1. It’s Sunday, so we’re taking it a bit easier than the last few days. Doing our best to honor the Sabbath when there’s a hard deadline staring us down. The last few days, however, have gone more or less according to schedule. That means we’re making good progress, but it also means we’re getting tired. We finished up a little (only a little) early last night and slept in a little (only a little) today.
2. I don’t know why I’m numbering these paragraphs, but I kinda like it.
3. Someone asked a few days ago why we’re making the album here instead of Nashville, where of course there’s an abundance of studios. Here’s why.
4. When we made Resurrection Letters II we hopped back and forth between Paul Eckberg’s Studio (which Osenga dubbed The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Paul), Gully’s home studio (The Night Owl’s Nest), and Michael Card’s studio (Mole End Studios). It was a blast hanging out together pretty much every day, and we sampled some of Nashville’s finest eateries for lunch many of those days. But we’re all family men. There are 10 kids between us, and wives who are bravely holding down the fort while we’re off on our hunting/gathering raids in the studio. That meant being home for dinner most nights. This was a good thing. It meant we got to pretend we had normal lives for several weeks, with 9 to 5 jobs and a semblance of routine. Routine is a rare thing in this self-employed life.
5. But that also meant that the album took months. Literally months. So this time around, I decided to try something different and sort of old school. My label, Centricity Music, which I’m very grateful for, has a studio deep in the mountains of the Northern Cascades in Washington. It’s available to their artists, which is awesome, but there’s one catch: it’s deep in the mountains of the Northern Cascades in Washington. It’s not easy to get here. It’s more than four hours from Seattle, assuming the roads are clear, and flying with all our instruments and gear is tricky, too.
6. So to avoid the fabled Resurrection Letters-three-months-of-recording fiasco, we carved out eight days of intensely focused studio time, hoping to return home with a mostly completed album, like Inuit tribesmen with a slain moose.
7. Never mind the fact that while we’re slaving away, we happen to be in one of the prettiest mountain ranges I know, cozied up in a log cabin. Don’t tell our wives, lest they slay us like moose when we come home.
8. Right now I’m outside the control room listening to Ben and Andy working on a rhythm track for a new one called “The Reckoning”, so I have to go. Thank you for encouragement and prayers. I hope this music is a blessing to you. Have a good Sunday.