EP release

So, many of you know that I've been working on an album project on and off for the last 1 3/4 years, and it's finally coming to a close. In fact, the masters are in the mail, and I'll be submitting the duplication order this week. Finally! It's been a pretty arduous process, on all fronts - you can ask my lovely wife how many ups and downs I've had with this thing. There were times that I truly, truly thought it was going to turn out badly, which I felt pretty sad about because I really liked the songs that we had. But in the end, I am really happy with how it turned out, and dare I say that I even feel proud of the final product.

It's going to be called The Beautiful Savior EP*. I like the sound of it, but I know *some* people disagree. Sorry, I guess since I ended up being the executive producer, I get to call those shots at the end. Actually, it was important to me that we upheld something we set out to do from the start, namely, that each songwriter would get to produce and sing they're own songs. Things changed a little bit when Ted forsaked us for Chicago (just kidding Ted!), and we weren't really able to work very much at all on To You, so I ended up taking over that one. But once Ted left, I kind of became the de facto executive producer since I was on staff at BayLight as the worship ministry leader, and we were mostly using my equipment for the tracking. So I ended up being the one who had to get the production schedule rolling (many times in vain), decide who to go with for duplication, and figure out our mini mixdown crisis (with the assistance of Danny and Ted, and the COT). We ended up finishing all of the tracking stuff by the beginning of December, but mixdowns and mastering ended up taking almost 2 1/2 months. Some of this was because of the holidays and stuff like that, but man it's been pretty stressful. I feel like the whole experience has been somewhat akin to what a product manager has to go through - I was overseeing every detail, and it all somewhat went through me. It's stressful to have to make all those decisions. And then, when the timetable kept getting delayed, it was frustrating, and I had to try and walk the line between trying to push things through, while at the same time keeping a good relationship with those people who were working on it because I definitely wanted to keep a positive relationship with them in the case that we do future projects with them. Anyway, all that to say, it's been stressful, but the finish line is in sight!

The last thing I need to figure out is how to make it available for purchase online. We're going to have a website soon, but I need to figure out a way for it to work. Most of the time, people in our situation sell CDs by doing gigs, or if it's worship stuff, by doing praise nights or conferences or things like that. But that most likely will not be happening at our church. Anyway, there are still things to figure out, but at least I'll have something in hand to show people. I don't know how many times my parents have asked me if the CD is done yet.

I'll post some artwork from the CD sometime soon. Isaiah worked on it, and did a fantastic job. I really, really like the way it looks. And I feel like that's just one of a number of contributions that people made to this project that really went above and beyond my expectations. I feel really blessed, looking back on it all, and truthfully, I see a lot of God's handprints on those things. My prayer is that He's not done with it yet...


* Many people are curious or confused by the EP thing, which is definitely understandable, I didn't really exactly get the concept, until I really started thinking about the name of the album. So most albums are considered LPs - Long Plays. That constitutes kind of your full 10+ track CD or whatever. And then people know what singles are - they usually consist of one hit song that is being pushed by the record companies, that include maybe 1 or 2 other songs (or remixes) at the most. EPs cover those things that fall in the middle - I guess that would make it between 4-8 or 9 songs. Our album is 6 tracks, so that would fall in the category of EP. And for some reason, I wanted to actually include EP in the title of the album. So sue me!