I just discovered that our new CD, “By Thy Mercy: Indelible Grace Acoustic” is #6 on the itunes Christian album chart. Wow. We’re humbled by everyone’s response. By the way, the hard copy CD available from our site @ www.igracemusic.com/iga has a couple bonus tracks.
I posted the title track from our new CD today at www.facebook.com/indeliblegrace
Hope you like it!
It seems I left some people confused by not following up my earlier blog post about my wife Wendy’s ordeal with a “fever of unknown origin.” She is out of the hospital now - in fact she left on Sunday August 2nd after spending a week at Vanderbilt Hospital. She seems fine now and we will follow up with a rheumatologist on Wed. August 19th to see if they have any more ideas on what happened to her. Thanks again for everyone’s kind words and prayers.
So it is Saturday August 1st and I am sitting with my wife in a hospital room at Vanderbilt. We have been here at the hospital since Monday morning when we came to the ER to check out her fever and weird combination of other symptoms. It all began almost 2 weeks ago when Wendy noticed a painful and swollen lymph node in her left leg. She went to her doctor who didn’t really know what to make of it. Perhaps she strained something doing zumba the doctor said. Two days later, around 3:30pm intense chills and body aches took over Wendy and a sudden fever (103) came upon her. During the rest of that week, she continued to spike fevers as high as 104.5 alternating with a low grade fever every 4 hours or so. Now we love that TLC show “Mystery Diagnosis” but it’s a whole different ball game when its happening to you, or your wife. As the week went on other weird symptoms developed. By Sunday night (a week after the initial swollen node) she had been put on two antibiotics, tests had been sent out for various tick born diseases etc. She continued to have the fevers, but now she had terrible headaches, swollen knees so bad she could hardly walk, and a rash. So we came to the ER and by the end of the day, still having no idea what was wrong with her, they admitted her for a “fever of unknown origin.” They ran all kinds of tests, my poor wife felt like a pin cushion, she endured several blown iv’s - finally ending up with one in her “vampire vein” in her neck. We had all kinds of specialists come in to consult on her case: infectious disease specialists looking for west nile and other tick and mosquito born viruses, rheumatologists considering lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and even Still’s Disease, and hematologists looking into lymphoma. By Thursday Wendy had been sick for over ten days and we still didn’t have any clear answers on what was going on. There seemed to be no potential diagnosis that could bring together all of her symptoms. She did indeed have meningitis - as they discovered when they did a spinal tap (not something you want to endure) and found her spinal fluid pressure was too high and she had an elevated white cell count in her spinal fluid. They had drained some of her spinal fluid on Wednesday, and her headaches were beginning to subside on Thursday, but still so many questions remained. What was wrong? We didn’t know, and neither did our team of excellent doctors - and we have nothing but praise for Vanderbilt University Medical Center and all of our doctors.
As were sitting in our hospital room that Thursday I decided I needed to listen back to the tracks from our new Indelible Grace Acoustic project I have been working on this summer. I was listening on a little boom box I had brought along, and jotting down notes for editing that still needed to be done, but my wife was listening. When I looked up, I noticed tears in her eyes. The first song, By Thy Mercy (words by James Cummins with a great new tune by Greg Thompson) seemed to put the words in our mouth that we didn’t know how to cry.
1. Jesus, Lord of life and glory, bend from heaven thy gracious ear;
While our waiting souls adore thee, friend of helpless sinners, hear:
From the depth of nature’s blindness, from the hardening power of sin,
From all malice and unkindness, from the pride that lurks within,
Refrain: By thy mercy, O deliver us, good Lord, good Lord
2. When temptation sorely presses, in the day of Satan’s power,
In our times of deep distresses, in each dark and trying hour,
When the world around is smiling, in the time of wealth and ease,
Earthly joys our hearts beguiling, in the day of health and peace,
Refrain: By thy mercy, O deliver us, good Lord, good Lord
The last verse really hit home:
3. In the weary hours of sickness, in the times of grief and pain,
When we feel our mortal weakness, when all human help is vain,
In the solemn hour of dying, in the awful judgment day,
May our souls, on thee relying, find thee still our Rock and Stay;
It is fascinating how often when we think we are making a CD for others we find that the Lord wants to use it to speak to us first. We are grateful for God’s goodness and for His healing mercy.
