"glow in the dark" song commentary
ANTHEM
"Anthem" came about quite by accident. In the recording of another song on this album, "When I Was Ready To Listen", I added some background vocals to the section at the end of the song which mellows out and just repeats the name "Jesus". By the time the song was almost completed, I had pretty much decided not to use these vocals, as I felt that they didn't really enhance the mood of that passage, but rather distracted.
One day I came into the studio to play this section, and for whatever reason, the only tracks that were up were the backgrounds......we may have been working on them for another section, I don't exactly remember. But I heard the vocals acapella quite by accident, and they sounded really good to me. So I transferred them onto fresh piece of 24 track tape, and added a bunch more vocals, creating a little mini-choral type sounding piece. I called it "Anthem", and decided to open the album with it.
CALLING YOU
"If I have ever had something which became a cliché in my lyric themes, it would be the theme of salvation. This theme pops up in so many of my songs, and especially in my earlier songs, where this was/is the theme of most importance. These lyrics reflect different aspects of the theme of needing Jesus in your life and hopefully prompting the listener to respond. I have had many people testify to having been saved as a direct or indirect result of having listened to one of my evangelistic songs. What an honor.
Callin' You" is another evangelistic song that was really more about the music than the lyric. This does not minimize the importance of the lyric, but some songs are more about the framing interesting music around the lyric, while maybe the thought of the lyric has been stated already in other songs. Therefore, the lyric becomes an extension of a theme already stated, while the music is something I haven't done before.
To me, "Callin' You" was a great little pop song. Good hook, good lyric, and a fun song to begin an album.
I REMEMBER
I had no concept at this time of what constituted a "gospel" song. I was just writing stuff that came either from my own personal experience or creating lyrics about things that I would imagine that people must go through. "I Remember" was based on the idea of reflecting n the thoughts of someone who saw a close friend claim salvation and then fail to live it out in front of the person. I think that we all have seen this happen in our experience, and I felt that this idea may minister as a thoughtful warning to Christians.
Production note: the idea for the Jon Linn guitar solos at the end was inspired from a passage in the Beatles album "Abbey Road". Near the end of the album, there is a guitar solo section which is part of the tune called "The End", where they overdubbed George Harrison guitar solos on different tracks. The sound of the guitar and even possibly the amplifiers changed with each lick, and I thought that was a cool effect. We duplicated the technique on the end of "I Remember", having Jon change even the guitar he used on every passage. It was fun to be able to use such an admired technique on one of my own albums.
RETURN
I remember that I wrote this at Calvary Chapel camp up at Idylwild, CA, before Calvary built their own camp at Twin Peaks, CA. I was a new Christian, but had already felt the sense of not being as close to God as I should be.
I wrote the lyric to be a somewhat sarcastic reflection on the excuses that people use to justify their loss of intimacy with God. Nothing much to say here, the lyric is self explanatory, the music is straight ahead, dare I say it, country type rock.
I KNOW A LADY
Obviously written for my wife, this was a love song of thanks to the Lord for finding the right mate. Again, my knowledge of gospel music was minimal, and I didn't really consider my music to be gospel in the strict sense anyway. So to write a love song to my wife and God seemed quite natural.
Production Note: One of my favorite albums as a young man was and album my jazz greats Bud Shank and Bob Cooper called "Flute and Oboe". It was a thrill to book Bob Cooper to plat the solo on this song and get to work with a musical legend.
NO, NO, YOU'RE NOT AFRAID
Wow, listening to this again, I am taken by how different it is from my usual style. This was written on guitar. Many of my guitar songs have very different chord structures than my piano songs. I relate to the guitar differently, with less understanding of what I am doing, so I often just move my fingers around randomly until something sounds good. I was experimenting with diminished and augmented chords at this time, and found this very different chord line that had a kind of French or European flavor to me. Maybe reminiscent of Michelle by the Beatles? The lyric once again, more served the melody, although I really like what it says. I really enjoy creating something that is so different from my usual style of writing.
SOMETHIN' SUPERNATURAL
The blues! Maybe the first R-rated song in CCM history! Using the line "to take her home with you and try to get it on" was risky, but amazingly, I never got any flack from the record company or objection from a listener regarding this line. The lyric is from the viewpoint of a non-Christian who is observing the changes in his newly born-again friend, similar to the dialog set up in the song "I Remember". The difference in this song being that the friend is favorably impressed with the changes, although he's bewildered by some of it. In the end, the suggestion is that the non-Christian friend is being pulled toward salvation by the witness of his friend.
