Once upon a time there was a Song.

‘Talk to me’, PRE-RELEASE / PRE PRODUCTION

After another strenuous night of trying to get our kids to sleep at the studio so we could work on our EP, my wife Jessie and I sat outside Clarke Lane Studios in the dark feeling incredibly un-inspired and discouraged. But it was 10 O’Clock and they were finally asleep so we couldn’t just pack up and go home. We sat and chatted about our life and where we’re at. It’s been a hard year for us on many different levels. The bizarre thing has been that new songs have been emerging in the midst of it all.

Jessie said “don’t you just wish God would come and sit and have a chat with us”.

I went and got the Ukulele and started playing this simple progression and Jessie starting singing this song. It’s one of the rare times in my life when a song just came out, 100% complete all in one go, one flow. As she sang the first verse, the security light randomly came on and washed us with light and the chorus followed.

“That’s a good one” I said. “Let’s record it”. So this is what we got that night. We’ll finish it and it will be on our upcoming EP of ‘New Spirituals’, which we’re calling “Your Love Endures” - hopefully to release at the beginning of September.

Hope you like it and it lifts your hearts and heads like it did ours.

‘KEEP ME IN YOUR LOVE’ - Part 1, Writing the Song

I wrote this spiritual song recently on a hike up a hill behind my house. It’s a prayer of surrender and is totally where Jessie and I are at in our life. I was planning on nicking some words from a an old hymn book and writing something, but I sensed that it was important for me to sing a new song. If you’ve ever read any of the psalms or the bible, you might notice God was big on new songs.

The vocal tracks you can hear, are the original ‘scratch tracks’ I recorded the day after I got down from that hill. The rest of the song has totally morphed, but that original heart felt vocal take was what I used to build the rest of it up. After a bit of a struggle to find the right part, Jessie and I came up with that third part of the song, the tag, which we later recorded a bunch of our friends singing for the haunting layer at the end. I’ll chat more about the recording process in another post….

I always listen to mixes and songs-in-process in my car, so our 3 year old son gets an earful of music. The original version I did had me playing acoustic with some fancy finger style playing that I thought was really cool, but I asked Reuben if he liked the song and he said “No, it’s REALLY boring… it’s SO boring”… So that was a kill joy, but kept me working on it until I finally got his stamp of approval after adding the drums with my brother in law Steve Goetz. Then he finally liked it. And I hope you like it too…

We’ll release it as a single and then it will also be on our ‘Your Love Endures’ EP when we can eventually get that done!

Please let us know if you like it, and share share share!

p.s THANKS AGAIN to the amazing IG artist @TheHudson for his artwork here.. Check out his feed Instagrammers! He’s the bomb.