Memorial Day

It's been a week since I have written. And a crazy week, for sure. My insomnia has been worse recently than just about ever before, so I've been pretty wiped. Last week I got some good work done in the studio, though. It was exciting to get to put some pieces together of the puzzle that is my next record. I worked mainly on two songs. One is my big, rock epic "Santa Barbara" that I'm just loving, and the other is a tune called "White Dove". This one I actually wrote around a loop that I built a few months ago, and until this past week have only had the chorus and bridge sections. Cason and I started recording it and left big holes for the verses and I've been working on them since. I'm just about settled on them, but one stanza is kicking my butt pretty hard, and won't give in. Still, I'm excited for the work that we've gotten done. We're going to try to get some drums on it this week, but it's all up in the air. Adding a real band to some of these will hopefully remove the "sketch" factor that's still there on them, and I think is the next step.

Other than that, this week I'm working a few days with Kevin Lawson and then playing a show in Georgia on Friday with Andrew Peterson. This will be my first show since my accident so I'm really looking forward to it, and also quite a bit nervous. I can still barely get from one side of my house to the other so a few hundred miles will be a good challenge for me. Granted, I won't be walking.

I decided not to go to Kansas this past weekend to work on the project with Don Chaffer. It was a bummer, and not an easy decision, but I'm really glad I got to stay home and spend the time with my family and catching up on my rest. I don't think I realize how hard this healing process is on my body. Don e-mailed me yesterday and said they had a great time and it turned out well, though, which made me feel a lot better. He said that they used the song he and I wrote together and it turned out well. I'm very curious to hear it, needless to say.

So that's about it. I'll be posting more later this week, I am sure, so stay tuned. For now, I'm going to go lose to my wife in Rumikkub and then try to get some real sleep.

American Idol - You've got to be kidding me

So I'm sitting here watching American Idol with my wife and a couple of her girl friends. I wish I could walk. None of these people can sing at all. They are terribly pitchy and they oversing. Seriously, I have like eighteen friends who can outsing these people any minute of any day. Why do people watch this? I can see better karaoke at a bar downtown.

Anyway, today was pretty fun. I had a morning session with Kevin Lawson (www.kevinlawson.com), who I'm doing a record with later this Summer. Then Cason came over and we started working on my next record again. We'll be working on it this week and next, and I'm so excited. Today we worked on a song called "Santa Barbara", which is my big, epic rock song. It's definitely the longest fast song I've ever written. There are a bunch of different sections, different vibes, and I think it will be a total rush to play live. I've had to sit on it for a little less than a year, and to finally hear it back on the monitors, even though it's just a few bits and pieces, was just a great feeling. Cason added some great piano parts as well. Can't wait to get back to it tomorrow.

It's nice to be able to settle down after Clay and Sarah's wedding. My folks left town yesterday, and Alison's left today. It was great to have them here, but man, I am so tired. 24 was great last night, as well, I have to say. Oh, now the girls want to watch the Britney and Kevin Spears show, I think I might have to go drown myself. Seriously, could that guy be any skankier? He's more gross then her! Hard to believe. Ok, I'm going to get some Chocolate Moose Tracks, the best ice cream ever, and try to read or something. I've finished every book on my list currently, so I don't know what to pick up, though. I have some Flannery O'Conner short stories I haven't finished, so maybe I'll look through that. Oh, and I'm still waiting for a piece to come in for my pedal board and then I'll post some pictures. Oh, and remember to vote for me on American Idol.

crazy week

Yeah, this has been a crazy week. I've been able to start getting around a little bit, which has been great. I've worked a couple sessions this week, but it really wears me out, and by the end of an 8-hour day, with my medicine and all, I am just wiped out. My brother-in-law Clay is getting married on Sunday, so family's starting to come into town and we've been busy working on details for the wedding.

We finished Andy P's record this week. The final mix was yesterday, and it's getting mastered tomorrow. It might be the best-sounding record I've ever worked on. I'm so mad at myself. Two of my favorite singers of all time, Jimmy Hoyt Washington and Ankle Jelly Jones, the famous old Gospel singers, came to add some background vocals on the record late last week. They also sang on "Behold the Lamb", Andy's Christmas record that we made last year. BOTH times, I took no pictures. Last year I didn't have a camera, this year it just slipped my mind until right after they left. I can't believe it, and it kills me. One of the highlights of my music career, and I have no photos! Other than that, though, I am very pleased with how the record came out, and how much fun we had making it.

The Caedmon's record is also nearing completion. I have two more songs to play on, and my part is basically done. I'm singing lead on two songs, and I got to do some guitar work I was pretty excited about. This record wasn't anything we were super excited about doing, but I think it's going to turn out really well, and has some great songs on it. I think it'll be fun to play a lot of these live, and hopefully they stand a chance of getting us back on the radio, and giving us a chance to be able to afford to continue to doing more "Share the Well" shows, and records of that idea. All in all, I'm glad we're doing it, and I hope it does really well. That would be very nice for all of us, for sure.

I did a big chunk of work on my big pedalboard today. It will now be housed on two separate boards, which I'll have on either side of my mic stand live. It's giving me a lot more room and flexibility, and I think it's looking pretty killer. I'm waiting on a few last pieces to come in before it's completely done, but I'm able to use it now. I've been taking pictures, so once it's all done I'll post them and the process. I can't wait to play a show with this new board. It's going to be so much fun.

Matt Odmark came over today and hung out for a while. It was a lot of fun. We were in a small group that was meeting for a while, but so many of us toured that it kind of fell apart. It was good to catch up. He also gave me a flat-screen monitor, that he wasn't using, for my studio, which is so awesome. I've been using this big, old nasty honking one for years, and the screen makes all my electric guitars hum really badly, so I always have to turn it on and off between every take. It'll be nice to not have to do that anymore.