By the following day, Wendy began to make a turn and greatly improve. She is almost completely fine now - nothing left but the bruises from all the needle sticks, a slight headache, and a little bit of swelling and stiiffness in her knees. The doctors still aren’t sure what hit her. Was it some unknown virus? Was it some auto-immune thing? (Seems the most likely answer is some combination of these two.) But whatever it was, not only are we grateful for the healing God has brought to Wendy, but also for the reminder of who He is, our Good and Merciful God.
My friend Vito’s band “The Welcome Wagon” is featured in Christianity Today online HERE. And Indelible Grace gets a mention. Thanks Vito. Vito was an RUF campus minister at NYU several years ago. If you haven’t heard their record you should!
So we started work on a new CD and are close to finishing the recording stage! This is not going to be Indelible Grace VI - that will most likely be recorded in the summer of 2010. Instead this will be the beginning of a new series of more stripped down Indelible Grace projects. It seems that every time we do a CD we have a whole bunch of good songs left over. For instance we probably considered nearly 50 retuned hymns for our Wake Thy Slumbering Children CD. Now some of those 50 will probably never see the light of day. But there are lots of tunes that we want the church to have access to, but we don’t have time or money to do a full production for all of them. So… for this new series we chose 10 retuned hymns that we think are great, but which will work well in a more stripped down style. If all goes well we will release these stripped down acoustic projects from time to time.
I’ve been recording at Cason Cooley’s and Jeff Pardo’s studios over in East Nashville and I think things are sounding great. Some of the longtime IG artists will be on this one including Matthew Smith, Sandra McCracken, Matthew Jones, Emily Deloach, and Jeremy Casella. But there will be some from more recent IG artists like Jason Feller and Chelsey Scott, and a couple new artists too including Justin Smith. Justin wrote 2 of the tunes on the Wake CD (including Abide With Me) and he wrote 3 on this new project. Matthew Smith wrote 1 and there is one by me (Kevin Twit). I have posted some pictures from the recording sessions over at our facebook fan page. (www.facebook.com/indeliblegrace)
We should be able to get the project mixed in mid August and so it should be available this Fall.
So I am getting ready to start a new little project for this summer. Every time we do one of our CDs I always end up with some extra songs that I think really should be shared with the church at large. The problem is, I don’t have the time or money to produce them all as fully we do on the Indelible Grace Cds. So, this summer, I am going to record 10 of these songs in a simple, stripped down way. Basically they will be acoustic guitar, vocals, and one or two more elements at most. I am close to settling on 10 tunes that I think will shine in this kind of setting. Look for this project by the end of the summer. I begin recording on Wednesday of this week. And if you think of it, keep us in your prayers as we work on this.
There was another artist/group honored at the Americana Music Awards the other night that I had the honor of crossing paths with, Jason and The Scorchers. They received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance - a well deserved honor. These guys were the original country-punk band and I worked with them on their “Thunder and Rain” CD back in the late 80s at Digital Recorders. We tracked the album there and did all the overdubs as well. A number of things are memorable about the experience of working with these guys.
1. This is where I really learned that rock and roll is not for the faint-hearted. Warner Hodges, the main guitarist of the group, used really heavy strings, .013 for his first string and would keep a little tube of super-glue on his pedal board. Whenever he would slice his finger bending strings - which happened pretty regularly - he would take the super glue and squeeze it right into the cut and squeeze his skin together until the glue had fused his skin together again. And then he would go right on playing. Wow. Warner made the comment at one point that “I always figured I would be dead by 30 so anything after that is just a freebie.” (He actually did have a heart-attack at 29.) These guys were the real deal hard living rock and rollers.
2. These guys played louder than any band I had seen before or since. For instance, they brought in their live sound engineer to mix their headphones for them using a monitoring console and connecting each headphone mix to a poweramp and hooking the headphones directly to the output of the amp where the speakers should be connected! There was so much power going through the headphones that they were physical hot to the touch. We had to change headphones out after every take because they would be burning the guys ears! And if the cord going from Warner’s guitar to his Hiwatt amps crossed his headphone cord then shrieking feedback would result because the electricity was actually going on the outside of the headphone cords. And then to top this off, the drummer (Perry) strapped his belt around his headphones to squeeze them tight to his ears so that he could hear the click over their playing. I knew that there was a point at which you could play so loud that pitch is imperceptible to the human ear - and we achieved this on this project when Warner was overdubbing gtr solos.
