So This Is the New Year.

This has been heavy on my heart and mind for the last month, and on this first day of the year, I finally have a moment to come back to it.

We kicked off our first-ever Christmas tour with a soft start in November - a college group we know and love invited us to make a stop with them, but their classes ended in early December and wouldn't leave time for a full-on Christmastime show.  So, we visited before Thanksgiving and played some normal C&J tunes with some Christmas songs at the end.

At the show, we got to see some familiar fans and meet some new wonderful faces.  I talked with one girl for a while afterward, and she bought both of our albums before leaving.  She was sweet and vibrant.  She took the time to post on our page later that week about how she couldn't stop listening to our albums - we were so touched by her enthusiasm and her thoughtfulness.  We messaged back and forth and made sure to invite her to the show we were playing in the same town soon.

But the Tuesday before that show, just two weeks after the night we met, I was scrolling through social media and saw prayer requests for the students of the school.  This young lady had suddenly passed away.

I was shocked.  We began to pray and reach out to those we knew at the college, and learned that this sweet girl had taken her own life.

And at that, I hit the wall, so to speak.  I wept for a good while before I could start our work for the day.

We knew this girl for fourteen days.  And that was all the time we would have with her.  In the last two weeks of her life, we had conversations with her.  She listened to music we wrote and recorded.  And then she was gone.

My thoughts were jumbled.  What hit me was some of the following:

• Our occupation as musicians and songwriters has purpose, gravity even.  And it's a lot bigger than just putting melody and chords together.
• Regardless of our occupation, our identity as Christians gives every meeting, every moment, every person purpose.
• We have no idea the demons that some people are fighting.  
• I don't want to waste words.  I don't want to waste breath.

Over the Rhine says it so well in one of their songs:
"I don't wanna waste the words 
That you don't seem to need
When it comes to wanting what's real
There's no such thing as greed
I hope this night puts down deep roots
I hope we plant a seed
Cause I don't wanna waste your time
With music you don't need" 

I don't want to waste time on words that are shallow and music that is inconsequential.  We do not know how long we get to know people in this life.  Everything counts.  Every. single. moment.  We get the chance to speak eternity to the hearts of people.  I want to do that.

As I tried to process, I clicked on her name from the comment she left on our page.  I could not get to the bottom of her feed to see anything she had posted herself; it was overflowing with words from people she knew.  Friends who shared the campus she attended.  Friends who hadn't seen her in too long.  Family from far away.  Those who spent many moments with her; those who wished they'd spent more time.  Post after post, everyone said the goodbyes they didn't get to say before she left.

And here is the other thing weighing on my heart:
Friends, we DO NOT have to wait to say these things.

We can say them while people are still here.  While they live and breathe and can read or hear those words.  Can process them.  Can feel their hearts swell and faint flames of joy ignite at knowing they are loved, they are valued, they are wanted, they are important.

What if this year, in 2016, we spent our days well by reaching out to people to tell them how much they mean to us?  The things we subconsciously think about them, but don't remember or even imagine saying in our everyday conversations (or far-spread out conversations, as the case may be).  To give the gift of affirmation to those who can receive it (and indeed are likely hungry to receive it).   Something deeper than just a "like" on a post - private, personal words of reflection.  Perhaps even the gift of LISTENING, for heavens sake - waiting for a response when we ask "How are you?" and not letting those we care about off the hook with a veiled "fine, thanks."  Think how many minutes and hours we spend in a day.  Which of those minutes are making eternal impact?  Which are we spending on mindless pursuits that we could turn into life-changing honesty and blessing?

I'm ramping up on this New Year's day, setting app timers and blockers in place to weed out the things that steal my attention from words that need to be said, whether directly to someone in my life or on this blog or in a song that could reach the ears of those I'll briefly or never meet.  If it's that person's best day or their worst, I want anything I've put out there to matter.  Enough with the shallow.  We have all been dying since the day we were born, and our souls are at stake.  Let's touch the souls we meet with intentional love.

View "I Don't Want to Waste Your Time" by Over the Rhine.

-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.