Also, in the ongoing iTunes quest, if you have a spare minute and want to go here and request to have me on there as an artist, that would be awesome. Thanks.

new album clips and other jazz

First off, from now until Sunday night at midnight I am going to make available song clips from the new album. You'll be able to find them here. Feel free to pass them along and to let me know what you think here on the comments section.

I just got back from playing a show with Matthew Perryman Jones. Holy cow, it was so much fun. I've been, along with my cousin Dean, pulling up old kitchen floor and putting down hardwood all week. I had to pull a couple all-nighters over the weekend to get my record ready for mix and Matt Long's ready for mastering, and then doing all this home improvement work, and it's left me pretty beat. To get to go and play, very loudly I might add, some of my favorite songs with some of my favorite people was a great release. He just finished a new record and, man, it's just stinking great. I've listened to it about sixteen times in the last two days. I'll let you know when it comes out.

Anyway, the floor almost got done today, but not quite. I'll get it finished up tomorrow. And my grandparents are in town and will hang out with us tomorrow as well. That should be fun. My grandpa has some surgery coming up soon so this is the last time they'll get to travel for a little while and it means a lot that they came to see us.

Well, that's it for me today. Please check out the song clips and please, please share the word if you're excited about what you hear. Word-of-mouth is the best way to get people to become more aware of what I'm doing, and that keeps the food on the table, and for that I can't thank you all enough. So have a great last couple of the days of this week. I'm playing with Caedmon's again on Saturday, we haven't played in about two months, so I'll let you know how that went while I'm out in California with them this weekend.

Sunday Night

Well, it's Sunday night and the new week is about to start. The studio is being rented out this week, so I'll do some editing on my record upstairs on my laptop Monday so I can turn it in to start the mixing process. I can't believe it's so close to being done. Alison and I are going to finish up the background vocals here in a few minutes and that should be about it.

As for the work last week on the record I only have five words: trombone. trumpet. me. Auto-Tune.

I'm going to attempt to put in a new hardwood floor in our kitchen this week. That should be interesting. My friend Jason Feller might be able to help out for a couple days, which would be great. Not only would it be nice to have another hand, but he's a good friend I haven't seen enough of recently and it'd be fun to hang out for a few.

He played a show Friday night at our church's little music venue, 12 South. He did great. My cousin Dean helped out on guitar for him. He's my evil twin, in case you're curious. He's my twin because he looks like me. He's evil because that's way more fun than having a regular twin. And he's the road manager for Casting Crowns. That was a joke. Anyway, Greg Adkins, whose record I produced last year, and Arthur Alligood, whose record I want to produce this year, also played and both did great sets with mostly new songs. It was fun to sit and listen to music and not play at all. I think the last time I just went and heard music was Paul Moak's wedding, where Kenny Meeks played at the reception. Man, that was good.

Alison's writing a post on her blog right now, so I'm just kind of procrastinating on here until she's done and I can read it. She's a great writer and I always enjoy her thoughts. We're going to have a TV-free zone this week. Move it out of the living room and not let it take up as much of our lives as it sometimes can. I'm looking forward to it. I doubt I'll miss it (although we might wait until after "24".)

Well, that's about it for me today. If I get crazy I'll post some photos of yours truly's attempt at home improvement. Wednesday I'll be posting a few clips of songs off the new record for you to listen to. They've been up on the pre-order site for a few days and people have been very kind about them. Anyway, have a great end to your weekends and I'll write again soon.

A quick note for the pre-order site folks. Some rough mix song clips of four songs have gone up on the site tonight. Head on over and check them out and let me know what you think. Thanks.

We Give Thanks (for the camera crew)

I had a new and really cool experience this past Sunday. We sang a song that I wrote as a congregation in Church. Thankfully, nobody said anything about me writing it, and I was playing in the band so I got to watch people sing it sort of "anonymously."

The song was "We Give Thanks" and it's on the new Caedmon's record. I wrote it to be very simple, both melodically, so as to work for a congregational song, and lyrically, to be very clear what it was that the congregation was actually singing about. They seemed to pick it up fairly easily and by the second and third choruses were all singing along like it was any other tune. A really cool sight, for sure.

I have been playing bass in the church band recently. They have a number of musicians so they just have a list of who plays what and that weeks' leader puts together a team for that week. Since I sing and play guitar every day for a living, I asked to be on the list as a bass player. It's been really fun. I just love playing bass, and it's nice because I'm ok at it, but not really great, so I just enjoy playing without worrying about doing anything fancy. It has been the best way for me to worship at church, honestly, in years. And it's been cool to get to know some other people that way, as well.

In other news, a camera crew from Portland Studios came over yesterday to film us working on my new record and to do some interviews for an extra CD-ROM thing on the CD. The record is so close to being done, but we intentionally saved a couple different types of parts so they could get me singing, Cason playing piano, David the intern rocking the tamborine, etc... They also filmed a couple of songs live, one as it will be on the record, and one for the extra portion. The Portland guys have never done anything that has been less than incredible so I'm excited to see how it will all turn out.

We'll be back to the normal grindstone of the album today, but aside from a few bgv's, and a little perc and piano that Garett and Ben Shive are coming to do later this week, I bet we'll finish it up today. Pretty exciting. It's really sounding great and I can't wait for you guys to hear it. I'll try to have some clips of the rough mixes up on the pre-order site by the end of the week.

Well, that's about it for me today. I'm going to go play with Ella a bit before I have to go to work. Thanks for dropping by.