Breaking the Silence
Time is an interesting thing. Technically speaking, it is of course relative (thank you Mr. Einstein), yet for the vast majority of us, it is an ever-steady constant. Time keeps going, no matter how actively or passively we engage with it. And after enough time passes, we look back and compare previous versions of ourselves to the current iteration.
Well, enough time has passed, and when I look back, I notice it’s been over 6 years since I’ve released music of any sort. And even the EP I released in 2012, I’m not super proud of (at least in retrospect) and never actually released it to the major outlets like iTunes and Spotify. So much has happened in these 6 years — I’ve done many things and many things have changed. But the one thing I haven’t done is released any music; and that bothers me.
Of course, that’s really only half-true. I’ve produced and engineered on various projects, done some remixes, even written and recorded songs. Anything I’ve created myself just remained mostly private for a slew of reasons, which I’ll dissect and challenge here shortly.
But before I dig into the inhibitions of the past, I’m hereby resolving to break the silence. There’s a couple ways I’m going to do this. First, I have a worship album tentatively titled Love & Sorrow Meet in the works, and though it’s still a ways off from completion, I am committed to finishing and releasing it. In addition to the album (release date TBD), I’ve decided to prime the releasing pump by recording simple acoustic versions of songs I’ve written over the past few years and never shown anyone outside of family.
I’m doing these acoustic songs for a few different reasons:
Producing them simply will combat my need for things to be perfect and fully produced (which often leads to never finishing/releasing.)
Doing acoustic songs can also be done relatively quickly, so I’ll be able to start releasing right away and stop blaming time as a reason for silence.
My wife always says she prefers my songs acoustically, so hopefully this will make her happy as well ;)
The first song I’ve selected to do is called “Grandpa’s Guitar.” I wrote this after the passing of my Grandpa, Wilburn Wallace this past April. His death was unexpected, and the emotion of it was heavy on my family. One of the most effective ways of processing emotion for me is to write songs, otherwise I tend to bottle it up and just kind of ignore it. Thus, Grandpa’s Guitar was birthed, to both help me process, and to share with my family. By releasing publicly, my family can access it more easily, and maybe there’s someone else out there who had a guitar-playing grandpa who can relate.
That’s my goal with this new initiative of releasing songs regularly — making them easily accessible for the people in my life I want to share them with. And yeah, on the off-chance that someone I don’t know stumbles upon the songs, then that’s a bonus. But let’s be realistic, most of the plays on these songs are gonna be by my mom (thanks Joan :P). And that’s totally cool with me.
So stay tuned for Grandpa’s Guitar check out Grandpa’s Guitar below, and in my next post we’ll dig into the reasons why I haven’t shared any music for some time, and why none of them are valid causes for silence.
From my Stone Wall Sessions, here’s Grandpa’s Guitar.
