sustenance
-Having time with the Lord for refreshment
-Doing all things for the sake of the gospel, and no other motivations (selfishness, approval...)

Yet I'm falling short in some of the way these are lived out.  Is constantly pushing beyond limits a foolish practice that will leave us ragged and spent and keep us from our full potential?  Or is conserving and protecting simply an American approach to our lives and our faith?

What do you think?  Where are you in this??

Album Progress: the things we must learn to love.

"More frequent summer blogging," I wrote in our last blog post.  In June.  So much for that.  I suppose it's still technically summer, but my school year has started, so it's hard to feel that way!  But I thought about blogging, with warm fuzzy feelings and all, a whole bunch of times.  So, there's that. 

We have returned from a week of recording vocals in Florida!  We tracked at The Prayer Closet Studios with Geoff Douglas of Equilateral Services (and a musician in his own right).  Our good friend JD Lenick is triple-threat-ing our album with drums, percussion, and some killer backing tracks to fill out the depth and sounds on these tunes.  We arrived in Port St. Lucie on a Sunday and got to catch the tail end of the drum tracks being recorded.  Beginning Monday afternoon, we traded off the vocal booth all week long, fighting to complete a long list of things in one tiny week.

 

 VICTORY!  Major AND minor vocal parts finished = brief Sabbath rest on the beach!

 

We have musician friends who seem to record all the time.  Every time we talk to them, they're making a new EP or a new single.  Most of them also have connections that help them do this... but regardless, recording this album, for us, just does not feel like whistling and skipping into a studio to gaily throw down our song as rainbows and butterflies appear.  It feels like hard labor.  It is a labor of love, but definitely labor.  We love to play together, and we love connecting with people at our shows.  We do not always love getting really particular about our craft. 

A while back, I saw this Proverb posted by a fellow musician (Mathai - she was on The Voice a few seasons ago, and I've enjoyed learning more about her) on Twitter:

Boyyyyyyyyyyyy it stopped me in my tracks.  She said it was "God slapping me in the face - no better wake up call."  Me too.  The road to recording this album has felt like one big training course in this very thing. 

I grew up as, so I was told, a really smart kid.  They tested me in third grade and put me in the gifted and talented program at my school.  I remained in it all the way through high school.  I experienced a lot of literature, projects, and problem-based learning that I would not have otherwise.  It gave me a bit of an identity, and gave me some peers I could commiserate with (or compete with, depending on the day).  So, then I went to college and was in the honors program there.  Again, I was made to think and use my brain.  All of these were valuable experiences, and I would not go back and undo any of them.  But at the end of the day, here are some things I think I really learned in those 12-ish, formative years:

::enter the voices inside Jenna's head, circa 2006, some known, most subconscious and unrealized...::

-Things come easily to me for the most part.  This is how people recognize me.  This is where my identity lies.
-If something doesn't come easily, it doesn't feel natural or fit with my identity.  People will look at me strangely.  I will avoid those things when possible.
-Criticizing me suggests that my smart kid, capable, quick to learn identity is no longer true.  Which means I don't know who I am.  So I crumble.  (it also all sounds like yelling to me, which terrifies me, but that's another story...)
-My dad, and many of my peers, define my intelligence by my grades. Anything below a 97 is going to raise an eyebrow.  Gifted kids aren't supposed to get less than that.   (this was helpfully dismantled a bit in college)
-...luckily, I can get really good grades by cramming the night before a test/paper/evaluation.  I probably won't remember the information later or be able to use or apply what I learned, but I got my grade.  No questions asked.
-I am labeled as "gifted," so I can get special privileges, like leaving other classes to work on projects and extensions on papers because I "need them."  So I can make up excuses when I procrastinate and people will generally make an exception for me.  I usually make 'last minute' work out pretty well.

::end the parade of half-truths::

Now... apply all of that to being an adult musician.  People tell me I am good at singing.  I have been singing forever, so I can do it - to a point - without thinking.  So, focused, technical practice is not first thing on my mind.  My mom does not live with me, and so does not force me to practice like she did with my clarinet.  I do not have tests to pass.  So, there are not deadlines for me to achieve certain levels of mastery with my craft.  I have a limited amount of piano, glockenspiel, and ukulele skill.  Trying to do certain things with them does not feel natural to me.  So, when they get hard, I push them away and do something else. 

What's missing is a healthy dose of work ethic.  Weird, since I worked my butt off to make sure I kept the grades and the appearances I felt I needed to...  but somewhere at the end of college, I crashed, and all desire to work at things was gone.  (Maybe it was that being good at things was what my whole identity was based on and I couldn't keep up anymore?  ..nah.....)

Somewhere in the sifting of education and cultivation, I missed the boat of intrinsic motivation and the constant pursuit of excellence.  Instead of seeing whatever abilities I had as a tool to be used, I saw them as the point of it all.  So being smart was the end goal, not being able to use my mind to accomplish great things.  So, here I sit, a closer-to-30-than-seems-possible adult, who loves music and feels a convicting calling to pursue it and use it for God's glory, who also instinctually runs away the second it gets hard.  Who bristles when her husband bandmate corrects her.  Who balls up on the couch and shuts down when she feels incompetent.  Who avoids even starting practicing because she has a sneaking suspicion she might actually be bad at it, and she never learned how to deal with being bad at things.

"To learn, you must love discipline.  It is stupid to hate correction." 

Ouch. 