Musically this track was straight ahead blues. I wanted to find a really great blues harp player for this song, and really didn't know of anyone. My engineer, Tom Trefethen, knew a guy who played great blues harp, but had NEVER recorded. I took a chance, and this guy walks in with a little Fender amp. and an old microphone that he used in live performances. The technical instinct is to mic him with a professional mic straight into the board, but I knew this guy had a sound, and so I let him set up his way. We recorded him direct out of his little amp and let him use his own cheapo microphone, The sound was great, and he blew most players out of the water. I had never heard of him before, and never heard that he ever did anything after this session, but he did a great job.
WHEN I WAS READY TO LISTEN
I don't remember too much about writing this song. It is a typical "Jesus changed my life" type lyric, and is fleshed out in this symphonic musical bed, which carries almost the first half of the song. It is actually two song ideas fused together into one song, creating a kind of "movement" song.
SO THANKFUL
Written Easter morning in Naples FL. I had been booked down there by a church which brought me in to minister to their youth group fro m time to time, and this year they had me in to do their Easter sunrise service. There was a piano backstage in the bowl type venue we were using, and I went back there and started to noodle. I began to reflect on the elements of what we celebrate at Easter time and I was overtaken by a great sense of gratitude for what Jesus did at the cross and in His resurrection. The lyric came quickly and easily, and I performed the song for the first time that morning.
OLD DAN COTTON
This song is one of several story songs, Plain Old Joe and Tinagera included, that have garnered the most questions over the years. Everyone wants to know, "did I really know a guy like Old Dan"? The answer is no. This song is purely fiction, and I really don't remember the exact genesis of this song. I do remember that this story began to unfold, and I wasn't really sure where the song was going or what it was ultimately saying. I struggle with the idea of every song I write having some direct or indirect basis in scripture, and I couldn't find a scripture to fit this song. Thus I tempted to throw out the whole idea. But something kept me hanging on to this theme, but the story was getting bloated and cumbersome. How to frame it was not coming easily to me and I kept shelving it and coming back to it intermittently. Then one day I was flying from LA to Barrington, RI to play a gig at Barrington College, and I just felt like the Lord was saying "less is more". That if I stopped trying to be so literal, and left gaps in the story, people would be able to fill in the obvious gaps, and I could format the song into a serviceable length, and still get the story told. Things just fell into place, and the song was finished on that plane ride.
I still must say that I don't have an obvious scripture for this song, but have been told by many that the song brought comfort to them while faced with the impending death of a grandfather or the like. Certainly this has been one of my most popular songs over the years.
"Anthem" came about quite by accident. In the recording of another song on this album, "When I Was Ready To Listen", I added some background vocals to the section at the end of the song which mellows out and just repeats the name "Jesus". By the time the song was almost completed, I had pretty much decided not to use these vocals, as I felt that they didn't really enhance the mood of that passage, but rather distracted.
One day I came into the studio to play this section, and for whatever reason, the only tracks that were up were the backgrounds......we may have been working on them for another section, I don't exactly remember. But I heard the vocals acapella quite by accident, and they sounded really good to me. So I transferred them onto fresh piece of 24 track tape, and added a bunch more vocals, creating a little mini-choral type sounding piece. I called it "Anthem", and decided to open the album with it.
CALLING YOU
"If I have ever had something which became a cliché in my lyric themes, it would be the theme of salvation. This theme pops up in so many of my songs, and especially in my earlier songs, where this was/is the theme of most importance. These lyrics reflect different aspects of the theme of needing Jesus in your life and hopefully prompting the listener to respond. I have had many people testify to having been saved as a direct or indirect result of having listened to one of my evangelistic songs. What an honor.
Callin' You" is another evangelistic song that was really more about the music than the lyric. This does not minimize the importance of the lyric, but some songs are more about the framing interesting music around the lyric, while maybe the thought of the lyric has been stated already in other songs. Therefore, the lyric becomes an extension of a theme already stated, while the music is something I haven't done before.
To me, "Callin' You" was a great little pop song. Good hook, good lyric, and a fun song to begin an album.
I REMEMBER
I had no concept at this time of what constituted a "gospel" song. I was just writing stuff that came either from my own personal experience or creating lyrics about things that I would imagine that people must go through. "I Remember" was based on the idea of reflecting n the thoughts of someone who saw a close friend claim salvation and then fail to live it out in front of the person. I think that we all have seen this happen in our experience, and I felt that this idea may minister as a thoughtful warning to Christians.
Production note: the idea for the Jon Linn guitar solos at the end was inspired from a passage in the Beatles album "Abbey Road". Near the end of the album, there is a guitar solo section which is part of the tune called "The End", where they overdubbed George Harrison guitar solos on different tracks. The sound of the guitar and even possibly the amplifiers changed with each lick, and I thought that was a cool effect. We duplicated the technique on the end of "I Remember", having Jon change even the guitar he used on every passage. It was fun to be able to use such an admired technique on one of my own albums.