3. I learned a lot about groove on this project from Barry Beckett the producer. Barry was the Muscle Shoals piano player and had produced some classic albums including Dylan’s “Saved”. He was awesome and had a great way of helping them understand when the song was really in the pocket - he said it had to make you want to do this kind of strut. He also had the engineer cut a sliver out of the 2-inch master tape to move up a snare hit on the final take of one of the tunes. This is how you had to do it before pro-tools.
4. I learned a lot about getting great rock guitar sounds from the engineer Justin Niebank too. he was great. I was so impressed with him that later I recommended him to David Mullen and he co-produced our 2nd cd “Faded Blues.”
5. But the thing the Scorchers did best was play live. I saw them play soon after the recording at the Cannery Ballroom - and I have never heard a louder band, nor seen a band with as much live energy as the Scorchers in their day. Warner Hodges is quite the showman on guitar - especially his patented spin-around move doing 15-20 pirouettes holding the guitar out at arms length and playing the whole time. It was great to see at the AMAs that he’s still got all his moves.
If you want to hear the Scorchers rock out, check out “Six Feet Underground” on their Thunder and Rain album.
So, Wendy and I were able to attend the Americana Music Awards last night at the Ryman here in Nashville. It was a great night of hearing all kinds of great artists, but the highlight for me was being part of the crowd paying homage to John Hiatt as we was given a “Lifetime Achievement Award” for songwriting. Hiatt has always been one of favorites ever since I crossed paths with him in the late 80s while working at a recording studio in Nashville. (Digital Recorders, for those who care.) Hiatt was basking in the acclaim of his amazing record “Bring The Family” - you must buy this record if you want to be my friend - and was scoring the soundtrack for a new tv show based loosely on The Breakfast Club. His great song (which he sang at the show last night) “Have A Little Faith In Me” was to be the title track. He had his new band, the Goners, featuring Sonny Landreth on slide guitar, with him and he was kind of trying them out in anticipation of recording the record that would come to be known as “Slow Turning.” I look back now, and realize how privileged I was to be around guys like Hiatt. He thanked his mom last night for instilling in him “his work ethic” and even then I was impressed by the seriousness with which he took this thing called “pop music.” I picked up other little things too - my way of playing little runs incorporating open strings on the acoustic gtr (see our recording of And Can It Be for an example) I learned from watch him noodling on the acoustic gtr sitting in the back of the control room.
Hiatt has a great gift in being able to write about real brokenness and the way God’s common grace can show up in the most unexpected places. (Your Dad Did from Bring the Family is one of my favorite examples.) He has written some of the saddest songs I ever heard (Icy Blue Heart from Slow Turning, Tip Of My Tongue from Bring The Family are 2 that come to mind.)
And it was introduction to Sonny Landreth - one of my absolute guitar heroes and a guy I try to see whenever he plays in town. In fact, he is playing here in a couple weeks and I am trying to get everyone I know to come see him with me.
Soon after we finished the sessions for the tv show pilot - which unfortunately saw the light of day because of a writers strike in Hollywood - Hiatt booked our studio to track Slow Turning with the legendary Glyn Johns. They tracked for a day but hated the big studio monitors we had (Urei’s for those who care) and decided to move over to Ronnie Milsaps studio instead. What a disappointment! But, as sort of a consolation prize, Sonny rented my guitar amps (a pair of Seymour Duncan 100w convertibles if anyone remembers those) and so my guitar amps are all over Slow Turning - on of my favorite records of all time.
My picks for best Hiatt records are:
Bring The Family
Slow Turning
Perfectly Good Guitar
Walk On
Crossing Muddy Waters
My favorite Sonny Landreth records are his 1st 2 major label releases, “South of I-10″ and “Outward Bound” but you have to see him live to really appreciate what he is doing. (Actually even seeing him live you will scratch your head trying to figure out how he is getting those sounds out of his slide guitar.)