Another thing I'm really excited about: Rick Felkel of Elloree instruments is building me two custom guitars right now. A twelve-string mando-guitar, which is an electric twelve-string an octave higher than usual, and a baritone electric, which is a 4th below a typical tuning. I thought it would be taking months and months, but he sent me an e-mail today saying that one of the necks was already finished and he would knock out the other one tomorrow. He's going to be carving out the bodies next week, and he got in all the electronics and tuners and bridges. I'm very excited for both of these, especially the mando-guitar. Malcolm had one and we used it almost constantly on the two last Normals records. You can hear it very evidently on "Romeo on the Radio."

Other than that, my parents are coming in tomorrow, which will be fun, and that's about all I can think of that's going on. My folks haven't seen Ella since she was a few days old, so I'm looking forward to them getting to spend more time together. I've been reading Harry Potter 5 again, getting refreshed before the new one comes out in July. I'll hopefully see Star Wars this weekend, even though I'm planning on it being terrible like the last two. We've been watching a lot of Seinfeld while I've been couch-ridden. Very good. Ella LOVES these Gerber daisies that we have in the living room. She'll stare at them as long as they're in sight. Next week I'm putting in a good three or four days on my record, and I'm really glad. It'll be good to get to add something to the little tiny bits I have now. I guess that's it. I was on the computer too much last week, so I've been trying to cut back this week. Sorry that means I don't post quite as often. Thanks for reading.

A great, quick read

Cason just sent me this link to a little bit of an essay by my hero G.K. Chesterton about babies. It's pretty awesome. Read it.

This site is full of awesome stuff, tons of great stuff to read, and some beer mugs that I really want.

this little piggy...

So I am officially an amputee. That's weird. Oh well. Life goes on. Thankfully. I'm still in quite a bit of pain, but today it's been a TON better than yesterday, or any of the week prior. Last night, after the amputation, it actually hurt worse than it did before, and I was pretty disappointed about that. But today, when I woke up, I was pleasantly surprised. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being stings a little, 10 being the first ten minutes after cutting your toes off in a lawnmower, my last few days had been a 4 or 5, yesterday was a 6 or 7, and today has mostly been a 2 or 3. Praise God.

Don Chaffer was in town today and he came over this morning to write. He's producing a project of a "re-telling" of the Psalms. Different writers are basically para-phrasing different Psalms, and the songs are being written from those para-phrases, and then an album will be recorded, in about two weeks, of these songs. We wrote a song this morning for it. He was in town to write with me, and also Derek and Sandra, Matthew Jones and Phil Keaggy. I know that Derek and Sandra, Jill and Andy G, and I will all be working on the record, but I'm not sure who else. It should be a lot of fun, though.

This was the first I'd worked at all since the accident. it felt good to be working again, and especially to be writing. Since the words already existed, all we had to do was write melodies to fit the words to. A nice, simple way to get back into writing. It also made me think about trying to write lyrics without music, something I haven't done for a while. I can get in over my head while writing sometimes, because I have done so much more production and guitar work than I have songwriting the past few years. Before I finish a stanza I'm figuring out the instrumentation and the tones and the players. I'm going to try this approach then, of writing lyric freehand and then writing musically later, sometime soon.

Don was in a band called Waterdeep for the past number of years. During the early days of The Normals they were one of my favorite bands. A lot of how I write songs can be pretty directly attributed to Don. He is a great writer, and his songs on their albums "Sink or Swim" and "To Chase Away the Birds" really opened up a number of doors for me. He has a great knack of working Biblical imagery into stories of modern people and places and I have very intentionally worked for some of that same imagery in my songs. He is also very good at writing about himself and his struggles without seeming whiny or self-important, something that is very hard for young, honest, Christian writers. I have been very, very blessed in that my career has allowed me to become peers, and even friends, with a lot of my heroes. Don was definitely a hero, and I enjoy knowing that he now looks at me as a friend. Today was the first time we've written together and it was a big honor for me. I really hope I'll be healed enough to travel to Kansas to do that record with him.

Cason is over right now, and taking a nap on the loveseat while I've got my foot up over here on the couch. He got off a tour with Derek a few weeks ago, and since then has been over here quite a lot. He has helped out a TON this week while I've been laid up. He watched Ella the other day while we were at the doctor and came home to find him reading her a book while she slept on his lap. The book was a biography of Bono, or "Uncle Bono" as Cason has introduced him to Ella. It's been a lot of fun having him back in town. Jason, and Alison's good friend Adrienne, have both helped out greatly this week too, and I really don't know how we would have gotten through this week without them all. I am so glad to have lived in the same city for eight years, to have friends who are close as family, who can babysit when we don't have money to pay them, and can be comfortable taking a nap in your living room in the middle of the day.

My wife Alison has been absolutely amazing this week, as well. She does such a great job with Ella. She has to get up every three or four hours in the middle of the night to feed her, as well as has to feed her every three hours during the day. She has to feed ME too, cause I can't get up to do anything right now. She has not complained once even though I know she's got to be so tired. And she's just smiling all the time and making me laugh doing the craziest things. I thank God for her, and hope that I can make up to her just how awesome she's been this week. And she's really pretty.

Well, I should get going, everybody was napping when I started and now they're up and about. Ella's got this little mat she lays on that has little stuffed animals hanging over her to look at and touch, and she is just staring at them with her wide, little eyes. It's hard to believe I came here eight years ago with a tiny Mazda, acoustic guitar, a few clothes and books and a demo tape, and now I have a family, my wife and my daughter, I have amazing friends, a job I love and a house that I call "home". I may only have nine toes and eight bucks in the bank, but I am so grateful. Oh, and a frozen pizza in the oven! Life is good!