This grown-up is having to slowly, painfully learn what many of her elementary students have already grasped - that learning is not always about a brief pat on the back, but about the development itself.  That it's supposed to feel awkward and uncomfortable for a while.  That having your inefficiencies pointed out is desirable, because it gives you a chance to seize them with determined joy and grow.  That doing something well "effortlessly" is a facade, because true skill is backed by a ton of discipline.  And learning to love that discipline can result in art that is beautiful and solid, not threatened by a lack of work or too much criticism.

To read more about the history of whom this quote is attributed to, go here.

To read the disturbing but memorable cartoon of what made me remember to say "whom" instead of "who," go here.

The original version of this quote, when I first read it, said "...miss two days, my friends know it."  Which, to me, is much more accountability-inspiring than thinking about critics.  The point is the same - and this is a kind of personal drive I have not known in my past, but I see it in friends of mine, and I aspire to honor the gifts God has given me with the same kind of zeal. 

...I started this post meaning to tell you specific details of what recording has been like so far.  I didn't quite know it would go this direction.  But, here it is.  The good news is I am writing to you in a reflective place: not the first realization of my faults, but standing in the middle of a massive project that has SO much potential, looking at the growth in these past months of willingness to listen, to refine, to practice, to struggle.  This album is indeed a labor of love, and I am so grateful for it.  I am grateful for the chance to learn to be a laborer, who puts the kind of work in that will make the harvest worth it. 

Much love,
Jenna

Back In the Saddle Again

So, my New Year's Resolution said that I'd write at least one blog post every month.  That lasted until April.  May was nonexistent.  But I wrote a bunch throughout Lent, so maybe that counts?  Or something?  Regardless, it's June, school's out, and I'm back.

To start us out for some (hopefully) more frequent summer blogging, a little insight into our hearts and passion right now.  We are creating our second album.  And we adore the tiny, fledgling fetus it is right now.  It will be our surrogate child for a while.  We are rather emotionally invested in it, which causes absolutely NO communication break downs or failures, in case you were wondering.  It also causes virtually NO stress about timelines, deadlines, skill, money........  ahem.

While these pesky human emotions and insecurities can indeed get in the way, we have something too important to get blocked and tramped down.  Chris, in a moment of clarity when we started to hit a wall one night, had us stop and begin writing a bit of mission/vision casting for this album.  In other words, why bother?  Why record these songs?  Below are snippets taken from these pieces of cardstock that we covered in various Sharpie colors, furiously attempting to translate our inner thoughts and desires to a set of visible and understandable characters on a page.

"There is an urgency in my heart for these truths. Clearly they've been said before, in very many ways. But this world hurts. It bleeds, groans, shakes, and mourns for something it long forgot, something Unnamed and ignored. But truly, it has a Name. A Heartbeat. A Face. A Voice. A Rhythm. A Disarming Force that in a breath can crumble every lie. And that is the pull of this album for me – there is Hope beyond what we've been fooled into swallowing. Far off, yet so near. A day unknown, yet this very moment. I want it to be a vessel the Spirit can reach right through and grab someone's heart. To still, to quiet, to awaken, to lead, to embolden...  A story of raw brokenness being transformed into freedom.

...

It is sure to unleash my insecurities – being able to play the instruments well enough, not understanding the process, being wrong, making mistakes... I want God to intervene for me and get me out of the darn way. Truly, I want this to be the start of a new chapter for C&J, and I'm not sure of all the pages (or any of them!)... but I want us to love people and to be instruments used as much as possible." 

  

"...God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering. Though musically a departure, it does feel like the spiritual successor to How the Fall Makes You Feel. The world is still a mess, but now we're not looking down at our feet, we're looking to the promise of God of resurrection through Jesus, of the righting of wrongs, of the redemption of mankind.

We look to that promise though it is still out of our reach and control. We wait for it patiently, hoping in the trueness of God's promise. While we wait, and the night stretches on, we ask God to lead us until the promise is fulfilled, until our faith is sight. We hold to His words, knowing that remaining faithful to Him takes, at the same time, all that we have, as well as what we lack. These songs, to me, communicate life from the no man's land. The time between the fall of man and Jesus' return. These songs are the cry of our hearts that in the midst of the battle, You would still be making us fruitful, making us more like You. They're songs written by people who are in these lands of suffering, for people in the lands of suffering. 

 

Artistically, my desire for the project's creation is that it would be joyous. Though personally, these songs mean the world to me, that's a huge burden to place on a recording. I don't want it to be so weighty that I feel as if my soul is at risk with every drum fill I don't love, or vocal take I botch. I think these songs could truly serve people, but not if we don't love playing them. Not if we're counting on them to make us rich, or build our fan base. I want to bring the wisdom of experience into the studio, for sure, but I don't want to bring in my baggage or jadedness. I'd rather count my blessings that God has allowed this vision to progress as much as it has. I'd rather serve in the creation of art than create art that will serve me.

...

So why this album? Why these songs? Why these people? Really, I can guess and reason, but at the end of the day, something in me says 'to make music.' I can't shake it from me anymore than I can unravel my skin. I thank God for the clarity and burden of a purpose. For “life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague desire. A boat yearning for the sea, yet afraid.” But it is my hope to make music that testifies to the mercy of God. I am thankful that God hasn't handed these dreams over to us, for a hope that we can see is no hope at all. I hope to always be working towards using art to shine light onto fragments of God's truth, and to not have too much, and thus be content, and forget what it is I'd set out to do at the start."

And so, we press on.  Glory to the One who is deserving!