Album release

The Sparrow & The Whale is finally finished and released. I was writing the liner notes in a text document, and I realized that this album has been a huge part of my life for the past three years. Each song was a huge part of me when I wrote it. I remember the dark, dark days where I sang Sister's Winter Coat, Brother's Tennis Shoes back to back with The Sparrow & The Whale. I remember an amazing (albeit complicated) beginning to a wonderful friendship that spawned The Trollopw & The Troubadour, and then the year after where I found myself living in the wrong direction and writing Trees & Towers, Floods & Fires as an admission of that. Then, a few weeks later, writing Wings on a church camp bunk before the campers arrived with the other counselors standing in the doorway listening. And as time went on, those songs started to trap me. Sister's Winter Coat became a two and a half minute filler. The Trollop & The Troubadour grew too long to sing. Trees & Towers, even moreso. Song For Everyone was the annoying pop song I had to play or people would get angry instead of the anthem to friendship it was when it was written. Sparrow was the only song I felt I had any freedom to move around in--I added drum machines, trumpets, electric guitars...it was the only song on the album I really enjoyed, even when recording became a chore.

I remember getting my MacBook and messing around on Garage Band, and the record suddenly became fun again. I would scream in octaves out of my range to create a background part that wouldn't be heard above the rest of the sounds anyway. My roommate Justin laughed and told me I was crazy. Then after I moved to Chicago is where things really started to move. One day, I was fiddling around with the new version of Sister's Winter Coat, and I was playing trumpet along with it. Mind you, I don't play trumpet that well. But Kriss was disappointed when he found out I wasn't recording, so in went a trumpet track. And then a cello track. And then an electric piano. Suddenly, the experimental spirit I had when I first started the album in the dining room of our farm house returned full force. And for the past few months, that is all I've done with the songs. I've experimented. I added bass parts for the first time (which all rock). And it made it fun again.

And now, on the night of the release, years after the writing, months after the tinkering, and a day after all of the mixing is complete...the songs are finally songs. They're no longer projects to tweak and add to and edit.

And it's all pouring out of me.

Thank God for completion.

Now onto the next album.