RETURN
I remember that I wrote this at Calvary Chapel camp up at Idylwild, CA, before Calvary built their own camp at Twin Peaks, CA. I was a new Christian, but had already felt the sense of not being as close to God as I should be.
I wrote the lyric to be a somewhat sarcastic reflection on the excuses that people use to justify their loss of intimacy with God. Nothing much to say here, the lyric is self explanatory, the music is straight ahead, dare I say it, country type rock.
I KNOW A LADY
Obviously written for my wife, this was a love song of thanks to the Lord for finding the right mate. Again, my knowledge of gospel music was minimal, and I didn't really consider my music to be gospel in the strict sense anyway. So to write a love song to my wife and God seemed quite natural.
Production Note: One of my favorite albums as a young man was and album my jazz greats Bud Shank and Bob Cooper called "Flute and Oboe". It was a thrill to book Bob Cooper to plat the solo on this song and get to work with a musical legend.
NO, NO, YOU'RE NOT AFRAID
Wow, listening to this again, I am taken by how different it is from my usual style. This was written on guitar. Many of my guitar songs have very different chord structures than my piano songs. I relate to the guitar differently, with less understanding of what I am doing, so I often just move my fingers around randomly until something sounds good. I was experimenting with diminished and augmented chords at this time, and found this very different chord line that had a kind of French or European flavor to me. Maybe reminiscent of Michelle by the Beatles? The lyric once again, more served the melody, although I really like what it says. I really enjoy creating something that is so different from my usual style of writing.
SOMETHIN' SUPERNATURAL
The blues! Maybe the first R-rated song in CCM history! Using the line "to take her home with you and try to get it on" was risky, but amazingly, I never got any flack from the record company or objection from a listener regarding this line. The lyric is from the viewpoint of a non-Christian who is observing the changes in his newly born-again friend, similar to the dialog set up in the song "I Remember". The difference in this song being that the friend is favorably impressed with the changes, although he's bewildered by some of it. In the end, the suggestion is that the non-Christian friend is being pulled toward salvation by the witness of his friend.
Musically this track was straight ahead blues. I wanted to find a really great blues harp player for this song, and really didn't know of anyone. My engineer, Tom Trefethen, knew a guy who played great blues harp, but had NEVER recorded. I took a chance, and this guy walks in with a little Fender amp. and an old microphone that he used in live performances. The technical instinct is to mic him with a professional mic straight into the board, but I knew this guy had a sound, and so I let him set up his way. We recorded him direct out of his little amp and let him use his own cheapo microphone, The sound was great, and he blew most players out of the water. I had never heard of him before, and never heard that he ever did anything after this session, but he did a great job.
WHEN I WAS READY TO LISTEN
I don't remember too much about writing this song. It is a typical "Jesus changed my life" type lyric, and is fleshed out in this symphonic musical bed, which carries almost the first half of the song. It is actually two song ideas fused together into one song, creating a kind of "movement" song.
SO THANKFUL
Written Easter morning in Naples FL. I had been booked down there by a church which brought me in to minister to their youth group fro m time to time, and this year they had me in to do their Easter sunrise service. There was a piano backstage in the bowl type venue we were using, and I went back there and started to noodle. I began to reflect on the elements of what we celebrate at Easter time and I was overtaken by a great sense of gratitude for what Jesus did at the cross and in His resurrection. The lyric came quickly and easily, and I performed the song for the first time that morning.
OLD DAN COTTON
This song is one of several story songs, Plain Old Joe and Tinagera included, that have garnered the most questions over the years. Everyone wants to know, "did I really know a guy like Old Dan"? The answer is no. This song is purely fiction, and I really don't remember the exact genesis of this song. I do remember that this story began to unfold, and I wasn't really sure where the song was going or what it was ultimately saying. I struggle with the idea of every song I write having some direct or indirect basis in scripture, and I couldn't find a scripture to fit this song. Thus I tempted to throw out the whole idea. But something kept me hanging on to this theme, but the story was getting bloated and cumbersome. How to frame it was not coming easily to me and I kept shelving it and coming back to it intermittently. Then one day I was flying from LA to Barrington, RI to play a gig at Barrington College, and I just felt like the Lord was saying "less is more". That if I stopped trying to be so literal, and left gaps in the story, people would be able to fill in the obvious gaps, and I could format the song into a serviceable length, and still get the story told. Things just fell into place, and the song was finished on that plane ride.
I still must say that I don't have an obvious scripture for this song, but have been told by many that the song brought comfort to them while faced with the impending death of a grandfather or the like. Certainly this has been one of my most popular songs over the years.
